Matthias Blazek presents in this book the first detailed biography of the executioner brothers Wilhelm and Friedrich Reindel. The fact that this is the first such work highlights how little attention historians have paid to this area, even though executioners were indeed under the particular public scrutiny of their contemporaries. The more frequently they were active, the more well-known they became. Friedrich Reindel (1824-1908), the godson of King Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia, was one of the most famous executioners in Germany and was even nicknamed "Father Reindel," likely due to the fact that he continued to perform executions with an axe well into old age. In the last decades of the 19th century, almost all death sentences in northern Germany were carried out by him.