Behind the Bastards (the podcast) had a multi-part look into this hangman. The conclusion seemed to be "Who knows if the Army hired him knowing he was incompetent or if he purposefully incompetent... but the result was a lot of Nazis suffering strangulation instead of the quick neck snap"

(And yes I know BtB's lead man is the center of some amount of controversy. Most of their strictly historical output is fine though, in my view.)