Johannes Hotz was born 1571 in Wertheim, Wurtemburg, Germany, and died 30 September 1644 in Vaitsgasse, Wertheim, Germany. He married Anna Schurer on 13 December 1601 in Stiftskirche, Wertheim, Wurtemburg, Germany, daughter of Veit Schurer.
Notes for Johannes Hotz: He was beheaded with a sword. Accused of being a witch.
In the Wertheim Stiftskirche records, there is a narrative dated January 1633 that is signed by nine men. One of the signatures is that of Johannes Hotz, who signs "Hanns Hotz".
Following is extracted from an email received by James H. Lawrence from Freidrich Lehmkühler, editor of "Wertheimer Zeitung", 4 Marktplatz, Wertheim: "Are you related to that Hotz who was innkeeper of "Kette"? He and his wife were the last people to be put to death as witches after they had been charged by a neighbour's child with meeting the devil at the "Wettenburg" near Wertheim." James & Kimiko stayed at the modern Kette on the Tauber River for the first 3 nights of their visit to Wertheim in September 1999. Note: According to Rosemarie Kieser of the Grafschaft Museum in Wertheim, the present-day Kette Hotel is not the one owned by Johannes Hotz in 1644. It's what is now 11 Marktplatz, Wertheim and known as Bach'sche Brauerei in 2003. (See below)
From the September 28, 1994, Wertheim Zeitung newspaper article about Johann & Anna Schürer Hotz witchcraft trial and execution: [Dr. Johann Schlaun and Dr. Bernhardt Schoepping as investigation judges led the interrogations. They began on 1 October of the year 1642 with the representation of a resume of Johannes Hotz.]
Dr. Johann Schlaun und Dr. Bernhardt Schoepping leiteten als Untersuchungsrichter die Verhoere. Sie begannen am 1. Oktober des Jahres 1642 mit der Darstellung des Lebenslaufs von Johannes Hotz.
[born in 1571, he came later already in young years to Kreuzwertheim. His father did not lead first of all an inn in Neubrunn, after that in Wertheim the old Kette (lain in the rear house of the Bachschen brewery; not to be confused with the hotel-inn on the Tauberufer.]
1571 geboren, kam er schon in jungen Jahren nach Kreuzwertheim. Der Vater fuehrte zunaechst in Neubrunn ein Gasthaus, danach in Wertheim die alte Kette (im Hinterhaus der Bachschen Brauerei gelegen; nicht zu verwechseln mit dem Hotel-Gasthof am Tauberufer).
Midelfort, Erik H. C. Witch-Hunting in Southwestern Germany 1562-1684: The Social and Intellectual Foundations. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1972. Lowenstein-Wertheim: The Klein Boys Southwestern Germany experienced several witch hunts involving children. In the county of Lowenstein-Wertheim on Christmas Eve of 1628, thirteen citizens presented a petition urging an attack on witchcraft. These citizens believed that a particularly evil plague of maleficum was plaguing their county. Their most recent crisis involved "our dear children [who] even without this poison prefer evil over good" (Midelfort 139). The counts took the advice of the concerned citizens, and an investigation was ordered. Two boys, aged five and ten, were arrested. These boys were the sons of a chimney sweep named Barthol Klein. The children claimed they were witches, reluctantly supplying the names of other witches they had seen at the Sabbat. By the middle of February, fifteen people were known as accomplices. When the boys' grandmother was examined, she quickly confessed and thirty-three more people were denounced as witches. When she was questioned a second time, twenty-two more suspects were produced. By the end of February, there were at least eighty-six different people had been accused of witchcraft. The panic was intensified in March when more children claimed to have attended the Sabbat. In the village of Bettingen, nine children underwent examinations. "With so many suspects, it is surprising that only nine women and one man were executed during 1629. . . . The suspicions awakened in that year, however, poisoned Wertheim for 15 years; trials of persons first named in 1629 continued until 1644" (Midelfort 139, 140). In 1634, sixteen women were accused of witchcraft and executed in trials that involved schoolboys. Four boys were so very inficirt (infected) they were kept under lock and key in the hospital. There they were watched carefully by the schoolmaster, who denied the boys' claims they flew off to dances at night. However, examination of the boys led to more denunciations, including the accusations of ten more children. When the son of the rector of the Latin school was denounced, the upset father begged the magistrates "to rather do justice to the boy so that his soul may be healed, and so that I can be more certain of his eternal salvation" (Midelfort 142).
