The Diary of Caspar Kruse III, Executioner: Goslar, January 9, 1640 – The Miller

 Four nights ago it had snowed — not soft, silent snow, but sharp, uneven flakes that gathered between the cobblestones and in the folds of my cloak. The city smelled of wood smoke and ice. People no longer spoke of hunger aloud, but it was felt in everything: in the empty market stalls, the thin winter soups, the red noses of children with worn-out shoes. There was no flour. Barely any beer. Even the rats seemed unwilling to leave their holes.

And then they brought Sigebert Meurer.
A miller. A strong man, broad-shouldered, with calluses like leather on his palms. His mill stood by the water near the southern rampart, and for months there had been whispers that his sacks were fuller than he admitted. Rumors said he had hidden grain while others buried their children. That he sold flour to soldiers outside the gate. That his wife wore new shoes.
I believed nothing without proof.
But the Council needed a reason for confiscation. They did not seek vengeance, but possession. Land. Storage. They wanted confession — nothing more. No trial. No justice. Only the word yes under the right conditions.

He was brought in at dawn. His feet were blue from the cold. His lip was split from the blow he had received on the wagon ramp. I asked him why he would not declare what he knew.
He answered:
“I know only what hunger is.”

I ordered him to be chained. The iron links closed around his wrists, rough from mill work. Bastian and Jörg hoisted him up on the wheel we had set up inside the Ulrich Chapel since autumn. The peasants called it the Span of Goslar — a simple wooden wheel fixed to a horizontal beam, where a man could hang until his bones began to speak.

He did not scream at first. His breath came heavy. I saw the tendons in his neck tremble. After a few minutes, his body began to twitch — reflexes of muscles that refused to yield their place.
Then it came.
A dull crack — the shoulder popped from its socket. He bellowed like an ox at slaughter. And then he cried:
“I did it for my children!”
He wept — not with the angry tears of a man, but with the raw, broken sobs of a child. His head hung low, his mouth open in pain. And I felt something shift within me. Something old. Something I had thought long buried.
But I could not stop. I had no order to stop.

After ten minutes, I let him down. He lay like a corpse on the floor. His right arm hung limp at his side, like an empty sleeve. I knelt beside him, placed my hand on his chest, and asked:
“Did you hide grain?”
He nodded.
“Where?”
He named a place beneath the mill floor, in the third storage room.
I looked at him.
“Are there witnesses?”
He shook his head.
I wrote on the parchment: Confession obtained.
But I did not add: under pain.
I do not think anyone asked.

Today was the execution.
They did not choose the sword.
The Council, in its zeal, wished to make an example.
“For the people,” said Mayor Cramer, “who starve for the bread he stole.”
They chose the gallows.

The High Court lay white under the snow. The wind cut across the field, yet the people came. A hundred or so, silent. No jeers, no hisses. Only silence. For they all knew him. Meurer had milled their grain, carried their sacks, greeted their wives at the well.
And now he hung there.
His arm, still dislocated, was tied tight. He could scarcely move when the noose was placed around his neck. I stood at the foot of the ladder and looked up.
“Have you any last words?” asked the preacher.
He looked at the people.
“Care for my own,” he said. “And do not forget who kept you empty.”
Then Bastian struck the support away.
His neck did not break at once. He struggled, twitched. Only after a minute and a half did it grow still.

I signed the record.

At home – that night
I dreamed of millstones. Of children with outstretched hands. Of a man raising his arm, but with no hand at the end.
I awoke with my own voice caught in my throat: “I did it for my children.”
I wrote it down.
And I added:
“I understood him.”