Katharina Henot ran the imperial post office in Cologne. In 1627 the city arrested her for witchcraft, ignored the highest court in the Holy Roman Empire when it ordered her released, and burned her. For 385 years her name stayed condemned.
The Horror
Henot was born around 1570, the daughter of the imperial postmaster Jakob Henot. After his death in November 1625 she and her brother Hartger took over the running of the post office. She was wealthy and well connected, in a city where such visibility could be dangerous.
Cologne was in the middle of the witch trials of 1626 to 1631. The charge against her was brought by a nun. Researchers who later examined the case found no evidence that she practised anything occult and judged that jealousy was the most likely motive. Ferdinand of Bavaria, the archbishop, ordered her arrest in early 1627.
She was tortured on at least three occasions and did not confess. The torture left her right hand useless, and she wrote a declaration of her innocence with her left. Her brother took the case to the Reichskammergericht, the imperial chamber court, which in April 1627 ordered that she be released. Cologne’s judges ignored the order.
She was condemned in May 1627. On 19 May she was paraded through the city and strangled, and her body was burned. One account places the burning in a square outside the city walls. She was one of 38 people executed for witchcraft in Cologne, among them three men, a teenage boy and an eight-year-old girl.
The Legend
Popular retellings name a particular convent, a particular sister and an infestation of caterpillars as the start of the accusations. Those details are unconfirmed. The same retellings give the execution ground as Melaten, where the city cemetery now lies, and that location is also unconfirmed.
The Modern Relic
Her brother later tried to clear her name and was himself accused of witchcraft, arrested in 1631 and eventually released when the case collapsed. The matter then lay until Hartmut Hegeler, a Protestant minister and religion teacher, had his students research the case. They found that Katharina Henot had never been formally acquitted. Hegeler asked Cologne to act, and in 2012 the city council passed a resolution clearing her.
A statue of Henot stands on the tower of the old town hall, beside one of Friedrich Spee, the Jesuit who published a critique of witch-hunting in 1631.