From http://www.carnell.com/elisabeth/medieval/crimen.html Elisabeth Carnell's website (she claims to be a "witch"): In Würtzburg, however, the Bishop Philipp Adolf (1623-1631) surpassed his cousin in both number (900 executed) and intensity. Surrounded by Jesuit policy advisors, Philipp Adolf began the persecutions that had, before his rise to the throne, been fairly sporadic. Like the mass denouncements at Bamberg, Würtzburg also saw a great many high-ranking officials and leading citizens executed, as a letter written by the chancellor to a friend illustrates: "It is true that many of the people of my Gracious Prince here, some out of all offices and faculties, must be executed: clerics, electoral councilors and doctors, city officials, court assessors, several of whom Your Grace knows. There are law students to be arrested. The Prince-Bishop has over forty students who are soon to be pastors, among them thirteen or fourteen are said to be witches. A few days ago a dean was arrested; two others who were summoned have fled. A notary of our cathedral consistory, a very learned man, was yesterday arrested and put to the torture. In a word, a third part of the city is surely involved." In addition to the denouncements against city's notables, leading personages and mayors from surrounding villages, and a large number of children were also accused. The chancellor went on to describe "children of three and fours years, to the number of three hundred, who are said to have had intercourse with the devil." He also lamented having seen children as young as seven executed along with even greater numbers of school-aged children aged 10-15. The horrors of the persecutions in Würtzburg did not begin to abate until the death of the Philipp Adolf's sole heir. Ernest von Ehrenberg, whose only crime may have been preferring a life of drink to his studies, was unknowingly denounced (by a Jesuit advisor of the Bishop), tried, and sentenced. Ernest was taken to the torture-chamber, whereupon seeing what awaited him was killed when he struggled against his captors. It appears that scholars have attempted to salvage the reputation of the Bishop by blaming the hysteria entirely upon his advisors, but the Bishop himself can clearly not be considered wholly blameless as to the horrors committed in his name. Some may argue that these areas were also small, non-centralized territories, therefore they were ripe for witch hunting: Gerhard Schormann points out that larger, centralized and absolutist states like the duchy of Württemburg were able to prevent trials or quickly deter their continuation, and Robert Walinski-Kiehl suggests that the witch-hunts represented an attempt by governments to impose their cultural norms over unapproved popular beliefs. Certainly a discussion of the sorts of political organization that call some areas into the throes of a pseudo-hysteria leaving the others able to ignore that particular siren song is useful to a point, suggesting why some soil was more fertile for the persecutions. The width and breadth of the influence of Jesuits, and Catholic teachings on witchcraft in general, however, as well as some of the timing of persecutions seem to address an issue of influence beyond political particularism, for as R. Po-Chia Hsia comments "it was no coincidence that the period of the most rapid expansion of the Society of Jesus in Westphalia overlapped with the height of witchcraft accusations and trials." Beyond the issue of the fertility of the soil is the issue of the seed itself and its origin. There was a massive body of works by ecclesiastical officials, including Jesuits, that supported the belief in witches, adhered to a doctrine of hunting them at any cost, and included procedures like the formats for questioning and the qualification of the use of torture. There were many authors in the fourteenth century like Nicholas Eymeric, the Grand Inquisitor of Aragon, who wrote treatises against heresy and demonology and a manual, the Directorium Inquisitorum, but their works would be encapsulated and brought to a wider audience by what has been called the witch-hunter's bible, the Malleus Maleficarum of Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, published in the late fifteenth