From the Diary of Executioner Caspar Kruse III: Introduction: Blood, Justice, and Heritage – The Six Generations of Kruse as Executioners in Goslar

 When you walk through the narrow streets of old Goslar – with its half-timbered houses, glistening cobblestones, and the outline of the Rammelsberg in the distance – history presses in. Not with force, not with grandeur, but with weight. The city carries its memories in stone, and in silence. And somewhere beneath that silence lies the trace of my ancestors: the Kruse family, six generations of executioners of Goslar, servants of the law – and of conscience.

My search did not begin in the archives, but in my blood. In the questions that linger without anyone daring to speak them aloud: What does it mean to descend from an executioner? What does a man leave behind who, by order, struck off heads, and taught his children to wield the sword as others teach carpentry or the grinding of millstones? Was he a monster or an official? Was his hand devoid of conscience, or did he carry the weight of every stroke?

I decided to stop evading the past. Instead, I entered it. With historical sources, city archives, old maps, and above all: with patience. And what I found was more than a series of names and dates. I found a family moving along the razor’s edge between order and exclusion, between law and stigma. A family that safeguarded justice for those who demanded it – but never fully belonged to the community it served.

The Kruses began their path in Goslar with Caspar Kruse I, from Görlitz, who around 1600 took on the office of executioner. His son, Caspar II, succeeded him. And so it continued – from father to son – up to Johann Conrad Kruse, who still held the office in the mid-18th century. Six generations, more than a century and a half of executions, verdicts, autopsies, plague work, and above all: isolation.

For the life of an executioner was filled not only with blood, but with distance. Executioners often lived outside the city walls. They were avoided at markets, excluded from guilds, unwelcome in taverns unless alone. Their work was necessary – indispensable even – but their presence was too sharp a reminder of the frailty of every human body.

And yet there was pride. Pride in the precision of the craft, in the skill with which a sword was handled, in the fact that justice could be carried out without torture when it was not required. My forefathers bore the office not as murderers, but as servants of the city. And sometimes, I imagine, they must have asked themselves: who is truly guilty here – I who carry it out, or those who gave the command?

This blog was born from those questions, from that search. It is an attempt to do justice to a forgotten profession – and to the people who bore it. Not to glorify it, not to excuse it, but to make it human. I want to tell the story of the Kruses of Goslar: their work, their struggle, their silence – and what it means to still carry their name.




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