What Was It Like to Be Accused of Witchcraft? When it comes to forms of execution, there are many examples throughout history of horrific brutality, like scaphism or crucifixion, few of these were carried out in such a frenzied manner as burning at the stake during witch trial executions.
A child’s confession to witchcraft
In 1629, 9-year-old Johan Bernhard Reichardt penned a confession in his own blood. “I, Johan Bernhard Reichardt,” he wrote, “have forgiven the Devil.” He was then burned at the stake for being a witch.
And according to his confession, he had done more than merely forgiven him. Despite not yet having gone through puberty, Johann claimed that he had had sex with the devil, not once but many times. Satan’s flesh, he recounted, was “of a cold nature” and “hard as horn.”
These meetings had taken place at the unholy Sabbaths that took place in the dark hills surrounding the city of Würzburg, where others who had pledged their souls and bodies to the Devil met to conduct orgies and profane the sacraments of the Catholic Church in grotesque parodies of the communion.
Even worse, the boy admitted to have denied God the Father, Christ, the Virgin, the Saints, and all the angles. For Reichardt was, he confessed, a witch.
Reichardt wasn’t the first confessed witch in Würzburg, nor would he be the last. His confession was written during an infamous period of the city’s history known as the “Würzburg Witch Trials.”
Beginning in 1626, a panic had gripped the city. Satan himself had come to Würzburg.
Isolated trials for witches were common through the 1610’s-20’s in Würzburg. But in 1625, one of these trials produced an unusual sense of dread through the community.
The accused witch had named names. Others in the city, dozens, were in league with Satan. She had seen them attending the Witches’ Sabbaths in the woods.
Word spread through the town. There were more witches, all working with the Dark Lord to bring death and ruin to the good Christians of Wurzburg.
Those the accused witch had named were immediately arrested and questioned. That meant, of course, that they were tortured.
Witches, after all, could not be trusted to tell the truth on their own. So the early-modern witch hunters had invented a variety of techniques to coax it out of them.
Torture techniques to “persuade” a confession
Most common in Würzburg was the strappado. The accused would have their hands tied behind their back. Then a long rope would be laced through their arms. Their torturers would then pull on the rope, lifting them off the ground.
Figure 1. The Strappado
Done properly, the stress on the joints of the shoulders would be excruciating as the weight of the body pulled down on them, rotating the arms out of the sockets, ripping tendons and pinching the sensitive brachial nerves. To make the torture even worse, the victim can be dropped a few feet before they’re jerked to a sudden stop by the rope.
The damage was often permanent. Even if the accused was found innocent, they would never be able to fully use their arms again.
And if the strappado failed to produce a confession, the interrogators could turn to the thumbscrews.
Figure 2. The Thumbscrew
These were two iron bars connected by a screw that could be tightened to squeeze them together. The victim’s fingers or toes were placed between them and the screw was slowly turned. Tightened far enough, the thumbscrews would crack the nails in half and shatter bones. And typically, the pain produced by the intense pressure on the sensitive nail beds was a fiendishly effective way of getting people to confess.
Given the sort of tortures that could be applied by witch hunters, it’s not surprising that most people didn’t last very long before saying whatever they thought their interrogators wanted to hear. In Würzburg, as in other places that held similar witch trials, the authorities wanted to hear two things.
First, they wanted the witch to confess that they had denied God and sold themselves to Satan.
Those who believed that witches were real didn’t think that they could work magic on their own. Instead, they believed that they got their powers directly from Satan. Satan, of course, got his power from God. And allowing witches to exist was seen as somehow being part of God’s divine plan to test the righteous and punish the wicked.
So by confessing to meeting with Satan was crucial to being seen as a witch. Otherwise, you couldn’t work magic against your neighbors. And denying God put you outside the protection of the faith and meant that any punishment would be justified.
Second, the accused were expected to name others. And after hours of torture, most did.
One man, Johannes Junius, wrote a letter to his daughter from prison that gives a good sense of what it must have been like to have been accused of being a witch.
Junius was arrested after a number of people accused him of witchcraft and subjected to the strappado.
[box] “Hereafter they first stripped me, bound my hands behind me,” he wrote, “and drew me up in the torture. Then I thought heaven and earth were at an end; eight times did they draw me up and let me fall again, so that I suffered terrible agony ….and with God’s help I had to bear the torture… And so I made my confession, as follows; but it was all a lie.”[/box]So by confessing to meeting with Satan was crucial to being seen as a witch. Otherwise, you couldn’t work magic against your neighbors. And denying God put you outside the protection of the faith and meant that any punishment would be justified.
Junius said he had met a woman and had sex with her. Unfortunately, she turned out to be a demon who promised him gold if he denied God and death if he did not. Still, Junius refused. So more demons were summoned and attacked Junius until he finally agreed to recognize Satan as his true lord.
He was then given a flying black dog, which he rode to a Witches’ Sabbath, where he met the Devil himself.
The other witches demanded that he sacrifice his children to Satan. He refused, but agreed to sacrifice his horse and bury a holy communion wafer instead, a detail which seemed to please both the witches and Junius’s later interrogators.
Obviously, these details sound absurd today. But they were exactly what the witch hunters wanted to hear. The truth was of no use. It would just mean more suffering. And others had already named him in their own confessions.
[box] “Dear child, six have confessed against me at once: the Chancellor, his son, Neudecker, Zaner, Hoffmaisters Ursel, and Hoppfen Else- all false, through compulsion, as they have all told me, and begged my forgiveness in God’s name before they were executed. … They know nothing but good of me. They were forced to say it, just as I myself was,” he wrote.[/box]Most importantly for those torturing him, Junius revealed in his confession that other people in town had recognized him at these meetings and congratulated him on joining them in their worship of Satan.
Broken by torture and betrayed by his friends, Junius now named these people, 27 in all, for his captors.
[box] Then I had to tell what people I had seen [at the witch-sabbath],” Junius wrote. “I said that I had not recognized them. ‘You old rascal,’ [the interrogator said] ‘I must set the executioner at you. Say- was not the Chancellor there?’ So I said yes. “Who besides?” I had not recognized anybody. So he said: “Take one street after another; begin at the market, go out on one street and back on the next.” I had to name several persons there.[/box]Somehow, Junius managed to bribe a jailer to smuggle the letter to his daughter out after his confession.
“Dear child,” he wrote to her. “Keep this letter secret so that people do not find it, else I shall be tortured most piteously and the jailers will be beheaded. So strictly is it forbidden. I have taken several days to write this: my hands are both lame. I am in a sad plight….Good night, for your father Johannes Junius will never see you more. July 24, 1628.”
If Junius was promised his life for his confession, the promise wasn’t kept. He was burned at the stake a few weeks later.
And thus, the trials fed on themselves. Those accused of witchcraft named others under torture, as did the next group of accused when their own thumbs were in the screws.
Soon, Würzburg was in hysteria as the neighbors the people of the city had known all their lives were suddenly revealed to be witches.
As the Chancellor of the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg wrote in a letter to a friend:
[box] Ah, the woe and the misery of it–there are still four hundred [witches] in the city, high and low, of every rank and sex, nay, even clerics, so strongly accused that they may be arrested at any hour…The notary of our Church consistory, a very learned man, was yesterday arrested and put to the torture.[/box]Most people who were convicted at trial were sentenced to the traditional punishment for witches: they were burned at the stake.
The burnings took place in waves, usually in front of a local church. By this time in Europe, it was uncommon to see accused witches burned alive, although some were. Instead, most were hung or beheaded before burning in a small act of mercy.
Instead of making the people of the city feel safe, the burnings intensified their fear into a state of mass hysteria as the accused denounced their neighbors.
One poor child was overheard joking to his friends that he would happily serve the Devil if he would feed him, clothe him, and give him a pony. When word got back to the city magistrates, the boy was hung and then burned at the stake.
Age, sex, or position made no difference in Würzburg once you had been named. And so his age was no protection when a friend accused young Johan Bernhard Reichardt of being a witch.
His father had sent Johan Bernhard to Würzburg for school. For some reason, there were soon rumors that Johan was dappling in witchcraft.
Age, sex, or position made no difference in Würzburg once you had been named. And so his age was no protection when a friend accused young Johan Bernhard Reichardt of being a witch.
His own father was convinced that the boy’s classmates had seduced Johan into witch craft based on rumors that were spreading around the town. Hoping to save the boy’s soul, he sent him to a nearby Jesuit school.
But Würzburg was now no place for someone who had been accused of witchcraft in the past. Johan was quickly arrested. And on the 8thof April, he confessed to a magistrate that one of his classmate convinced him to become a witch.
We don’t know if Johan was tortured. Torture had been used on children before, but it likely wouldn’t have been necessary to convince a nine-year-old boy to admit to whatever an adult was telling him to say.
Like many others, he may have been promised his life if he confessed. And he was undoubtedly terrified. So he confessed, and he named others.
And like all the rest, Johan was burned to death at the stake on May 9, 1629.
The trials continued for another year, until the fire of mass hysteria burned out. Everyone in the city was changed by what they had just gone through.
One man, Jesuit priest Friedrich Spee, had served as the last confessor for many of the accused during the trials. Their dying words had, he said, permanently turned his hair white and thoroughly convinced him of the absurdity of the trials.
He would eventually write a book on the subject called Cautio Criminalis, or Caution for Prosecutors. In it, he would spell out why confessions gained under torture were worthless and using his experiences in Würzburg as a cautionary tale about witch trials in general.
The work would prove influential and helped bring an end or at least a reduction in similar trials across Germany.
Most of all, Spee wrote, not everyone accused could be condemned as a witch for surely, at least some must be innocent. And these trials had destroyed everyone involved, guilty or innocent.
He quoted from the Bible to make his point, citing the Parable of the Weeds:
[box] “While you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest.”[/box]Love to read history? I highly recommend buying the new Amazon Kindle Paperwhite. Check the price on Amazon.
