The Robber of the Eilenriede - Altes Rathaus
Beneath the stepped Gothic gables of the Altes Rathaus lies a vaulted Ratskeller where, in the winter of 1652, a soldier turned forest robber named Jasper Hanebuth confessed under imperial interrogation to ten thefts and nineteen murders. His guilt was never fully established, his confession extracted under the shadow of torture, but the wheel outside the Steintor turned on 4 February 1653 and Hannover's most notorious outlaw was gone.
About this place
The Altes Rathaus has stood on this market square since the late thirteenth century, its stepped brick gables and slender lancet windows a signature of the North German Gothic style that the Marktkirche beside it shares. But the building's legacy is not only civic. In the autumn of 1652, the city guard arrested a man named Jasper Hanebuth for horse theft and brought him to the Ratskeller below. Hanebuth was a veteran of the Thirty Years' War, a conflict that had left Germany with a generation of trained fighters and no wars left to fight. He had turned those skills to robbery in the Eilenriede, the ancient forest to the east of the city, preying on travellers for years before the law caught him. In the interrogation chamber, under the rules of the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina, the imperial criminal code of 1532, magistrates were permitted to present the instruments of torture as an inducement to confession. Hanebuth confessed to ten thefts and nineteen murders. Whether coercion shaped those numbers, whether the true count was higher or lower, is something the records cannot tell us. He was sentenced on 3 February 1653 and broken on the wheel the next morning at the execution grounds beyond the Steintor. In the centuries that followed, legend softened his memory: a bell on a rope, coins for the poor, a Robin Hood of the Eilenriede. None of it has ever been verified.
Key facts
- 19 murders confessed — Jasper Hanebuth confessed to nineteen murders during his interrogation in the Ratskeller of this building, under the threat of torture, in the winter of 1652.
- 1653 year — Hanebuth was broken on the wheel outside the Steintor on 4 February 1653, one day after his sentence was formally pronounced.
- 700 years old — The Altes Rathaus has watched over this market square since the late thirteenth century, making it one of the oldest surviving civic buildings in Hannover.