The Pappenheimer Case centered around a family who were tried and executed for witchcraft in 1600 in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. The family were executed, along with accomplices they were forced to name under torture, after a show trial as scapegoats for a number of unsolved crimes committed years back in a display of extreme torture intended to deter the public from crime. The witch trial resulted in the death of twelve people: four of the Pappenheimer family and two of their accused accomplices in the first trial, followed by the remaining member of the family and five other accomplices in the second trial. The trial was of one of the most well-publicized witch trials in German history.
Background
The Pappenheimer family consisted of Paulus and Anna Gämperl and their three sons: the adult sons Michel (sometimes called Jacob) and Gummprecht Gämperl, and their youngest son, ten-year-old Hansel (sometimes called Hoel) Gämperl. While their last name is individually given as Gämperl or Pämb, the family as a whole are often referred to, and became known in history as, the Pappenheimer family.
They belonged to the lower class in society, and were vagrant beggars from Swabia. They supported themselves as traveling emptier of privies and by digging graves, which at this time belonged to the very lowest of professions.
Arrest
At this time, the government in Bavaria conducted a campaign against vagrants and criminals. There had been many crimes committed by vagrants, whom the government had been unable to arrest.
An arrested thief pointed out the two adult sons of the family, Michel and Gumpprecht, as his accomplices in the murder of pregnant women, and denounced the whole family as robbers and murderers prior to his execution. The local officials of the Danubian provinces of Bavaria were informed to look out for the family.
In February 1600, the family was arrested and imprisoned in Altmannstein under the custody of prefect Alexander von Haslang zu Haslangsreut, Grosshausen und Reid. They were arrested in the middle of the night, taken from their beds and taken to jail. Initially, only the adults of the family was arrested and the ten-year-old Hansel was left with their landlord, who shortly after brought him to his parents in jail, not knowing what else to do with him.
Interrogation and trial
On the order of Maximilian I (Elector of Bavaria), they were taken from Altmannstein to the Bavarian capital of Munich, where they were imprisoned in Munich's Falcon Tower.
A leading official in the trial was the duke's councillor Johann Sigismund Wagnereckh, who had long made unsuccessful attempts to promote witch trials in Bavaria, but with the exception of some trials in 1589–90, witch trials had been uncommon in Bavaria because of the general opposition to such trials among the Bavarian elite. Wagnereckh conducted several interrogations of the family by use of severe torture. A main concern of Wagnereckh was the charge that the Pappenheimers had murdered children to grind their hands to a powder they could eat, which would give them magical powers and help them in their murders and robberies.
It appears that the Duke's government wished to make an example of the family in a period of many vagrant crimes, which the government had been unable to solve. Witchcraft was a crime in which could include many other crimes, which made it useful as a general charge in a show trial toward scapegoats. The Pappenheimers appear to have been subjected to a show trial and meant to be made an example of, and "As many as possible of the unsolved crimes of the past few years were to be put down to the account of the accused."
Hansel was tortured first because he, as a child, was expected to break first. They were tortured by the strappado, squassation, rope burns, and torch burnings while Hansel, as a child, was beaten with a cane.