Posted on 07/29/2020 3:01:47 PM PDT by CheshireTheCat
On this date in 1600, Bavarians thronged to a half-mile-long procession in Munich for the horrific execution of the Pappenheimer family.
They were marginal, itinerant types: the father, Paulus Pappenheimer, cleaned privies (“Pappenheimer” would remain as Nuremberg slang for a garbageman into the 20th century, according to Robert Butts); the mother, Anna, was the daughter of a gravedigger. They wandered, begged, did odd jobs. They were Lutherans in a Catholic duchy.
So they were vulnerable to their extreme turn of bad luck. Fresh to the throne of Bavaria, young Catholic zealot Duke Maximilian I wanted a crackdown on the infernal arts, and when others accused the Pappenheimers of witchcraft, they found they had become the stars of a show trial.
Tortured into a spectacular litany of confessions, Anne Llewellyn Barstow, records...
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
WARNING: DO NOT READ THIS ONE IF YOU ARE SQUEAMISH.
I won't read it because it's some Goober's cheesy blog needlessly excerpted.
What stopped you from posting the whole thing?
I never post the whole “thing.” If people are interested enough after reading the first few lines posted, they can click to get the rest.
I see no need to take up space unnecessarily.
Really enjoy your directing us to Executed Today. It’s one of the more fascinating blogs out there.
I read about this several years ago (the original family name was Gamperl). Such incidents were rather common in Germany in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Thank you.
I know a lot of people find it weird. But it really just is a version of “This day in history.”
Keep it up
they were stripped so that their flesh could be torn off by red-hot pincers. Then Anna’s breasts were cut off. The bloody breasts were forced into her mouth and then into the mouths of her two grown sons … a hideous parody of her role as mother and nurse …
Church bells pealed to celebrate this triumph of Christianity over Satan; the crowd sang hymns; vendors hawked pamphlets describing the sins of the victims.
Meanwhile, Anna’s chest cavity bled. As the carts lurched along, the injured prisoners were in agony. Nonetheless, they were forced at one point to get down from the carts and kneel before a cross, to confess their sins. Then they were offered wine to drink, a strangely humane act in the midst of this barbaric ritual.*
One can hope that between the wine and loss of blood, the Pappenheimers were losing consciousness. They had not been granted the “privilege” of being strangled before being burned, but in keeping with the extreme brutality of these proceedings, they would be forced to endure the very flames.
Further torments awaited Paulus. A heavy iron wheel was dropped on his arms until the bones snapped … [then] Paulus was impaled on a stick driven up through his anus …
The four Pappenheimers were then tied to the stakes, the brushwood pyres were set aflame, and they were burned to death. Their eleven-year-old son was forced to watch the dying agonies of his parents and brothers. We know that Anna was still alive when the flames leapt up around her, for Hansel cried out, “My mother is squirming!” The boy was executed months later.
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