The executioner stepped into the cell with his good clothes and his freshly groomed face and asked the prisoner politely for forgiveness for what he was about to do. It was the custom in Nuremberg, and it had a name: the St. John’s blessing. A cup of wine shared between the condemned and the man who would end their life within the hour.
Sometimes the prisoner gave his forgiveness. Sometimes he spat or fainted. Either way, the cup was offered, and either way, that same courteous man would cut off the prisoner’s head in front of several thousand people. His name was Frantz Schmidt.
For forty years, he was the executioner of one of the richest cities in the Holy Roman Empire. Across his whole career, he personally put 394 people to death. He hanged them, beheaded them, burned them, drowned them, and broke their limbs one by one with a heavy wagon wheel while they were alive and screaming. He punished 345 more short of death, flogging them out of the city gates or taking an ear or a finger as the sentence required.
He kept count. We know the exact numbers because he wrote them all down himself in a private journal kept for his entire working life—entry after entry, name after name. Frantz Schmidt never wanted the job. His father never wanted the job.
His father had been standing in a crowd one October afternoon in 1553, an ordinary, respectable man watching an execution get organized. And by the end of that afternoon, his family was cursed for the next three generations. One afternoon, that was all it took. The prince was Albrecht Alcibiades, Margrave of Brandenburg-Kulmbach, a man whose entire career was one long armed tantrum across southern Germany.
By the autumn of 1553, he was paranoid, cornered, and camped on the town of Hof, where he became convinced that three local gunsmiths were plotting to assassinate him. Whether they actually were, nobody can say now, and it hardly mattered. The margrave wanted them dead, publicly, immediately. Hof had no executioner on hand, so Albrecht reached for an old custom that said a prince could simply appoint a bystander on the spot to carry out a lawful sentence.
His eye landed on a local woodsman named Heinrich Schmidt, a respectable man, a citizen’s son, whose grandfather had been a mayor in good standing. Heinrich had done nothing except stand in the wrong crowd on the wrong afternoon. Albrecht pointed at him. Heinrich refused.
He begged, pleading for his bloodline—if he did this, he told the margrave, he and his children and his children’s children would be dishonored forever. Albrecht answered that if Heinrich would not do it, then Heinrich would hang instead, and so would the two men standing beside him. So Heinrich Schmidt hanged three gunsmiths who may well have been innocent, to save his own life and the lives of two strangers. And the moment the third body stopped moving, his old life was over.
No neighbor would drink with him. The trade he had been forced into at swordpoint was now the only trade that would have him. A few months later, in the first half of 1554, his son Frantz was born, arriving into a household already sealed off from the world. The margrave never paid for any of it.
Albrecht lost his wars, got himself banned by the empire, and died in 1557 in exile, aged 35, almost certainly never giving Heinrich Schmidt another thought. The whim of his one afternoon, though, kept working quietly for seven more decades. Frantz grew up inside that quarantine. Other children were not allowed to play with him.
His father, by every scrap of evidence, was a decent and careful man who did the one thing left open to him: he trained his son to be excellent at the family’s hated craft, on the logic that if the boy had to carry the sword, he would carry it as a master and not a butcher. Young Frantz practiced his two-handed sword stroke on rhubarb stalks, because a rhubarb stalk has roughly the resistance of a human neck. Hour after hour in the yard, decapitating vegetables, and then animals, learning where a spine gives and where it fights the blade. In the spring of 1573, at nineteen years old, he was judged ready.
On the 5th of June at a place called Steinach, under his father’s eye, Frantz Schmidt hanged a thief named Leonhard Russ, and the presiding master pronounced the work done adroitly. With that single killing, the teenager was certified a journeyman of death. He spent the next five years as a traveling freelancer around Franconia, riding from town to town wherever a sentence needed carrying out, building a reputation stroke by stroke. His reputation was very good: clean work, sober habits, no drama.
And in Nuremberg, one of the great cities of the empire, the authorities were paying attention. On the 1st of May 1578, the council gave him the job, and he held it for the next forty years. Salary, official residence, the house on the river, plus fees—one of the best paid appointments of its type anywhere in the German lands, held by a man who could not legally become a citizen of the city he served. Two things made Frantz genuinely unusual.
