The Pirate Whose Skull Was Stolen Twice

Klaus Störtebeker is the most legendary pirate in German history — a man whose name meant “empty the tankard in one gulp,” whose death produced one of the most astonishing execution legends ever recorded, and whose severed skull became a museum exhibit that someone, six centuries later, decided to steal.

To understand him, you have to go back to the Baltic Sea in the 1390s. A pirate brotherhood known as the Victual Brothers had turned the sea lanes of northern Europe into hunting grounds, plundering the merchant convoys of the mighty Hanseatic League. When they lost their safe harbours, the survivors rebranded themselves the Likedeelers — the “equal sharers,” because plunder was split evenly among the crew — and among their captains, one name rose above all others: Klaus Störtebeker. To the Hanseatic merchants of Hamburg and Lübeck, he was a plague upon their trade. To the poor of the coastal towns, he became something closer to a Robin Hood of the sea. Hamburg wanted him dead.

In 1401, they got him. A Hamburg war fleet — led, tradition says, by the ship Bunte Kuh, the “Painted Cow” — cornered Störtebeker’s ships off the island of Heligoland in the North Sea. After a ferocious fight, the pirate king was taken in chains to Hamburg, along with dozens of his men. Legend claims that when his captured ship was broken up, the masts were found to be hollow — filled with molten gold. The pirates were tried and condemned to die together on the Grasbrook, the execution ground on an island in the Elbe, within sight of the harbour they had terrorised.

The Horror

On the 20th of October 1401, Störtebeker and his crew were led out to die — and this is where the legend begins. Facing the block, Störtebeker is said to have made the executioner an offer no one had ever heard before: after his head was struck off, his body would rise and walk down the line of his kneeling crewmen — and every man his headless corpse managed to pass would go free. The offer was granted, perhaps as a joke. The sword fell. Störtebeker’s head dropped to the ground. And then, as the crowd watched in dead silence, the headless body rose to its feet and began to walk. One man. Two. Five. Ten. Eleven of his crew, the legend says, watched their captain’s decapitated corpse stride past them, blood pouring from the stump of his neck — before the executioner, in a panic, threw out his foot and tripped the body, which finally collapsed into the dirt. And then Hamburg broke its word: every one of the pirates was beheaded anyway. The legend adds one final horror. When the executioner — standing in blood up to his ankles after dozens of beheadings — was asked if he was tired, he boasted that he had strength enough left to execute the entire Hamburg Senate as well. The senators, insulted, had him beheaded too.

The Modern Relic

The heads of Störtebeker and his men were nailed to wooden stakes and planted in a row along the banks of the Elbe — a forest of skulls, left to rot as a warning to every sailor entering the port of Hamburg. And there the story should have ended. But in 1878, workmen digging on the old Grasbrook execution ground unearthed a human skull with a massive iron spike driven through it. It was identified as Störtebeker’s, and it became one of the most famous objects in Hamburg — displayed for over a century in the Museum of Hamburg History, the great pirate reduced to nailed bone behind glass. Then, on a night in January 2010, someone smashed into the display and stole it. The 600-year-old skull of the pirate king vanished — until, more than a year later, police recovered it after two men tried to sell it, and the skull went back behind glass, where it sits today. A bronze statue of Störtebeker now stands in Hamburg’s HafenCity, bound and defiant, gazing out at the harbour — a few hundred metres from the ground where his headless body, so the legend insists, took its final impossible walk.

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