weight loss cardiff answers:

Actually, yes. There were numerous occasions when piano wire was used to strangle/hang dissidents.

It was also used in setting up ambushes — i.e. String the wire across the road, as a garrote, etc .

This site is a little gruesome, but it shows a gallows that used piano wire in one of the camps:
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Ohrdruf/Ohrdruf01.html

But probably the most famous is the von Stauffenberg conspirators. Some were hanged with piano wire.

EDIT: Here are a few others I’ve been able to find for you:
http://books.google.com/books?id=KKmJWBIW1I0C&pg=RA1-PA151&lpg=RA1-PA151&dq=piano+wire+executions+WWII&source=bl&ots=N7DLdPhr4z&sig=DXJsCH-KFbpiEZdGJe2bl1Ov4j4

I’ve also always heard that Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor who spoke out against the Nazis, was hanged with piano wire — or at least in the same place where that was common. Wiki refers to it, I’ve included it, but it’s not a reliable source so please remember that.
Http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer

weight loss cardiff answers:

No. The Americans never attempt this task.

However, there was a story of Churchill ask Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck to do this before WWII.

The only attmpt was the German Resistance. They were alone. It start by General Obst of the Abwehr with Admiral Canarias and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The actual task was carryout by Klaus Graf von Stauffenberg.

weight loss cardiff answers:

There is no such thing, in historical terms, as “the” Christian religion. There are many diverse and distinct Christian movements, institutions, and churches, especially in the modern era. There were many different responses to Nazism by different kinds of Christians.

Most favorable to the Nazis was the movement they called the “German Christians.” This was basically Christianity reinterpreted to fit Hitler’s nationalistic and racist worldview, and had the official support of the state.

The Roman Catholic church took a cautious approach. The pope kept a bit of distance from actually endorsing Hitler, but refrained from condemning Nazism and apparently collaborated with the Nazis to some extent. This was for two reasons. One was fear that outright criticism would mean harsh persecution of Catholics, and would get them sent to concentration camps. The other was fear of communism; there had been very serious attempts to launch Russian-style communist revolutions all across Europe in the 1920s, and communism was officially and militantly atheist. The fascists and the nazis presented themselves as the enemies of communism and thus the church favored them.

Some Christians actively opposed Nazism in Germany. Catholic priests who criticized Hitler were sent to concentration camps. In Munich, there was a student movement called the White Rose opposed to the Nazis, whose members were religiously motivated (they were eventually executed). The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed for his involvement with a resistance group that tried to assassinate Hitler, though he himself was not part of the assassination plot.

And all of this IS in textbooks, by the way. You just have to actually do some reading.