The first was the drinking, or rather the absence of it. He took a vow, apparently early in life, never to touch wine or beer, and he kept it for decades. Everything in his world depended on the steadiness of his hands in front of thousands of witnesses. One shaky morning, one stroke that landed in a shoulder instead of a neck, could undo twenty years of careful reputation, and reputation was the only currency his family had left.
The second thing was the journal. Starting from that first hanging in 1573 and continuing to his final execution in 1617, Frantz kept a private register of every person he put to death and every person he punished short of death. Early entries are almost skeletal—a date, a name, a crime, a method. As the decades pass, he starts recording the stories: where the condemned came from, what exactly they did, the little details that clearly lodged in his head and would not leave.
He never says how he feels, not once in forty-five years. The closest he comes is in which details he bothers to save. When he writes that a murdered girl was a pious young woman, or notes that a thief was only eighteen, something is being said sideways. The range of people in that file is astonishing.
Highwaymen and horse thieves by the dozen, but also Niklaus von Gulchen, an actual member of Nuremberg’s ruling elite, a counselor and doctor of law, who turned out to be running years of spectacular fraud behind his respectable face, and in 1605 Frantz took his head off with the sword like anyone else’s. Or a conman recorded as Gabriel Wolf, a merchant son gone crooked who spoke seven languages and spent over twenty years gliding through the courts and counting houses of Europe, forging seals and signatures, swindling nobles and merchants from Lisbon to Krakow. Frantz clearly found him fascinating—the journal entry runs long, almost admiring, cataloging the man’s tricks like a rival craftsman’s technique—then ends the way they all end, with the sword. Frantz Schmidt worked barefaced.
The black hood and leather mask belonged to later imagination. Every soul in Nuremberg knew exactly who he was, and on execution days he dressed up: fine doublet, good hose, finery a merchant would envy, because the ceremony demanded dignity and he was its central officer. German never even called him a hangman when it was being formal. The title was Scharfrichter, the sharp judge, the judge of the blade, or in some regions Nachrichter, the after-judge, the one who comes after the verdict.
The tools had their own folklore. Execution swords were treated as half-alive. A blade that had taken many heads was believed to grow thirsty between jobs, and stories circulated of swords rattling in their cabinets at night when a death sentence was coming. Hanging in this period worked almost nothing like the version most of us carry around in our heads.
The trapdoor and the long merciful drop that snaps the spine belong to the nineteenth century. A sixteenth-century German hanging was a slow strangulation in the open air. The condemned man climbed a ladder backwards, facing the crowd, with the executioner climbing alongside him. At the top the noose was fitted, and then the man was simply pushed off, dropping maybe a foot, the rope closing his throat, and then everyone waited.
Strangulation takes minutes. The dying man kicked and swung and convulsed while thousands watched, and the spectators had a euphemism for those movements: they called it dancing. Sometimes the executioner’s men would drag down on the legs to hurry it along, and that counted, in context, as a kindness. The rope was also the shameful death, the bottom rung, reserved mostly for thieves, and its shame outlasted the dying.
A hanged man was left up there days, weeks, months, until the weather and the ravens finished him. This was meant to be seen exactly that way, a permanent advertisement. Prisoners condemned to the rope, hearing that the council had graciously commuted their sentence to beheading, would fall on their knees and weep and kiss the hem of the judge’s robes in gratitude. They were thanking the court for a different death.
The sword was quick where the rope was slow, but the deeper point was rank. Executed with the sword, a man could be buried in a churchyard. His family kept a future. Executed with the rope, he rotted on a beam in the wind while his children carried it forever.
So the sword was the true test of the craft. A German judicial beheading did not use a block and did not use an axe. The condemned knelt upright, or in Nuremberg often sat in a plain wooden chair, the judgment chair, and the executioner took position behind and to the side with a two-handed sword built for exactly one purpose. These execution swords survive in museums all over Germany.
Broad flat blades with no point, often with words etched down the steel—one surviving blade carries the inscription, “When I raise this sword, I wish the sinner eternal life. ” The stroke itself had to deliver a horizontal cut through skin, muscle, vertebrae, and windpipe on a living, breathing, sometimes swaying target, cleanly in one pass, with several thousand people watching at close range. Across roughly 187 beheadings, Frantz’s record needed a second stroke only four times, and only once in his whole career did he need a third. That once haunts the record—a woman so shaken she wobbled her head on her neck, and it took three blows to finish what should have taken one.
