Burned as Witches - Marienplatz
On 29 July 1600 the Pappenheimers, a family of vagrant beggars tortured into confessing witchcraft and hundreds of murders, were sentenced at Munich's town hall and led from this square to be torn with red hot pincers, broken on the wheel and burned alive, in the most notorious witch trial in Bavarian history.
À propos de ce lieu
Today Marienplatz is Munich's postcard, all Glockenspiel chimes, golden Mariensäule and the Fischbrunnen where the mayor washes the city's empty purse each Ash Wednesday. But until 1854 this was the Schrannenplatz, the grain market, and for centuries the city's stage for public justice. In 1600 Duke Maximilian I had a family of itinerant privy cleaners and grave diggers from Swabia, Paulus and Anna Gämperl, their sons Michel and Gumpprecht and the boy Hansel, brought to the Falkenturm prison in the city wall a few hundred metres east of here. A condemned thief had named the sons as accomplices, and the ducal councillor Johann Sigismund Wagnereckh saw his chance to stage the witch trial Bavaria had long resisted. Under the strappado and burning torches the family confessed to a pact with the Devil, to hailstorms and poisoned cattle, to the murder of hundreds of children, and named over four hundred accomplices. On 29 July 1600 the sentence was pronounced at the town hall and the four adults, with two men arrested on their word, were paraded west through the Neuhauser Tor, today's Karlstor, to the execution ground outside the walls, where they were torn with pincers, broken on the wheel and burned alive. Ten year old Hansel was forced to watch from the sheriff's horse, and on 26 November 1600 he and five more of the accused followed them to the stake. The same Maximilian raised the Mariensäule in the centre of this square in 1638.
À retenir
- 1600 year — On 29 July 1600 the sentence against the Pappenheimer family was read at the town hall and the condemned were led from this square to the execution ground outside the Neuhauser Tor.
- 12 people executed — The witch trial claimed twelve lives in all: four Pappenheimers and two accused accomplices in July, then ten year old Hansel and five more people on 26 November 1600.
- 400 accomplices named — Under torture in the Falkenturm the family named more than four hundred supposed accomplices, many of whom did not exist, before the duke halted the hunt.
📍 Marienplatz, 80331, München