“The Dark Reason F*ring Squad E*ecution Were Blindfolded! (*ACTUAL FOOTAGE*) “

Long before the blindfold became a standard part of firing squad executions, governments faced a problem they could never fully solve: how to make an execution look like justice. The answer, it turned out, was a small piece of cloth. But the real reasons behind it were far darker than most people realize.

The firing squad had already been there before the blindfold became part of the process. By the 1500s, gunpowder weapons had become common in European armies. Military leaders needed a quick way to punish deserters, traitors, and enemy prisoners without using too many resources. Hanging required ropes and a structure. Beheading required a trained executioner. A firing squad only required a group of soldiers with rifles.

The earliest recorded military use of firing squads appeared in 16th-century Europe. By the 1600s, armies in Britain, France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire were using them regularly to enforce discipline among their own soldiers. There was nothing ceremonial about it; the goal was speed, and that was all that mattered.

But commanders quickly noticed a problem: ordering one soldier to kill another soldier could cause serious emotional and psychological stress. To reduce that burden, military courts began using several shooters at once. Sometimes there were five men, sometimes eight, sometimes twelve. The idea was that if many soldiers fired together, no one man had to feel completely responsible for the death.

By the 1700s, European colonial powers had carried the firing squad to Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The method had spread across much of the world. As it spread, new rules and rituals began to appear: uniforms, formal commands, specific numbers of shooters, and fixed distances from the condemned person all became part of the process.

The blindfold first appeared in military courts across Europe before spreading to Latin America and colonial territories. Officials gave different reasons for using it. One of the main reasons was practical: when people know they are about to die, their bodies react automatically. Their heart rate rises; their muscles tighten. They may flinch, move suddenly, or even collapse before the order to fire is given.

For a firing squad, this created a serious problem. Accurate shots depended on a stationary target. If the condemned person moved at the wrong moment, bullets could miss vital organs, leading to a slow and painful death. Military officials in the 1700s and early 1800s knew little about modern medicine, but they understood one basic fact: a shot through the heart could kill quickly, while a shot through the stomach often didn’t. They wanted executions finished as fast as possible. This was not always out of compassion; a long and messy execution damaged the image of control and authority that governments wanted to project.

The blindfold helped solve that problem. If the condemned person could not see the soldiers raising their rifles, they couldn’t predict the exact moment the shots would be fired. Without that warning, they were less likely to flinch or move. In the coldest and most practical sense, the blindfold made it easier to carry out a clean execution.

During the early 1800s, military doctors in Europe began writing about what they called the “terror response.” Today, this would be recognized as an acute stress reaction. Some medical reports specifically recommended blocking a prisoner’s vision to reduce panic and physical agitation before execution. Military commanders read these reports and gradually changed their procedures.

There is another side of the story that is often overlooked: the blindfold was not only meant to control the condemned person; it was also meant to help the soldiers who had to pull the trigger.

When two people make eye contact, something powerful happens. It creates recognition, empathy, and an immediate awareness that the person in front of you is another human being. That was exactly what many early firing squads faced before blindfolds became common. Records from Napoleonic France and early 19th-century Spain described soldiers who broke down emotionally, deliberately fired into the air, or refused to shoot after making eye contact with the condemned person. In some cases, entire firing squads became unable to complete the execution and had to be replaced by other units.

For military leaders, this was a serious problem. The purpose of military justice was to enforce discipline. An execution that ended in confusion and hesitation undermined that goal. The blindfold helped remove that problem. Later, psychologists would describe this as creating emotional distance. It allowed soldiers to see the execution as part of a procedure instead of facing a human being looking back at them.

The psychological system went even further. In the early 1800s, Prussia introduced the practice of loading one rifle with a blank cartridge. Because one gun contained no lethal round, no soldier could ever be completely certain that his shot was the one that caused the death. That practice soon spread to other European armies. Together, the blindfold and the blank cartridge formed a system designed to spread the emotional burden of killing across an entire group. Militaries that adopted both methods reported fewer psychological breakdowns among soldiers after executions.

While military leaders were trying to manage the emotions of soldiers, they were also building a ritual that made executions look less like killings and more like justice. Throughout most of the 1800s, public executions remained common across Europe and the Americas. Governments used them as demonstrations of power. But when an execution became chaotic, it did not project strength; it made the government appear brutal and out of control.

The blindfold changed the entire appearance of an execution. A blindfolded person standing still against a wall looked calm, silent, and passive. To spectators watching from a distance, the event appeared orderly and controlled. This was exactly the image governments wanted.

By the 1850s and 1860s, firing squads in France, Britain, Spain, and many Latin American countries often wore full military dress uniforms during executions. Condemned soldiers were frequently executed while wearing their own uniforms. Orders were delivered using formal military commands. The blindfold became the final piece that completed the scene. It signaled that what people were witnessing was supposed to be law and justice rather than violence.

