Visites · Nuremberg · historic site
The Plague Prison - Weinstadel & Henkersteg
The Weinstadel, a towering half-timbered warehouse built in 1446, doubled for centuries as Nuremberg's forced plague quarantine house, where the infected were locked away without trial and rarely seen again. Steps away, the Henkersteg bridge connected it directly to the home of the city executioner, who was required by law to live apart from everyone else.
À propos de ce lieu
Built as a municipal wine storage facility, the Weinstadel's riverside isolation and sheer scale made it the obvious choice whenever plague swept through the city. Officials would remove symptomatic residents from their homes, sometimes within hours of the first sign of fever, escort them here under guard, and confine them with no fixed sentence and no hearing. There was no realistic expectation of release: the building's population turned over almost entirely through death. Just across the short wooden Henkersteg, Franz Schmidt, Nuremberg's meticulous executioner, lived in the Henkerhaus on a small island in the Pegnitz, legally required to keep his distance from the citizens he served. His contact with condemned bodies made him ritually unclean under medieval law, and the city housed him here alongside the plague sick for the same reason it placed them here: this strip of riverbank was where Nuremberg deposited everything it depended on but could not bear to keep in plain sight.
À retenir
- 1446 year — The Weinstadel was built in 1446 as a municipal wine warehouse and is one of the best-preserved large half-timbered structures in Germany.
- 17000 plague deaths — The catastrophic plague epidemic of 1632 to 1633, arriving with the armies of the Thirty Years War, killed an estimated 17,000 Nuremberg residents, roughly one-third of the entire city population.
- 361 executions — Franz Schmidt, who lived in the Henkerhaus across the Henkersteg, recorded exactly 361 executions in his diary and treated approximately 15,000 patients as a healer during his career from 1578 to 1617.