A letter by Johannes Junius to his
daughter from prison.
A rare account of the experience of
being tried as a witch.
"Many hundred thousand good-nights, dearly beloved daughter Veronica. Innocent I have come into prison, innocent I have been tortured, innocent I must die."
With these words of resignation to a grotesque and undeserved fate, Johannes Junius, a burgomaster, or chief magistrate, of the city of Bamberg, began a letter of fairwell to his daughter. The writing was arduous , because the prisoner's hands were mutilated by the thumbscrews that had been used to coerce his confession. But the words that he scrawled were both proud and poignant. Junius's sense of his right was all that was left to him. When he wrote the letter on July 24, 1628, he was already beyond any hope of proving his innocence. "For whoever comes into the witch prison," the burgomaster declared, "must become a witch or be tortured until he invents something out of his head."
In the course of the witch persecutions that peaked in the seventeenth century, thousands of innocent Europeans suffered the same end that befell Junius. The burgomaster's wife had ben incinerated in the witch oven - a crematorium located in the nearby town of Zeil - only months earlier. In Bamberg as in some other regions, witch-hunting had become a form of state-controlled crime that was complete with its own bureaucracy; the entire apparatus was used by rulers to steal the welath of the victims. Unlike most of the accused witches, Junius had the opportunity to leave behind a personal testimony to his suffering, to the nightmarish farce of his trial, and to the calculated ruthlessness of his inquisitors.
Junius was able to smuggle the letter out of prison with the assitance of one of his guards. The communication carried specific for his daughter to pay the jailer one thaler - a silver coin - as a means of compensating the man for his troubles.
Junius cautioned his daughter to hide the letter, "else I shall be tortured most piteously and the jailers will be beheaded." He further instructed her to save herself by fleeing the center city of Bamberg immediately. The young woman did manage to escape; whether or not she ever received her fathers letter was not noted.
Even for those times, the Bamberg of Johannes was notorious for the scope and brutality of its witch trials. Beginning in 1595, inquisitors systematically tortured and executed hundreds of towns-people, imcluding many of the leading citizens, all on trumped-up charges. Prince-Bishop Johann Georg II, Fuchs von Dornheim, sho served as the independent ruler of Bamberg, presided over the worst of the attocities, which occured during the 1620s. Witht the assistance of a priestly administrator as well as a full-time staff of lawyers, torturers, and executioners, Johann Gerog sent no fewer than 600 citizens to their deaths. Furthermore, he ordered the construction of a special prison call the Trudenhaus, or witch house, a facility to hold those who were awaiting trial.
The Prince-Bishop confiscated the property of everyone who was cinvicted of witchcraft. By all accounts, Johann Georg saw to it that his witch hunters made the most of this extraordinary arrangement. A list was compiled shortly after the persecutions ceased in 1631 indicates that the prince-bishop's henchmen had confiscated some 500,000 florins - or gold coins- from the victims they had executed and they had taken another 220,000 florins from suspects that were still locked up in prison.
In addition to the profit motive, there was another incentive for the merciless destruction of alleged witches in Bamberg. In a religiously divided Germany, which had been wracked by the devastation of the Thirty Years' War, Catholic and Protestant armies frequently engaged in regional skirmishes. Catholic rulers such as Johann Georg used witchcraft as a pretense for rooting out the opposition Lutherans in their dominions.
 The infamous Trudenhaus was constructed in Bamberg as a prison for accused withces |
In an effort to justify their actions, these leaders cited religious arguments formulated by Jesuit and Dominican theologians. The aim of the clerics in producing these writings had less to do with clarifying religious doctrine than it did with winning back the protestant strong-holds in Germany. Protestant authorities responded in kind, conducting their own witch hunts.
Church support notwithstanding, the severity of the Bamberg trials eventually evoked revulsion among the townspeople. In 1630 and 1631, Johann Geogrg's so-called overlord, the Holy Roman Empero Ferdinand II, finally ordered reforms. His most important stipulation was to put an end to the confiscation of the victims' property. Without the prospect of spoils - and threatened by an advancing Protestant army - the prince-bishop began to lose enthusiasm. Executions eventually ceased in 1631, and within another year the tyrannical Johann Georg had died of natural causes.
 Thumbscrews and leg vises were used in the early stages of an increasingly terrible sequence of tortures. |
"I will tell you how it has gone with me," Junius wrote. "When I was the first time put to torture, my brother-in-law Dr. Braun, Dr. Kothendorffer, and two strange doctors were there. Then Dr. Braun asks me, 'Kinsman, how come you are here?' I answered, 'Through falsehood and misfortune.' 'Hear you,' he retorts, 'you are a witch. Will you confess it voluntarily? If not, we'll bring in witnesses and the executioner for you.' I said, 'I am no witch; I have a pure conscience in the matter.'"
The tribunal then confronted Junius with a number of witnesses, each one of them a confessed witch, who, after being subjected to various means of torture, had identified Bamberg's burgomaster as a willing participant in their rituals. When the chief magistrate refused to cinfirm tha accusations, his suffering began in earnest: "And then came alas - God in highest heaven have mercy - the executioner, and put the thunbscrews on me, both hands bound together, so the blood spurted from the nails and everywhere, so that for four weeks I could not use my hands, as you can see by my writing.