Historians who study punishment have identified an important purpose behind these rituals: they helped create a clear distinction between state executions and ordinary murder. Governments argued that a killing carried out with uniforms, commands, procedures, and blindfolds was fundamentally different from killing someone in the street. Many people questioned that argument, but politically it was extremely powerful.

All of the power behind the execution ritual depended on one thing: the condemned person had to go along with it.

Some refused.

One of the most famous examples of the 19th century was Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico. Maximilian was an Austrian archduke who became emperor of Mexico in 1864 after being placed there by French Emperor Napoleon III, with support from Mexican conservatives who opposed the elected president Benito Juárez. When Napoleon III pulled French troops out of Mexico following pressure from the United States, Juárez’s forces regained control of the country. Maximilian was captured, put on trial for treason and war crimes, and sentenced to death.

On June 19th, 1867, at the Cerro de las Campanas (Hill of the Bells) near Querétaro, Maximilian was brought before a seven-man firing squad. He refused to wear a blindfold. Standing calmly, he gave gold coins to each soldier and asked them to aim for his heart so he would die quickly.

After that, he said nothing. He simply looked at the men who were about to shoot him. Everyone understood what his decision meant: by refusing the blindfold, he removed part of the carefully planned ceremony and forced the soldiers to see him as a human being instead of just another execution.

During the American Civil War, a small number of soldiers executed for desertion on both the Union and Confederate sides also refused blindfolds, although most of their names were never recorded.

In France, after the crushing of the Paris Commune in May 1871—when government troops executed somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 Communards in a single week—witnesses reported many condemned men and women refusing blindfolds as a political statement.

While European armies were perfecting execution rituals at home, they often used very different methods in their colonies. The humanity shown to condemned people in Europe was frequently denied to colonial subjects. British records from India during the 1850s, especially after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, show this clearly. During the rebellion and the brutal crackdown that followed, an estimated 100,000 Indian soldiers and civilians died. Large numbers of captured rebels were executed, but many of the formal European rituals were missing: there were often no uniforms, no ceremonial commands, and no blindfolds.

Executions were carried out in public, sometimes in front of crowds gathered specifically to witness them. In some cases, British commanders used a method known as “blowing from guns.” Prisoners were tied to the mouth of artillery cannons and blown apart when the cannons fired. This method offered no practical advantage over shooting; it was chosen because it was terrifying to watch and sent a powerful warning to anyone thinking of resisting British rule.

The Dutch used similar practices in Indonesia during the 19th and early 20th centuries. French colonial forces did the same in Algeria and Indochina. Looking at these differences makes one thing clear: the blindfold was never a universal act of mercy. It was often given only to those whom the state considered worthy of a certain level of respect. When it was used, it meant something; when it was deliberately not used, that meant something too.

The First World War brought firing squad executions back into public attention and exposed some of the darkest contradictions behind them. Between 1914 and 1918, the British Army executed 306 of its own soldiers by firing squad. Their offenses included desertion, cowardice, abandoning their posts, and striking superior officers. France executed around 600 soldiers during the same period; Germany executed about 48. The United States, which entered the war in 1917, executed 35 soldiers, although 11 of them were convicted of rape and murder rather than battlefield offenses.

British military executions followed the formal procedures that had developed over the previous century. Most took place at dawn; this timing reduced the hours a condemned man spent waiting after his final night and ensured that most of the camp would still be asleep. Blindfolds were normally used, and commands were given in a formal military style.

What makes many of these executions especially tragic is what historians later discovered: a large number of the British soldiers who were executed are now believed to have suffered from severe shell shock, which today is recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). These men had survived relentless artillery bombardments and endured conditions that pushed the human mind beyond its limits. Many didn’t run because they were cowards; they ran because they were psychologically shattered.

In these cases, the blindfold was not protecting men from fear; it was covering the face of a soldier whose mind had been broken by war, while the state executed him for that very condition. In 2006, the British government granted posthumous pardons to all 306 soldiers executed during the First World War. Nearly 90 years later, it was an acknowledgement that many of those deaths had not been acts of justice. But at the time, the blindfold, the uniforms, and the formal commands gave the executions the appearance of a fair legal process.

During the Cold War, firing squad executions continued in many countries on both sides of the political divide. The blindfold remained common, but its meaning often changed depending on where it was used.

In the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, the NKVD—the secret police force that later evolved into the KGB—carried out executions on a massive scale. During the Great Purge between 1936 and 1938 alone, an estimated 750,000 people were shot. These killings weren’t ceremonies; they usually happened in prison basements, forests, and remote execution sites, often in the middle of the night.

