The Pappenheimer family was tried and executed for witchcraft in 1600 in Bavaria, Germany. The case is taken as an example of the torture used in witch trials, as it is unusually well documented.
Background
The Pappenheimers consisted of father Paulus, mother Anna, sons Jacob and Gumpprecht, and the youngest son, ten-year-old Hoel. They belonged to the lower class in German society, and were originally beggars from Swabia. Pappenheimer was a nickname, their actual family name was Pämb or Gämperle.
Witch trial
They were pointed out by an arrested thief, and arrested in the middle of the night, taken from their beds and taken to jail, accused of having assisted the thief in murdering pregnant women for the purpose of making candles out of their unbaptized fetuses. On the order of the duke Maximilian I, they were taken to Munich, and exposed to torture so fierce they confessed to anything they were accused of or questioned about. They were made responsible for every unsolved crime that had occurred in Bavaria in the later years and confessed to hundreds of thefts and murders. They admitted sorcery and pointed out over four hundred accomplices.
Execution
The parents and the eldest sons were to be executed together with two other men. The bodies of the men were torn six times each with irons, Anna's breasts were cut off and rubbed in the faces of her adult sons, the skeletons of the men were broken on the wheel, the father was subjected to impalement on a pike, and finally, they were burned at the stake. All this took place in front of the youngest son, ten-year-old Hoel, who was to witness the execution of his family; he had been brought along on the horse of the sheriff, who was to write down his reactions. Later the same year, in December 1600, six more people were burned at the stake in Münich, including Hoel.
Accounts
The historian Joseph Hormayr, Baron zu Hortenburg provides a detailed excerpt from an old chronicle depicting these events in the 1844 edition of Taschenbuch für die vaterländische Geschichte, pages 331-332. Some divergences, such as Anna Gämperl having died prior to being burnt, rather than burning alive in the Hormayr account, in the chronicle used by Hormayr can be seen relative to an English account of the trial already in 1601, A Strange Report of Sixe most notorious Witches