century. This was a largely unoriginal work, but it served its purpose by pulling together the various and sundry witch belief and works of authors writing against witches in different geographical locations and organizing them in a clear and easily usable manner. Tracts against witches and outlining the inquisitorial procedures against them continued to multiply, including the Rerum Criminalium Praxis by the Flemish lawyer Josse Damhouder and Tractatus de Maleficiis attributed to doctors Alberti de Gandino, Bonifacii de Vitalianis, Pauli Grillandi, Baldi de Periglis and Jacobi de Area in the middle of the sixteenth century; juris consult Johann Zanger’s Tractatus de Quæstionibus seu Torturis Reorum, Nicolas Rèmy’s famed Dæmonolatreia and Jean Bodin’s de Magorum Dæmonum from the late sixteenth century; Henri Bouget’s Examen des Sorciers (approved by the rector of the Jesuit college at Besançon) and Jesuit Martin del Rio’s Magicarum Disquitorum from the early seventeenth. As the standard for setting clear guidelines for judicial action, especially espousing the use of torture to elicit confession and various preferred methods of execution, these works clarified previous thought and influenced future discourse (including that of Friedrich Spee, who refers frequently to the works of Damhouder, del Rio and the Malleus in particular in his refutation of their arguments). Judicial officials throughout Germany used torture as a matter of course. Both Continental and Roman law relieved those accused of witchcraft of any regular legal rights and their trials were bound by a methodology in which regular legal procedures had little place. Witchcraft was considered a crimen excepta, an exceptional crime, a grievous crime that involved dealings between the Devil and humans, treason against the Christian church. It was considered awkward to prove under normal circumstances and procedures; the Jesuit Martin del Rio allowed that torture was to be used in cases of witchcraft moreso than other crimes as witchcraft was so much more difficult to prove. Torture was intellectually justified by such authors as Bernardus Guidonis in his Practica Inquisitionis Heretice Pravitatis in the second decade of the fourteenth century and Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer in the Malleus Maleficarum. Later the works of Jean Bodin, Peter Binsfeld and Martin del Rio echoed it's virtues and necessity. From the early sixteenth century on, it was a standard consideration that a condemned witch could not be executed without a confession of guilt, and that confession should, in fact, be made under torture to be assured that it was wholly genuine. Martin del Rio asserted that to wash away the stain of infamy from a confession under the first torture, a second torture was necessary. There was no hard and fast rule of torture, but common convention combined with limits set by secular law were considered the established guidelines. Officials, however, could be found to often twist the definitions to allow excessive methods, such as the additional application of torture being referred to as a continuation rather than a repetition, as the law only allowed torture to be used three times without new proofs of guilt found. Allowances for physical condition, age (both to the very old and to the very young), and disability of the accused were supposed to have been taken into account, but the very young were not spared in many areas, such as Würtzburg. Pregnancy was also, as previously mentioned, to be considered counter-indicative to the use of torture - officials expected to wait until one month after the birth of the baby, according to Francisco Peña writing in 1584. In Bamberg, though, the pregnant wife of a Councilor was tortured and executed. While torture methods varied depending on the period, area, and executioner certain generalizations and understanding of standard procedures can be made. The usual first stage of torture was designed to force the accused to confess through threatening, stripping, whipping, terrifying the victim by taking them to the torture chamber and allowing them to see each instrument, such as the eye gouger, and learn its purpose (and the end result of its usage), and the use of thumbscrews. This