One of the best-known examples is the Katyn Forest massacre of 1940, where Soviet forces executed about 22,000 Polish military officers, police officers, and intellectuals. Most victims were shot in the back of the head at close range, and blindfolds were used inconsistently. Records released after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 show that the use of blindfolds during Stalin’s rule often depended on the individual NKVD officers carrying out the executions rather than any official policy. There was no ceremony and no attempt to create a formal ritual. When blindfolds were used, they were mainly practical tools for controlling prisoners rather than symbols meant to shape public perception.

After the communist victory in China in 1949, the country developed its own firing squad procedures. Unlike the Western tradition of multiple shooters firing from the front, the standard Chinese method often involved a single shot to the back of the head while the condemned person knelt. Blindfolds were used in many documented cases.

In Cuba, after Fidel Castro’s revolution succeeded in January 1959, hundreds of officials, military officers, and political opponents connected to the Batista government were executed by firing squad. Che Guevara, who oversaw many of these executions as commander of the La Cabaña fortress prison, reportedly supervised the deaths of between 100 and 600 people during the first months of 1959. Many of these executions were public, political in nature, and carried out without the level of legal process that the new government publicly claimed to support.

In the United States, the firing squad remained a legal execution method in several states throughout the 20th century. Utah used it more than any other state, partly because of a Mormon religious belief known as “blood atonement.” This idea held that some very serious crimes required the shedding of blood for spiritual forgiveness to be possible.

On January 17th, 1977, Gary Mark Gilmore became the first person executed in the United States after the Supreme Court restored the death penalty in 1976, following its suspension since 1972. Gilmore had been convicted of two murders committed in Utah in July 1976: he killed Max Jensen, a 24-year-old gas station worker, and Bennie Bushnell, a 25-year-old motel manager, on back-to-back nights. Both men were forced to lie on the ground before being shot in the back of the head.

Gilmore gave up his right to appeal and repeatedly demanded that his execution move forward. His decision created a huge legal and media controversy across the United States. On the morning of January 17th, he was taken to the execution chamber at Utah State Prison in Draper. He was strapped to a chair facing a five-man firing squad. Four rifles contained live rounds, while one contained a blank cartridge. A target was pinned over his heart. He refused the blindfold. Moments later, the order to fire was given. News of Gilmore’s execution spread across the United States in a way few firing squad executions had since the 1800s.

By the second half of the 20th century, scholars began looking at executions in a different way. They no longer saw them as simple procedures; instead, they viewed them as carefully organized displays of state power. In those discussions, the blindfold became one of the most important parts of the entire ritual.

In 1975, French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault published his influential book Discipline and Punish. Although his main focus was prisons, many historians later applied his ideas to executions. According to this view, the commands, uniforms, formal setting, and blindfold were all part of what Foucault called a “spectacle of power.” The blindfold also shaped how executions were remembered. By the late 1800s, photography had become common; the image of a blindfolded prisoner standing against a wall with bound hands had already become one of the most recognizable symbols of execution.

In the modern world, the firing squad did not disappear. Instead, it adapted and continued to be used in different forms.

In 2015, Indonesia resumed firing squad executions after years of reduced use. Many of those executed were convicted drug traffickers. Indonesia’s procedure uses a twelve-person firing squad: three shooters carry live rounds, while the other nine carry blanks. This follows the same idea developed by Prussian military courts almost two centuries earlier. Blindfolds are normally used, although prisoners can choose to refuse them.

The first group execution in 2015 included eight prisoners from six different countries, including Australia, Brazil, France, Ghana, Indonesia, and Nigeria. The executions triggered strong international criticism. A second group execution followed in April 2015. Despite worldwide pressure, the Indonesian government defended the executions as part of its right to enforce its own laws.

In the United States, the firing squad returned for a very different reason. Beginning in the early 2010s, several European pharmaceutical companies refused to supply drugs for lethal injections because of ethical concerns. As a result, some American states struggled to obtain the drugs needed for executions. In response, Utah brought back the firing squad as a backup method in 2015. South Carolina added it as an option in 2021. Utah, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Idaho, and South Carolina all kept firing squads legally available. The reasoning was almost identical to what military leaders had argued hundreds of years earlier: a firing squad was reliable, simple, and didn’t depend on difficult-to-obtain medical supplies. After centuries of ceremonies and rituals, the original practical argument for the firing squad had returned.

North Korea has continued to use firing squad executions throughout the 21st century, including high-profile political executions carried out in front of military audiences. This resembles the public execution model that many countries abandoned long ago. One of the most famous cases was the execution of Jang Song-thaek, the uncle of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, in December 2013 after he was accused of treason. Reports from South Korean intelligence and North Korean defectors described some executions being carried out with anti-aircraft guns, causing massive destruction to the body. This was very different from the controlled image that blindfold rituals were originally meant to create.

China also continues to carry out more executions than any other country in the world. Amnesty International has repeatedly stated that China’s execution numbers are classified as state secrets, but estimates suggest the total reaches into the thousands each year. Although lethal injection has become more common since the 1990s, firing squads remain legal and are still used in documented cases.