His journal notes the botch flatly in his own hand. Because when a beheading went wrong in front of a crowd, the crowd did not merely boo. An old customary rule allowed the executioner three strokes, three attempts to take a head. Beyond that, tradition held the crowd was within its rights to storm the scaffold, and by some tellings, to put the executioner to death in the condemned man’s place.
Frantz’s own predecessor in Nuremberg once needed three strokes, and the crowd pelted him off the platform with frozen clods of mud. These crowds had come on purpose to watch a human being die; they had no objection to the death. What enraged them was unauthorized suffering. The sentence said death, and a clean stroke delivered death, and everyone went home satisfied that justice had occurred.
A butchered stroke delivered agony that no court had ordered, and the public came for the man with the sword. Nobody in the history of the trade demonstrates this better than an Englishman named Jack Ketch, the public executioner of London from 1663 until his death in 1686. England, unlike Germany, beheaded with an axe and a low block, reserved for the nobility, so an English headsman might go years between beheadings with no practice. In the 1680s, political treason trials handed Jack Ketch two of the most high-profile beheadings of the century back to back.
The first was Lord William Russell, condemned in the Rye House plot. Russell paid Ketch a handsome tip beforehand—ten guineas by one account, the going bribe for a swift clean job. Ketch took the money, raised the axe, and buried the first blow in Russell’s shoulder, a hand’s width from where it was aimed. Three or four more strokes before the head finally came away.
The crowd’s reaction was ugly enough that Ketch afterwards published a printed pamphlet, an actual public apology. Two years later, London gave him a second chance, and this is one of the most horrible execution accounts in English history. James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, the handsome, popular, illegitimate son of the late King Charles II, condemned for rebellion, had heard all about Lord Russell. On the scaffold, the Duke handed Ketch six guineas and asked him not to hack him as he had hacked Lord Russell, adding that if Ketch struck him twice, he could not promise to lie still.
He then ran his thumb along the axe’s edge and remarked that it seemed too dull. Ketch failed. The first blow gashed the back of Monmouth’s head and neck without going near through. Monmouth reportedly rose partway off the block and turned and looked at Ketch and did not say a word, just laid himself back down.
Two more blows. The Duke’s body was still moving, and the crowd had begun to howl, and at that point Jack Ketch threw the axe down on the boards and cried out that he could not do it, that his heart failed him. The sheriff ordered him to pick it up. Two more blows by the official account, five in all, seven or eight by some witnesses.
And even at the end, the head hung on by sinew, and Ketch finished the work by drawing the butcher’s knife he wore at his belt and carving through the last of the neck by hand. Guards had to close ranks and hustle him away because the crowd was ready to tear him into pieces. Jack Ketch died the following year, still employed, and then his name refused to die with him. Within a generation, catch became English slang for any hangman, and then for the devil.
In Punch and Judy shows, the hangman puppet that Punch tricks into stringing himself up carried the name Jack Ketch. For the next three centuries, children laughed at him in seaside puppet tents. Back on the continent, at the far end of Frantz Schmidt’s toolkit sat the wheel. Courts reserved it for the worst of the worst: murderers, robber gangs.
The sentence often came in stages written into the verdict like a recipe. Some sentences ordered that the condemned be torn with glowing tongs on the way to the execution ground. The procession would halt at fixed points, and the executioner’s brazier came forward, and a pair of iron pincers heated red closed on the man’s arm or chest or thigh and pulled away a piece of him, flesh smoking in front of whoever stood nearest. The verdict specified the number of nips—two, three, sometimes more—a fixed quantity of agony itemized by a court clerk in advance.
Chroniclers mention the smell again and again, because nobody who stood close ever managed to forget it. At the execution ground, the condemned was stripped to his breeches and staked out flat on his back, arms and legs spread. Under his wrists, elbows, knees, and ankles, the assistants laid sharpened wooden battens, ridges of hard wood, so that each limb was bridged over a cutting edge. Then the executioner took up the wheel itself, a heavy iron-shod wagon wheel, and began.