usually ended with binding the accused in rope and tightening the ropes gradually, possibly in harmony with the rack, which would slowly stretch the body out. Once a confession was secured, however, the torture was not over for a witch was required to name accomplices since witchcraft was not considered a solitary crime. To this end strappado, binding the hands of the accused behind their back and hoisting them up with a rope tied to their wrists, was most commonly employed. Should this not extract enough information, a stronger version of strappado, squassation, would be used. This consisted of tying additional weights to the prisoner and whereupon the rope would be pulled and jerked sharply, completely dislocating hands, elbows and shoulders. While del Rio suggested that during torture the flesh and bones should remain unbroken, he admitted that it could hardly be considered appropriately administered without the dislocation of joints. Additional method of torture could be used for special offenses including cutting off limbs or any portion thereof, tearing the flesh with heated pincers or scalding water baths. Specific cases can be found that involve far more creative officials and far more excessive cruelties. Certainly torture was not the only method of extracting a confession, albeit it was the most successful. Methods that were not considered torture but were found useful included keeping the accused without sleep (popular in England), stretching the accused on the rack and using a vise to crush the legs. Johann Matthäus Meyfart made an account in 1635 describing how "the prisoners are fed only on salted food, and how their drink is mixed with herring pickle, and no drop of pure, unadulterated wine, beer, or water is allowed them, but a raging thirst is purposely kept up in them … but this cruel, raging, devouring thirst the inquisitors do not consider torture". The Malleus advised using deception to trick confessions out of otherwise uncooperative suspect, allowing the judges to promise a prisoner who named accomplices their life, but without disclosing that it will be lived out imprisoned on rations of bread and water. The text also continued, noting that "others think that, after she has been consigned to prison in this way, the promise to spare her life should be kept for a time, but that after a certain period she should be burned," or that "the Judge may safely promise the accused her life, but in such a way that he should afterwards disclaim the duty of passing sentence on her, deputing another Judge in his place." Martin del Rio, however, disavowed the outright lie, but suggested that equivocation and promises of a vague nature were perfectly acceptable, and any prisoner thus deceived should have been less gullible. Against these many horrors and in the face of the sheer enormity of the hysteria in Germany stood, ironically, a Jesuit: Friedrich von Spee. Spee was born in 1591 near Cologne, attended the Jesuit college there and entered the novitiate in 1611. He studied at Würtzburg and Mainz, two major centers of judicial activity against witches, the horrors of the former of which have already been described, before becoming a missionary preacher at Paderborn in 1624. Three years later he was back in Würtzburg as a professor, and acted as confessor to those accused of witchcraft through those darkest of days during the reign of prince-Bishop Philipp Adolf von Ehrenberg. As a witness to the procedures of the judicial authorities and the cruelty inflicted upon the vast numbers of those tried as witch-hunting hysteria spread wildly throughout Franconia and Westphalia, he drew his own conclusions both to the guilt of those accused and to the validity of methods and conflict of interest of those trying them. There is a record of a conversation that might ancedotally illustrate the profound effect this time in Würtzburg had between Spee and Johann Philip von Schönborn, who would later become the elector of Mainz, on why Spee's hair had turned entirely gray before he was forty. Spee's answer was that "it is regret that has turned by hair all gray, regret that I've had to accompany so many witches to the place of execution and among them I found not one who was not innocent."
