Journal Offers Insight to Being an Executioner

I have spent virtually every day of the past four years in the company of a man who with his own hands killed 394 individuals, flogged or otherwise disfigured roughly the same number, and tortured hundreds more. I should add that my acquaintance has been dead for nearly four hundred years, and my familiarity with him is based on an intimate knowledge of the private journal he kept for nearly half a century. This fascinating document, which I have transcribed and translated from a 1634 German manuscript, is the basis of my forthcoming biography of Meister Frantz Schmidt, executioner of the imperial city of Nuremberg from 1578-1618.