Candido Lope is homeless and living on the streets of Madrid. He is the son of Spain’s last executioner, Antonio Lopez Sierra.
One of the most tragic executions his father performed was of anarchist Salvador Puig Antich on March 2, 1974.
“My father was a tough old dog. But every time he had to execute someone he would get drunk first, believe me.”
His son recalls that, earlier in life, his father had worked as a street sweeper in Germany, feigning syphilis to avoid having to pay his own way back to Spain. Since there was no such thing as an “apprenticeship” to become an executioner, he had been taught the secrets of the trade by an Andalusian executioner who wrote poetry, attended mass daily and envied his victims for their passing into eternity.
“Would you have taken over your father’s job?”
“Yes, and my hands would not have trembled. I prepared for it from a young age.”
Source: El Pais Semanal (Spain) 28.11.2011
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
Should we revise our opposition to the death penalty?
Do we need to bring it back not only to provide work for unemployed executioners, but also to liberate those who commit serious crimes from the frustration and anguish of looking for work and not finding any in this difficult economic climate once they’ve served their time? Community colleges could develop new programs to train executioners. One would not want to be dispatched by an unqualified practitioner. And, as Canadians, we should not have to send potential career executioners to Texas or China for training. We can do it ourselves, here in Canada. The Harper Government might be inspired to establish the VicToews Centre of Excellence in Execution Science.
How does one feign syphilis?
One pretends to be a philosopher like Nietzsche or a composer like Schubert, Schumann or Hugo Wolf. or Thomas Mann’s fictitious Adrian Leverkühn.