The Mayor's Smuggled Letter From The Witch House

In the summer of 1628, the most respected man in Bamberg, Germany — the Bürgermeister, the mayor, a man who had served his city for twenty years — was dragged into a building the locals called the Drudenhaus.

The Witch House.

It had been purpose-built. The Prince-Bishop of Bamberg — Gottfried Johann Georg II Fuchs von Dornheim, known to history as the Witch Bishop — had constructed it specifically to process the accused. It could hold dozens of prisoners at a time. It had interrogation rooms. It had instruments.

Johannes Junius was fifty-five years old. He was a father. He was a public servant. He walked into the Drudenhaus and he never came out.

THE HORROR Junius was accused of witchcraft by people who had themselves been accused, tortured, and broken. Under torture, they had been ordered to name accomplices. They named the mayor. The system fed itself — each confession produced new names, each name produced a new arrest, each arrest produced a new confession. The machine required fuel. The fuel was names. The names were invented under pain.

On 28th June 1628, Junius was interrogated without torture. He denied everything. He said he had never renounced God. He said he was innocent before God and the world.

They brought witnesses. Six people — all previously tortured — told him to his face that they had seen him at witch gatherings. He denied it. He said he would stake his life on his innocence.

They gave him two days to reconsider. He did not reconsider.

The torture began. Thumbscrews — iron clamps tightened around the thumbs and fingers until the bones cracked. Strappado — his hands were bound behind his back and he was hoisted off the ground by his wrists, his full weight hanging from dislocated shoulders. Leg vices — iron frames compressed around the shins.

After a week of this, Johannes Junius confessed. He confessed to renouncing God. He confessed to attending witch gatherings. He confessed to desecrating the sacred wafer. He confessed to everything they needed him to confess.

Then, with hands that had been crushed by the instruments that broke him, he did something extraordinary.

He wrote a letter.

He addressed it to his daughter Veronica. He gave it to a sympathetic jailer who smuggled it out of the Drudenhaus and delivered it to the girl.

It begins: “Many hundred thousand good-nights, dearly beloved daughter Veronica.”

Then: “Innocent have I come into prison, innocent have I been tortured, innocent must I die. For whoever comes into the witch prison must become a witch or be tortured until he invents something out of his head.”

He described every torture. He described every confrontation. He described how the witnesses had lied to his face and how the inquisitors had told him: “Confess, or we will continue.”

He told his daughter that his confession was “sheer lies and made-up things, so help me God.”

He warned her: “Dear child, keep this letter secret so that people do not find it, else I shall be tortured most piteously and the jailers will be beheaded. So strictly is it forbidden.”

He closed: “Good night, for your father Johannes Junius will never see you more.”

The letter is written in a shaking hand. The lines wander across the page. The man who wrote it could barely hold the pen — the same instruments that had broken his will had broken his grip. He wrote with fingers that no longer worked properly, in a prison that forbade writing, to a daughter he would never see again, about a confession he had invented to make the pain stop.

On 6th August 1628, Johannes Junius was burned at the stake.

The official court record states that he confessed voluntarily and was never tortured.

THE MODERN RELIC Both documents survive. The court record — neat, professional, composed in the steady hand of a clerk — states that Junius confessed of his own free will. The letter — shaking, desperate, smuggled past guards at the risk of the jailer’s life — states that every word of the confession was a lie extracted by torture.

Both are in the Bamberg State Library. They sit in the same archive. One is a lie written in a steady hand. The other is the truth written in a broken one. The handwriting tells you which is which before you read a single word.

Between 1626 and 1631, the Bamberg witch trials killed approximately 600 people in a city of 25,000 — roughly one in forty. The victims included every burgomaster in the city, multiple priests, the chancellor’s wife, and children. The Witch Bishop drove the persecution until his own death in 1632.

Bamberg is a UNESCO World Heritage Site today. Tourists visit for the medieval architecture, the Romanesque cathedral, the old town hall built on an island in the river. The Drudenhaus is gone. The letter is in a library. The court record is beside it. One shakes. The other does not. The one that shakes is the one that tells the truth.

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