He raised it high and brought the rim down on a shin, and the bone broke over the batten with a crack the whole field could hear, and the crowd counted the blows out loud. A thorough wheeling could run to thirty or forty blows, and the man staked in the grass was awake for it, screaming through it, watching his own limbs stop being limbs, one strike at a time. The verdicts distinguished between working from the bottom up and from the top down. Bottom up meant starting at the ankles and shins and climbing slowly, saving the chest and neck for last—maximum duration, maximum awareness.
Top down meant the first blow came down on the chest or the throat, and that blow had its own tender little name: the blow of mercy, because it killed or near enough. French courts formalized the same mercy in a written clause called the retentum, tucked into the sentence, sometimes secret from the crowd, instructing the executioner to strangle the condemned quietly after the second or third blow. Mercy in this world was a ruling decision about which minute of the procedure you died in. When the breaking was finished came the part that gave the punishment its name.
The shattered man’s arms and legs, now soft in the middle, bending where limbs do not bend, were threaded through the spokes of a second wheel, braided onto it like wet rope. Then the wheel went up horizontally on top of a tall post at the execution ground, with the man on top of it, face to the sky. And if no mercy blow had been given, he was alive up there—alive with every major bone broken, unable to move anything but his eyes and his mouth, raised up high specifically so that everyone could see him. Survival on the wheel ran hours at minimum.
Reliable accounts speak of men lasting a full day, two days, three, calling down from the post begging travelers for water or for killing. Frantz Schmidt carried out the wheel dozens of times. In January of 1588 he wheeled two robbers together, George Hornlein and Jobst Canal. The crime that sealed their sentence involved a baby.
A prostitute in their company had given birth to a boy in the house where the gang was staying. Canal, a potter by trade, actually baptized the newborn himself—went through the little ceremony, water and words—and then cut off the infant’s hand, a mutilation tied to a piece of criminal folk magic. One of the company tossed the child in the air so that it fell onto the table and mocked its crying with the words, “Hark how the devil whines. ” Then they cut the baby’s throat and buried him in the garden.
Frantz wrote all of it down, the baptism, the hand, the joke, in more detail than he gave most crimes. Or take Georg Frank, wheeled in 1593, whose entry Frantz opens with the victim rather than the killer: a young woman the journal calls fair Annie, a servant girl engaged to be married. On St. Andrew’s day, Frank and a companion offered to escort her through the woods to her betrothed’s village.
In the middle of the woods, the companion clubbed her from behind with a fence stake, hit her twice more while she lay in the leaves, and they cut her throat, stripped the body, and sold her clothes in the next town for five florins—her wedding clothes. Frantz broke Frank on the wheel for it, arms first. The care he takes to name her fair Annie, when so many victims in the journal go nameless, feels like a small stubborn act of remembrance from a man not given to sentiment. Below the wheel and the sword, the everyday machinery of the trade ran on fire and water.
Burning at the stake was the prescribed death for arsonists, certain heresies, sodomy, counterfeiting in some jurisdictions, and famously, witchcraft. What the paintings usually leave out is what actually killed people. A big well-built dry fire could bring unconsciousness fairly fast, smoke and scorched airways doing the work before the flames properly reached the body. A mean fire built of green wood or fighting a crosswind was a catastrophe—the condemned, chained too high above a struggling blaze, roasted rather than burned, sometimes for the better part of an hour.
So the mercies evolved. A repentant prisoner was routinely strangled at the stake, a cord slipped around the neck from behind the post and twisted tight, dead or nearly dead before the executioner ever touched torch to wood. Elsewhere, they hung a small sack of gunpowder around the condemned person’s neck so that when the flames climbed high enough, the charge went off and ended things at a stroke. Gunpowder as a kindness.
The defiant and the relapsed could be denied all of it and burned wide awake. England supplies the case you will not forget. In 1726 at Tyburn, a woman named Catherine Hayes was burned for murdering her husband, and the plan was the usual mercy—the executioner would strangle her with a rope run around the stake before the fire took hold. But the fire was lit and ran up faster than anyone expected and reached the executioner’s hands where he was working the rope, and he let go.
