The Show Trial of Süß Oppenheimer - Marktplatz

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Today the Marktplatz is pale granite, splashing fountains and the 61 metre clock tower of the 1950s Rathaus, but in 1738 it was the stage for one of the most notorious judicial murders in German history. Joseph Süß Oppenheimer, the Jewish financial adviser of Duke Carl Alexander of Württemberg, was arrested on 12 March 1737, the very day the duke died, and held for months in the fortresses of Hohenneuffen and Hohenasperg. A special court meeting behind closed doors accused him of high treason, plundering the state coffers and bribery, yet no evidence was ever produced, his defence brief was ignored, and the death sentence was settled before the trial began. On 30 January 1738 he was brought to the Herrenhaus on this square, where the condemned awaited execution. On the morning of 4 February, with 1,200 soldiers sealing off the Marktplatz, the sentence was read and he was driven across the square on the knacker's cart, praying without pause, the Ten Commandments tied to his forehead with a black handkerchief. Before thousands of spectators he was hanged on a 12 metre iron gallows on the Galgenberg, and his body hung in an iron cage for six years. The Herrenhaus is gone, like nearly everything that framed the square before the bombs of the Second World War, but the story is not: in 2013 the state parliament of Baden-Württemberg formally remembered him as the victim of a Justizmord, a judicial murder.

Fatti principali

• 1200 soldiers — Troops sealed off the Marktplatz on the morning of 4 February 1738, when Oppenheimer was led from the Herrenhaus to his execution.
• 12 metres — Height of the iron gallows on the Galgenberg, said to be the tallest in the whole Holy Roman Empire.
• 6 years — His body hung in an iron cage on the gallows until Duke Carl Eugen had it taken down in 1744.

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