Abstract
This is a completely extraordinary, well-researched and contextualized account of the life of Frantz Schmidt, the salaried executioner of Nuremberg between 1578 and 1618. Schmidt kept a personal journal of the executions and other punishments which he administered beginning with his first execution (by hanging) in 1573 when he was nineteen until his retirement in 1618. This was first published in 1801 (Meister Frantzen Nachrichter …) and translated as A Hangman’s Diary, Being the Journal of Master Franz Schmidt, translated by C. V. Calvert and A. W. Gruner in 1928. Schmidt personally killed 394 people. During his first decade, he performed 191 floggings, 71 hangings, 48 beheadings (with the sword), 11 wheel executions, 5 finger choppings and 3 ear clippings. On average, he put to death 13.4 people a year and administered 20 corporal punishments.
The book provides a vast amount of information about which most people know nothing. Hitherto, I did not know precisely what execution by the wheel was, but I do now. The information is grisly and the text is interspersed with graphic contemporary sketches and engravings. The strength of the book is not only its most unusual subject matter, but its evident success in recreating a social world and its detailed governing rituals. It is explained that Schmidt lived during the ‘golden age’ of executions, when successful cities took charge of retribution. We learn that his base salary placed him among the top 5% of earners in Nuremberg and that after two years he asked for a New Year bonus. We learn that he was good at it: in a career total of 187 executions by the sword, Schmidt required a second stroke only four times (a strike record of 98%), and on each such occasion he noted ‘botched’ (putzen) in his journal. We know that he was literate and perhaps very unusually, a teetotaler. We are told that Schmidt competed with the local barber-surgeons as a physician (of a kind) and even did some dissections. He acquired a respect. We learn that he was a Lutheran but not prejudiced either against Roman Catholics or Jews and that though he did many terrible things, he was not a sadist. He effectively ended the practice of drowning women in a sack in favour of the mercy of the sword.
One cannot read this material without constantly asking oneself what he thought about it. Schmidt was the official torturer and even executed his own brother-in-law, the robber Friedrich Werner, with the wheel. Unsurprisingly, few of the introspective questions of that kind are answered, but we are drawn into Schmidt’s intense commitment to self-gentrification and his successful petition to the Emperor for a restoration of family honour after his retirement.