Catherine Hayes burned alive, fully conscious. Witnesses counted three great screams. She tried to push the burning wood away from herself with her bare hands until somebody threw a heavy piece of timber at her head to end it. The mercy failed because a man’s fingers got hot.
Water was gendered. Under the Carolina, the great imperial criminal code of 1532, the standard punishment for a woman convicted of killing her newborn child was drowning. The condemned woman was sewn or bound into a sack, carried to the river, and thrown in. If the current was slow, the executioner’s assistants stood on the bridge and pushed the struggling sack under and held it under until it stopped moving.
In some old versions of the custom, animals went into the sack with her—a dog, a cat, a snake, a rooster—an inheritance from ancient Roman law. Nuremberg’s own records show sack drownings in the Pegnitz, the same river that flowed under Frantz’s house. Who were these women, almost without exception? Servant girls, young and unmarried, working in some household far from their families, seduced or assaulted by a master, a master’s son, a fellow servant, a soldier passing through.
Pregnancy meant instant dismissal without a character reference, and after that destitution, quite possibly starvation. So they hid it and told no one, right up until the night they gave birth alone in a barn or an attic, in pain and terror, with no midwife and no plan. And some of them did the thing the law killed them for. Frantz’s journal records Margaret Moranti, a country girl in service to a farmer who concealed her pregnancy, gave birth alone at night by a shed near the Pegnitz, and put the newborn into the river.
His entry preserves one detail with terrible precision: that the child stirred and struggled as the water took it. She was executed with the sword, and the sword in her case was the mercy. It was a mercy that Frantz himself had fought for. Early in his Nuremberg career, he and the prison chaplain began pressing the council to abandon the sack for infanticide cases and substitute beheading.
His public argument was even a little cynical—that a beheading on the scaffold was visible to the whole crowd, and therefore a better deterrent than a sack vanishing under brown water. The argument underneath is not hard to guess. The council agreed. The sack fell out of use in Nuremberg, and in his old age Frantz noted with something as close to pride as he ever allowed onto the page that the drowning of women had been done away with there, in part by his doing.
Beyond the executions, there was the other half of the job, the half done in cellars with no crowd at all. In the Holy Roman Empire, the executioner was also officially and unavoidably the torturer. Under the Carolina, a court could not simply convict on suspicion; serious conviction required either two eyewitnesses or a confession. When witnesses were lacking, the confession had to be obtained, and the law provided the method and called it painful questioning.
The sessions followed an escalation ladder as formalized as a liturgy. Step one involved no touching at all. The prisoner was walked into the chamber and shown the instruments one by one, slowly, with explanation: the screws, the ropes, the weights, the pulley in the ceiling. For a certain percentage of people, the tour alone was enough.
Step two, the thumb screws, a small iron vice fitted over the thumbs, studded on the inner faces, tightened turn by turn. Step three, iron splints or screw vises on the shins. And past the screws, the centerpiece of continental judicial torture, the strappado: the prisoner’s wrists tied behind his back, the rope run up through a pulley in the ceiling, and the executioner hauled until the prisoner rose off the floor, hanging backwards from his own wrists, both shoulders typically wrenched out of their sockets within moments. Level two added weights hooked to the ankles.
Level three was the drop, letting the rope run free for a yard and snapping it to a jolt through arms already dislocated, repeated and counted and specified in advance by the court. Interrogation records survive in quantity—question by question, scream by scream—because the clerk wrote everything. England preferred the rack, a frame with rollers at either end, wrists and ankles roped, the winches cranked in opposite directions until the body drew to and then past its own limits. The most famous victim from these years was Anne Askew, a young Protestant gentlewoman racked in the Tower of London over her beliefs and her connections at court, racked so severely with two royal counselors allegedly working the wheels themselves that her body simply stopped working below the damage.
When they burned her at Smithfield weeks later, she could not stand or walk to her own stake and had to be carried to the fire sitting in a chair, and burned in the chair. She was twenty-five. Two consequences followed this system. The first is that sometimes the pain produced fiction.
A prisoner in the strappado will say anything, name anyone, invent whatever the questions imply, purely to make it stop. The witch trials everywhere they raged ran on exactly this fuel, ordinary women hoisted and dropped until they described flying to Sabbaths and kissing the devil. Nuremberg’s council grew skeptical of such evidence, and kept the city comparatively clear of that particular madness, and its executioner, our Frantz, never burned a witch in his entire career. The second consequence is quieter: the torturer and the healer were the same man.