Father: Johannes Hotz b: BET 1530 AND 1548 in prob Most, Württemberg Mother: Unknown
Marriage 1 Anna Schürer b: BET 1584 AND 1585 in Hochhausen, Württemberg Married: 13 DEC 1601 in prob Stiftskirche, Wertheim, Württemberg Children Jacob Hotz b: 1607 in Phila from Wertheim, Württemberg Philipp Hotz b: 1610 in prob Wertheim, Württemberg Jacob Hotz b: 19 MAY 1612 in Wertheim, Württemberg Philipp Jacob Hotz b: 11 OCT 1615 in Wertheim, Württemberg Margaretha Hotz b: 16 FEB 1616/17 in Wertheim, Württemberg Wolf Heinrich Hotz b: 7 JAN 1618/19 in Wertheim, Württemberg Michael Hotz b: 23 MAR 1620/21 in Wertheim, Württemberg Malpingis Hotz b: 26 JAN 1624/25 in Wertheim, Württemberg
Sources: Title: Wertheim Stiftskirche Repository: Note: Latter Day Saints Family History Center Call Number: 1238275-76 Media: Microfilm Page: LDS film #1238275 Baptism Title: "Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562-1684" Page: pg 142 Text: "Johann Hotz, aged 71, and his 57-year-old wife Anna." Title: Wertheim Jahrbuch 1938-39" Note: From the article: "Beitraege zur Geschichte des Hexenwesens in der Grafschaft Wertheim" (Contributions to the story of witches being in the Grafschaft Wertheim) Repository: Note: Grafschaft Museum, Wertheim, Germany & Wertheim Archives, Bronnbach, Germany Call Number: Media: Book Page: pg 23 Text: "man of the city who was 71 years old proprietor of the Kette Inn, Johann Hotz and his wife Anna, 57 years old, born in Hochhausen" Title: Wertheimer Zeitung Note: 1990's-2000's, editor Friedrich "Fritz" Lehmkuehler. Late September 1994, ran a 350th year anniversary story about the Johann & Anna Hotz witch trial and execution. Copy held by James H. Lawrence. Repository: Note: Wertheim, Germany Call Number: Media: Newspaper Page: Sept. 30, 1994 edition Text: "1571 geboren, kam er schon in jungen Jahren nach Kreuzwertheim. Der Vater fuehrte zunaechst in Neubrunn ein Gasthaus" (Neubrunn is located about 7 ½ miles East of Wertheim/There are 3 other Neubrunns in Germany) Title: Wertheim Stiftskirche Repository: Note: Latter Day Saints Family History Center Call Number: 1238275-76 Media: Microfilm Page: LDS film #1238274 Church narrative for 1633 pg 34 Text: Signed document; "Hanns Hotz" Title: Wertheim Jahrbuch 1938-39" Note: From the article: "Beitraege zur Geschichte des Hexenwesens in der Grafschaft Wertheim" (Contributions to the story of witches being in the Grafschaft Wertheim) Repository: Note: Grafschaft Museum, Wertheim, Germany & Wertheim Archives, Bronnbach, Germany Call Number: Media: Book Page: pg 23 Text: "Johann Hotz and his wife were arranged in 1644, after two-years of torment and were beheaded." Title: Wertheim Archives records Note: Behind the Lutheran Church in Bronnbach. Also LDS film 1045463: "Die Bürgerschaft der Stadt Wertheim am Main 1605 und 1640" Repository: Note: Bronnbach, Germany Call Number: Media: Manuscript Page: Court Records 1632-1644 Text: "Kettewirthe" Title: Wertheim Archives records Note: Behind the Lutheran Church in Bronnbach. Also LDS film 1045463: "Die Bürgerschaft der Stadt Wertheim am Main 1605 und 1640" Repository: Note: Bronnbach, Germany Call Number: Media: Manuscript Page: Court Records from 1632-1644 Text: "Kettewirthe" Title: Wertheim Archives records Note: Behind the Lutheran Church in Bronnbach. Also LDS film 1045463: "Die Bürgerschaft der Stadt Wertheim am Main 1605 und 1640" Repository: Note: Bronnbach, Germany Call Number: Media: Manuscript Page: Archivist's statement September 2002. Text: "After execution their bodies would have been put on public display or burnt. There would have been no burial." Title: Wertheim Archives records Note: Behind the Lutheran Church in Bronnbach. Also LDS film 1045463: "Die Bürgerschaft der Stadt Wertheim am Main 1605 und 1640" Repository: Note: Bronnbach, Germany Call Number: Media: Manuscript Page: "Die Bürgerschaft der Stadt Wertheim am Main 1605 und 1640" pg 5 Text: "Hotz, Wirte u. Metzger aus Most 1571, B. i. W."
More About Johannes Hotz and Anna Schurer: Marriage: 13 December 1601, Stiftskirche, Wertheim, Wurtemburg, Germany.
Johannes Hotz (b. 1571, d. 30 September 1644)
Notes for Johannes Hotz: