Diary of an Torturer

Some years ago, Joel Harrington, an American historian, discovered a manuscript copy of the diary of Frantz Schmidt, citizen of Nuremberg who died in 1634. The diary had been published before, but the manuscript was more detailed and accurate than the published versions.

Any diary from the seventeenth century is a historical treasure, but Schmidt’s is remarkable because for many years he was a Master Executioner, responsible during his first decade of work for “228 executions, 191 floggings, five finger-choppings and three ear-clippings.” Over the course of his career, “he flogged at least 367 offenders, usually before effecting the court’s order for their banishment from the city; many more were whipped by his assistant. He branded a large N for Nuremberg on the cheeks of four pimps and conmen, clipped the ears off four “thief-whores”, snipped off the end of one blasphemer’s tongue, and chopped off the fingers of nine prostitutes, procuresses, false gamblers, poachers and perjurers.” (This from Richard J. Evans’s TLS review of Harrington’s The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century . Evans is the author of Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600-1987 .)

In addition to giving a rare glimpsed into the daily life of an executioner, the diary allows Harrington to suss out Schmidt’s moral perspective on his work. Evans summarizes:

“As Harrington notes, he had a highly traditional view of justice, and regarded every crime as a violation of personal trust, which broke in the most underhand way the ties that bound the criminal and the victim, and, beyond that, the human elements of society itself. During the late sixteenth century, jurists were attempting to redefine crime as an offence against the legal sovereign and by extension, against God, who had put the sovereign in power; but Master Frantz did not recognize this novel conception of crime. He recorded with a conspicuous lack of emotion the offenders who had been arrested as spies or mercenaries acting on behalf of Nuremberg’s rival the margrave of Ansbach, but expressed obvious moral outrage at the fact that one of them, Hans Ramsperger, ‘had not only provided him with information,’ but even ‘betrayed the town of Nuremberg to the old margrave, revealing where the walls were weakest and most easily stormed and offering if possible to do his best to bring this to pass.’”

Harrington also examines the implicit notions of justice and social order in Schmidt’s outlook: “Punishments in sixteenth-century Nuremberg, as in other parts of Germany, were carried out in public, not least because trials were held behind closed doors and administered by officials. They were an open demonstration of the operation of justice, and major executions were attended by a large part of the town population in a collective act of community approval.”

Schmidt didn’t choose to be an executioner: “Sixteenth-century Germany was a “society of orders”, in which the grade and station of every individual were carefully regulated by law and above all by convention. Honour was the glue that held the system together.” A relative of Master Frantz killed a man, and the dishonored family went over the edge: ” The executioner had to live in a special house next to the municipal slaughterhouse, pig market and prison; Master Frantz’s successor was lodged in the town’s former pesthouse. Executioners almost invariably married within the dishonourable caste, and their families often included knackers, slaughtermen, skinners, gravediggers and jailers.” The mode of execution was sometimes designed to keep the executioner at a distance from his client: “The executioner’s touch was generally polluting – the special privilege of execution with the sword, while kneeling, was granted not only because such offenders could show courage and honour by waiting motionless for the fatal blow, but also because they could avoid being touched by the executioner during the ceremony.”