The law needed prisoners fit for further questioning and fit for public execution, so after a session, the executioner set the shoulders he had pulled apart, splinted what he had cracked, salved what he had torn. Frantz was famously good at that part, and his skill at mending bodies opens onto the biggest surprise of his whole story. Executioners were the unofficial doctors of the poor, and often of the not so poor, all over the German lands. A master executioner had a working knowledge of the human body that no university physician of the age could match.
He broke bones for a living, so he knew precisely how bones break and how to set them. He tore muscle and dislocated joints in the torture chamber and was legally required to repair his own damage afterwards. By his own estimate, across his decades in Nuremberg, Frantz Schmidt gave medical consultations to some 15,000 people. Set that against 394 executions, and the man healed roughly forty people for everyone he killed.
Nuremberg’s licensed physicians complained about him repeatedly, and the council repeatedly shrugged, and the patients kept coming across the covered walkway to the little house on the river. Guild craftsmen, merchants’ wives, respectable citizens carrying their children—the same people who would not take a coin from his hand in the marketplace now holding still while that hand set their daughter’s arm. Frantz also dissected quietly the bodies of some of those he executed, teaching himself anatomy from the inside. Beyond the honest medicine sat a darker shelf.
Europeans of this era believed in corpse medicine. The human body, especially the body of a healthy young person cut off suddenly in full vigor, was understood to be full of unspent life force, and that force could be harvested, processed, and swallowed. The apothecaries had a product name for the flagship item: Arm Sunder, poor sinner’s fat. Human fat rendered from executed criminals, sold openly by the pound as a premium salve for arthritis and gout.
Executioners harvested it and prepared it. Human skin tanned by the same hands was made into belts that pregnant women wore to ease labor, and into strips worn at the throat against goiter. Ground human skull went into powders for epilepsy. By far the most prized substance of all was blood, drunk fresh and warm at the scaffold itself within moments of death as a cure for epilepsy.
Epileptics or their desperate parents paid the executioner in advance for access, and at beheadings across the German lands, the scene repeated over and over: the sword falls, the head drops, and figures dart forward from the crowd’s edge with cups outstretched to catch what leaps from the neck, and they drink it on the spot, steaming, while the crowd watches with complete comprehension and zero horror, because everyone present shared the belief. Death in this economy had no waste product. Fat, skin, blood, bone, fingers, even the soil it dripped on—all of it moved through the executioner’s hands and came out the other side as merchandise. And beyond all of that, there was one more role, perhaps the strangest one: spiritual co-star in the last hours of hundreds of human lives.
Three days before the end, the condemned learned their sentence, and from that moment they became the poor sinner, an almost ceremonial figure, and the city’s full attention bent toward them. A chaplain moved into the death cell, singing hymns with the prisoner, coaching them toward a good death, calm and repentant, because in this society’s deepest belief, a criminal who died right walked off the scaffold into heaven ahead of half the audience. Nuremberg’s death cells sat below street level under the town hall, small stone chambers off a cramped corridor, dark at noon, cold in August, furnished with straw and a bench, and the jailer and his wife lived down there among their prisoners, cooking for them, listening to them cry through the doors at night. On the last morning came the famous meal, the hangman’s meal, and Nuremberg did not do this by halves.
Whatever the poor sinner wanted within reason arrived at the cell, and the traditional centerpiece was an entire roasted goose plus wine. Some ate every scrap of it, and some could not touch a bite, and the wine flowed either way, since a slightly drunk poor sinner was steadier on the scaffold. Then the warden’s phrase at the door: “The executioner is at hand. ” The scene this story opened with: Frantz in his finery, the request for forgiveness, the shared St.
John’s drink. Then out past the judges seated in the open air at the blood court, where the sentence was proclaimed in the name of the laws of the Holy Roman Empire, and each of the jurors in turn spoke his formal assent: “What is legal and just pleases me. ” Twelve times down the row. And the condemned was invited—and this is real—to thank the court, to formally absolve the men who had just ordered his death.
Most of them did it. Then a staff was ceremonially snapped over the condemned’s head—the breaking of the staff, the sign that the law was finished with them and they now belonged to the executioner. Then the procession, a mile or more through packed streets, church bells tolling the poor sinner’s bell, the crowd pressing close enough to touch, and Frantz walking beside his charge, timing it, managing it, hurrying it through hostile stretches, slowing it where the mood was warm. The humane touches recorded along these walks stay with you: a woman allowed to wear her favorite straw hat to the scaffold; a condemned poacher allowed to wear the wreath his sister had woven and sent him.
Small permissions inside a machine built to kill, granted by the machine’s own operator. At the stone itself, the final performance. The poor sinner was expected to address the crowd, forgive the executioner out loud, forgive the judges, warn the young against the path that brought them here. Then the chair, the bared neck, and Frantz’s one motion.
If the motion was clean, the head came away in a single beat, and he lifted it by the hair and showed it to the crowd in the prescribed manner, and the whole square exhaled at once. Witnesses more than once recorded the strange pride of the moment, the council formally noting that the execution had been carried out finally and adroitly. Then the crowd dispersed to the taverns to discuss the performance. The epileptics wiped their cups.
And Frantz Schmidt walked back across his covered bridge over the river into the house in the middle of the water, took off his good clothes, and sat down and updated the journal before anything faded. Another name, another line. His marriage in 1580 was its own small scandal worked out under the council’s protection, since giving a daughter to the hangman cost a family its standing. Seven children followed, raised in the house on the river inside the same quarantine their father had grown up in.
And Frantz, who had spent his whole life climbing out of exactly that pit, now watched his own sons standing at the bottom of it, and everything he did in his last decades aimed at getting them out. He buried his wife in 1600, and he buried several of the children too across the plague years. And the journal, which records the deaths of hundreds of strangers with dates and details, falls completely silent on the deaths inside his own house. His last execution came in November 1617.
Then Frantz Schmidt, sixty-three years old, hung up the sword and began the final campaign of his life. He petitioned the emperor himself, Ferdinand II, laying out the whole story: his grandfather the honorable tailor; his father seized from a crowd in Hof by a tyrant’s whim; forced under threat of death into the trade that damned the family; the sixty-plus years of blameless and sober service the Schmidts had given since. The petition worked its way through the imperial machinery, and in 1624 the answer came down from Vienna. The language of the decree survives: the inherited shame of Frantz Schmidt was by imperial power and clemency abolished and dissolved.
One document, seventy-one years after the afternoon in Hof, and the curse was legally over. Nuremberg granted him citizenship in the city he had served for four decades and could never before belong to. His children were free, eligible for honest trades. He lived another decade as a respected medical man, and died in the summer of 1634 around eighty years old.
Nuremberg gave him a large funeral, attended by respectable citizens in numbers, and burial in consecrated ground at St. Rochus Cemetery—an honorable grave in an honorable churchyard for a man whose profession was traditionally tipped into pits by the gallows. The dynasties carried all of this forward much further than you would expect. The greatest of them all was the Sanson family of Paris.
In the 1680s, a former soldier named Charles Sanson married the daughter of the executioner of Dieppe, and by the logic of the trade, the marriage decided everything. He took up his father-in-law’s trade, and in 1688 he became executioner of Paris. The post then passed from Sanson father to Sanson son unbroken for six generations and 159 years. The famous one, the one the whole dynasty gets remembered through, was the fourth, Charles Henri Sanson, born in 1739.
He studied medicine. He played the cello seriously. He dressed elegantly and practiced free healing on the side, exactly as Frantz had, and wanted by every account any life other than the one waiting for him. When his father was paralyzed, the post swallowed him anyway.
His career had opened years earlier with the worst duty in the family’s entire history. In 1757, a man named Robert-François Damiens scratched King Louis XV with a penknife, barely drawing blood. For that scratch, the courts revived in full the medieval sentence for regicide, and young Charles Henri was on the scaffold crew that carried it out. The hand that held the knife burned off with sulfur.
