A few months ago, Executed Today detailed the dreadful fate of the Pappenheimers, a family of poor itinerants swept into a witch scare and horrifically executed.
10- or 11-year-old Hansel Pappenheimer was made to provide some of the testimony that condemned his parents and older siblings to a torturous public death. Then, he was made to watch.
This child was being monitored by the authorities for any sign of infernal possession himself, so his heartbreaking exclamations as the butchery unfolded — “Look how they’re thumping my father’s arms!” as the man was broken on the wheel; “My mother is squirming!” as she burned alive — were recorded.
That’s just about as horrible as the annals of execution get.
The only thing that would make it more horrible would be the coda the Bavarian duchy added this date in 1600, when it burned little Hansel Pappenheimer too.
On this day..
- 1954: Jonas Žemaitis, Lithuanian Forest Brother - 2019
- 1766: John Clark and James Felton - 2018
- 1736: James Matthews and Elizabeth Greenley - 2017
- 1936: Vladimir Mutnykh, Bolshoi director - 2016
- 2009: Hu Minghua and Su Binde, child abductors - 2015
- 1948: Hans Karl Möser, for rocketry - 2014
- 1933: Thomas Thurmond and John Holmes lynched in St. James Park - 2013
- 1678: William Staley, "the prologue to the bloody tragedy" - 2012
- 1937: Peljidiin Genden, former Mongolia Prime Minister - 2011
- Daily Double: Stalinism east to west - 2011
- 1940: Jilava Massacre - 2010
- 1849: Sheikh Bouzian, defending Zaatcha - 2008
- 1919: Felipe Angeles - 2007