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Karlo Dragutin Hart was born on 28 July 1879 in the county of Karlin in what today is the Czech Republic. His father’s name was Ivan. They were ethnic Roma. Hart came to Sarajevo after the First World War, probably as a demobilized Austrian soldier. His Czech name, Karel, was pronounced in Bosnia as Karl or Karlo, and he himself later Serbianized it into Dragutin.
Immediately after the war, Hart became an assistant to the then hangmen, Seyfried and Mausner, and in 1922 he was appointed as a deputy executioner. After Mausner’s death, he was promoted to the office of state executioner. In 1930 Hart was transferred from Sarajevo to Zenica, where he was to stay in an official apartment within the Zenica Penitentiary complex. In 1935, his request for a return to Sarajevo was granted. Hart was married and had four children; his youngest daughter, Marija, was born in 1934. He took care to present himself as a good parent in public and once interrupted an interview to buy toys and candies for his kids.
During his career as assistant, deputy and executioner, Hart hanged nearly hundred persons. He was an object of public interest and gave frequent interviews. Hart had a gift for the spectacle and always appeared on the job dressed in top-hat, frock-coat and white gloves. His diary, kept for many years, has been preserved, but its present whereabouts are unclear. Like his predecessor, he always had on him photographs of his victims and probably sold them to the interested public.
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Although he denied it in public, Hart probably sold pieces of the rope used for hanging as well. On one occasion he said: „Many people have asked me after executions for a piece of the rope with which I hanged my first criminal. They said that it would bring them luck. I am not a businessman and did not sell that rope, but I did cut it into small pieces and gave them to those who believe them to be lucky charms. But, dear sir, just imagine how lucky should I be, seeing that I have dozens of those pieces at home“.
While relating how he had seen all kins of horrors as an alleged volunteer in the Czech army during the war, Hart explained that he did not think his job horrible. „Hanging is my trade and it does not impress me as gravely as people would think. [...] Like all intelligent men, I hold that a judicial execution of a criminal who has all those victims on his conscience and who had ruined so many families, cannot be such a terrible thing“.
Hart kept asking his employers for rises and supplements of his income and would often threaten not to appear for an execution unless paid in advance. On several occasions he was late for the hanging, so that executions had to be postponed and the convicts enjoyed a prolonged stay on the death row. Nonetheless, Hart was regularly promoted in the government service and in 1940 became a civil servant in II salary class. He served until the German occupation of Yugoslavia in 1941, after which all trace of him seems to be lost.