Schmidt, as the public executioner of Nuremberg, kept personal journal between 1573 and 1617, "recording and describing each and every execution and corporal punishment he administered" -
torture by various methods, flogging, cutting off of fingers or ears, as well as judicial execution by hanging, beheading, burning, drowning, live burial, or breaking on the wheel.Accounts include -
1573 - Kloss Renckhart of Feylsdorf, a murderer. Committed three murders with his companion. First, he shot dead another companion. Secondly, a miller's man who helped him to attack and plunder a mill by night. The third instance was again at a mill, called the Fox Mill, on the mountains, which he attacked at night with a companion, shot the miller dead, raped the miller's wife and maid, forced them to fry some eggs in fat and laid these on the dead miller's body, then forced the miller's wife to join in eating them, then kicked the miller's body and said, "Miller, how do you like this morsel?". Also robbed the mill. On this account executed on the wheel at Graytz, in the archbishopric of Bamberg.One cannot hang people without clothes.
February 1584 - Hennsa of Geyselwind, otherwise known as Fatty; Hennsa Palllauf of Hernda; Killian Wurmb of Wirnsbach, otherwise known as Rear End; Hans Schober of Weher, otherwise known as Dusty; and Hennssla Klopffer of Reigelsdorff. Five thieves who ... had to be clothed, for they were naked and bare; some of them knew no prayers and had never been in a church. The eldest were 22, 17, 16, and 15 years old; the youngest 13 years. All five from here. Executed with the rope at Nuremberg.
Other incidents include -
August 1594 - Christoff Mayer, a weaver of fustian, and Hans Weber, a fruiterer; both citizens of Nuremberg who for three years had practiced sodomy together and were informed against by a hook-maker's apprentice, who caught them both in the act behind a hedge. The fruiterer had practiced this for twenty years, namely with the cook Endress, with Alexander, also with Georg in the army, and with the baker Toothy Chris at Lauf, and otherwise with many other baker servants that he couldn’t name. The weaver was first executed with the sword and then his body was burnt with the fruiterer, who was burnt alive.Harrington notes Schmidt's -
November 1617 - Burnt alive here a miller of Manberna, who however was lately engaged as a carrier of wine. Because he and his brother, with the help of others, practiced coining and counterfeiting money and clipping coins fraudulently. He also had a working knowledge of magic ... This miller, who worked in the town mills here three years ago, fell into the town moat on Whitsunday. It would have been better for him if he had been drowned, but it turned out according to the proverb that "What belongs to the gallows cannot drown in water".
self-identity as a restorer of social order, a kind of moral accountant, who, in his own words, "did his duty and made things right again". As if making entries in a ledger, Meister Frantz carefully lists all known offenses committed by each individual, including full itemization of all stolen property, and numbers all of his punishments, capital and corporal, providing annual totals of each.He also notes Scmidt's other self-image as -
While Schmidt's tone is almost always dispassionate, the relative length of the entries and other clues reveal his implicit hierarchy of social values. Violent crimes, particularly the outrages committed by vicious robber gangs, were clearly the worst and required the most severe punishments to restore justice. Abuses of trust, however, were nearly as grievous in Schmidt's eyes, including treason, the murder of a relative (especially a child), the rape of a young girl, or audacious financial fraud, such as the one-legged "treasure finder" Elizabeth Aurholtin (aka "Scabby"), whose schemes amassed a considerable personal future, or the master forger and con-man Gabriel Wolf, who defrauded nobles across Europe of huge amounts. Crimes against property in general required strict rectification, often including hanging for theft. But most such offenses – except when they directly abused people’s good will or hospitality – did not arouse Schmidt's ire. His complacency was even more evident in a variety of "victimless" sexual offenses (not rape), typified more by exasperation at the defiance of recidivist prostitutes and their pimps than by any evangelical fervour.
a healer-priest, likewise evident in his pervasive concern with full accounting of each individual's crimes and sins, no matter how small, and Schmidt's own active role in reconciling the sinner with God. Strikingly, his approach is much less overtly doctrinaire than that of his colleague, prison chaplain Johannes Hagendorn, who also kept a personal journal of criminal cases. Rather, Schmidt seeks to create in the elaborate spectacle of public death a sort of preliminary last judgment that provides the condemned the opportunity to achieve "a good end" or "fine death", and in his journal he comments extensively on his own success or failure in ensuring that they did not part the world "godless"” or "with no hope of salvation". Above all, the journal entries and supplemental legal sources portray a man steeled to the use of torture and other violence on the offenders before him but also consistently attentive to avoid unnecessary cruelty. Schmidt, for example, successfully leads a pioneering campaign to abolish the drowning of female felons and execute them by what he considered the more humane method of decapitation. He also regularly persuades his magisterial colleagues to behead those condemned to die by fire or being drawn and quartered.