The arms, legs, and chest torn open with pincers, and molten metal, boiling oil, and burning resin poured into the wounds. Then four horses harnessed to the four limbs to pull the man apart—except the horses could not do it. They pulled for the better part of an hour; six horses eventually, and Damiens came apart only after the executioners cut through the sinews at his joints with knives, and witnesses swore he was alive and aware deep into the process. Charles Henri never got over that day and said so.
The revolution then handed this reluctant man the busiest scaffold in human history. He championed the new beheading machine and genuinely believed in it—a device that could not miss, that would deliver to every condemned person the identical instant death. In April of 1792, he conducted its first execution, a robber named Pelletier, and the crowd went home disappointed: it was over too fast, no spectacle. Within two years, the machine was falling all day long.
By his own count across his career, Charles Henri executed nearly 3,000 people. On the 21st of January 1793, he guided King Louis XVI to the plank, and his own account of that morning is quiet and sick with grief. The family paid its own blood price: his younger son Gabriel, assisting on the scaffold, lifted a freshly severed head to show the crowd, slipped on the wet boards, and fell headfirst to his death. After that, the Sansons fitted railings.
The dynasty ended two generations later in the most Sanson way imaginable. Henri-Clément, sixth and last of the line, hated the work, gambled, drowned in debt, and in 1847 did the unthinkable: he pawned the guillotine, the state guillotine of France. An execution promptly needed carrying out, and the state discovered its instrument sitting in a pawn shop and had to buy back its own machine to kill a man on schedule. The moment the sentence was done, they fired him.
He dictated a sprawling family memoir and sold one of the old machines to Madame Tussauds for the wax museum. Germany’s version of the same long thread runs through a Bavarian family named Reichart, knackers and executioners for eight generations back into the mid-1700s. Johann Reichart, born in 1893, took over the Bavarian state executioner’s post from his own uncle in 1924. His ledger grew into the largest of any man in this story: 3,165 executions, most of them under the government that took power in 1933, when political death sentences became an industry.
He traveled between prisons like a contractor with a route, driving his own car with the dismantled machine in tow, working in the old formal costume of the Bavarian office—black coat, white shirt, white gloves, top hat. On the 22nd of February 1943 at Stadelheim Prison in Munich, the prisoners brought to him included a twenty-one-year-old student named Sophie Scholl, condemned with her brother Hans for distributing anti-government leaflets with the White Rose resistance. Reichart carried out the sentence, and he said afterwards that he had never seen anyone die as bravely as that girl. When the war ended, the occupying Americans hired the same Johann Reichart to hang condemned war criminals at Landsberg.
Afterwards he was interned and put through the denazification courts, where he offered the defense the trade had been offering for 600 years: that he had never doubted the legality of what he was doing. The law sentenced, he executed. The guilt lived elsewhere. His marriage collapsed.
His children were tormented at school with a chant: head cutter, head cutter, your dad’s a head cutter. In 1950, his son Hans, twenty-three years old, took his own life. Reichart himself died in 1972, poor and alone, buried in Munich’s East Cemetery beside his sons. The great stain itself dissolved with strange quietness.
Revolutionary France abolished the whole doctrine of dishonorable trades in 1791, declaring the executioner a citizen like any other. The German states followed through the 1850s, striking the ancient category of the unehrliche Leute from their law books. And within a couple of generations, people had to be told by historians that any of it had ever existed. And the families themselves, freed at last to choose, made a move so fitting it feels scripted: a striking number of the old executioner dynasties went into medicine formally, this time with degrees.
All those generations of bone setting and wound dressing and anatomy learned at the scaffold flowed straight into licensed practice. The descendants of men who had been refused a seat in church became the physicians and surgeons of the very towns that had shunned their grandfathers, and their patients by then had no idea. The hangman’s house still stands in Nuremberg, the little building on the island in the Pegnitz with its covered wooden walkway, lovingly restored after the war. Today it is a small museum about Frantz Schmidt.
Tourists stroll across the bridge all day long, taking photos over the water, walking in cheerful crowds through the doorway of a man no honest citizen would once stand beside. The river still runs under the house. On the wall inside you can find the old journal’s tallies laid out for visitors: the 394 names, name after name after name. And somewhere near the end of the exhibit, the line from Vienna: abolished and dissolved.
People tend to go quiet in that last room. Then they walk back across the executioner’s bridge, over the running water, to the shore where everybody belongs now.
