On October 23, 1770, a stray swine crossed the boundary between adjacent gardens and strayed onto the property of Frau Schramm. Recognizing the beast as belonging to her neighbor, the widow Hoffmann, she assumed the woman had gone to dig potatoes in the fields. Yet the window shutters of the neighboring cottage remained fast. Frau Schramm was not content to leave the matter at that: she dispatched the wife of the huntsman Otte to summon the eldest boy so that he might drive the pig home. Otte stepped over the fence, entered the dwelling, and burst back out into the open air with cries of terror. A bloodied hand hung limp from the bed. Schramm hurried to the scene; the house no longer answered to the ordinary rhythms of the neighborhood. Four bodies were discovered: the widow and her three young children.
More than half a century after the events, the Neue Pitaval offered a retrospective account of the crime, situated in Neubrandenburg, within the Duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. The compilation reproduces interrogations and an official report of the execution, yet it does not supersede the original case file. Its title announces a "robbery-murder"; it remained for the judicial inquiry to establish who had crossed that threshold, and to what purpose.
Margarethe Elisabeth Hoffmann, her eight-year-old son, her three-year-old daughter, and her one-year-old infant had all been slaughtered in their beds. The chapter notes that the examining surgeons counted seventy distinct wounds. The posture of the corpses and the disarray of the bedding led the magistrates to conclude that the family had been taken entirely by surprise in the dead of night.
The widow of a journeyman papermaker, Hoffmann tended her small garden and kept a modest public house. No sign of forced entry could be detected; the keys to the house and to several chests were missing. An axe belonging to the household was discovered near the bed, wiped clean. The inquiry soon turned toward a woman who had recently been observed lingering in the vicinity.
A Bundle by the Wayside
Following the depositions of Schramm and Otte, the investigators questioned Klähn, a young maidservant who had spent nearly two years in Hoffmann’s employ. Having left service only a few days prior, she recalled a stout, poorly clad woman who had frequented her former mistress’s hearth for several weeks, claiming to have lost all her worldly goods in a conflagration at Sulz. She had occasionally slept under the roof for several nights running; moreover, she was well aware that Klähn was about to depart.
Klähn added that shortly before the murder, Hoffmann had refused lodging to two men—one wearing the uniform of a hussar—and three women. She gave, furthermore, a precise description of the visitor’s clothing: a striped skirt, a newly made bodice, a dark cap, a blue apron, and a red-checkered neckerchief. The magistracy promptly circulated this physical description.
A shoemaker named Appel soon discovered, near the town gates, a bundle wrapped in a blue apron, with a straw hat lying alongside it. It contained domestic linen, various articles of clothing, and lengths of cloth. Several townspeople positively identified the linens as Hoffmann’s property; a stained dark bonnet and a torn handkerchief were attributed to the woman described by Klähn. The correspondence was striking, yet it could not explain on its own how these diverse objects had come to be assembled. The bundle bore no label proclaiming the name of its owner; it was necessary to piece together the recollections of neighbors, the maid’s testimony, and the identification of the fabrics. Thus did a trail take shape: not through the sudden revelation of a self-evident clue, but through the patient accumulation of circumstance.
On October 24, warrants and notices were dispatched to neighboring towns. Following the funeral, the burgomaster of Friedland communicated an important piece of intelligence: a woman answering the description had procured a change of clothing there. Two magistrates set out on horseback. A local tailor confirmed that he had fashioned a new bodice, cap, and apron for a passing traveler; she had also purchased stockings and announced her departure for Anklam, where her husband served as a Prussian grenadier.
While the search expanded into neighboring jurisdictions, the town accompanied the dead to their rest. On October 26, according to the chronicle, the mother and infant were laid in one coffin, the two elder children in a second. The civic guilds provided the funeral palls; schoolboys sang, after which the pastor delivered the funeral sermon. The solemn procession traversed the marketplace, followed by the magistracy, the burghers, and a great concourse of townspeople. The funeral bore witness to the breadth of the community’s grief; soon, those very ties of neighborhood and craft would serve to speed the circulation of evidence.
On the morning of October 28, the pursuers came upon the woman in Anklam, quartered in a soldier’s lodging. The military commandant ordered her arrest; the two delegates formally requested that the prisoner be delivered into the custody of the Neubrandenburg authorities. She was transferred on October 30. From Friedland to Anklam, the convergence of clues had brought the pursuers to this solitary woman; it now fell to the law to hear her account.
Three Tales, One Confession
The prisoner was roughly forty years of age and was named Dorothea Götterich. Born in Stavenhagen, the daughter of a shoemaker, she had lost both parents in early childhood and had grown up in domestic service. Married in 1756 to a Swedish artilleryman, she followed his fortunes until he deserted to Anklam in 1768 to enlist in the Prussian service. He subsequently accused his wife of seeking to entice him back into Swedish ranks, and she was banished from the town. Thenceforth, the couple lived apart.
Götterich had previously suffered punishment for petty theft, and the chronicle portrays her as wandering aimlessly through Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Yet the historian has no right to convert this precarious, unsettled existence into a ready-made explanation for murder. The record establishes only that she was familiar with the Hoffmann household, had lodged there at times, and knew full well that the widow and her babes dwelt alone.
Upon her first formal examination, she confessed to having committed the butchery single-handed. Shortly thereafter, she recanted this admission, laying the blame upon two Swedish deserters and claiming that she had merely kept watch at the threshold. This accusation did not long survive scrutiny within her own narrative: she withdrew it and once again admitted that she had acted alone. The chapter states that she maintained this version steadfastly until the close of the judicial inquiry. Yet one must distinguish between a recorded confession and independently corroborated fact. No original minute or independent transcript was consulted here, and the narrative provides no direct eyewitness to the nocturnal scene. The neighboring women and the shoemaker attest to encounters, garments, a wayside bundle, and a flight; they were not witnesses to the slaughter. The chronicle leads the reader from circumstantial clues to confession, but these two orders of evidence do not carry the same legal or historical weight.
In the reported confession, money introduces the question of motive. Götterich stated that she had observed Hoffmann bring forth a bag filled with gold and silver coins. She herself possessed but two thalers; she wished to purchase new attire and hoped that a more substantial sum might effect a reconciliation with her estranged husband. An initial attempt to lay hands on the hoard supposedly failed when a stair creaked and the infant cried out. The widow stirred; Götterich, according to her reported words, stole back to her pallet. These intimate details reach us solely through the confession as set in type by the compiler.
Pursuing this same declaration, she stated that she seized an axe, hesitated, and offered up a prayer before striking down Hoffmann and the children, subsequently carrying off the coins and apparel. We possess no independent testimony of these terrible moments, but only the confession as transmitted by the printed volume. Interrogated regarding other violent robberies, she steadfastly denied them.
The Sentence and the Report
The judicial inquiry concluded in November. On the 28th of that month, the defense presented its memorial, offering a markedly different interpretation of the accused: an orphaned childhood, the absence of religious instruction, marital abandonment, and extreme destitution were urged in plea for clemency. Her advocate represented the confession as voluntary and the plunder as modest and partially recovered. These arguments are summarized in the chapter; while they could not negate the material acts alleged by the prosecution, they sought to mitigate the severity of the ultimate penalty.
The judges rejoined that she had indeed received Christian instruction and had already undergone punishment for theft. Her confession was not, in their eyes, spontaneous, since she had initially cast the blame upon others. They handed down the sentence of breaking upon the wheel for robbery with murder, debated the added aggravation of tearing with red-hot pincers, and ultimately settled upon what they deemed the less rigorous form of the execution. The sovereign confirmed the sentence prior to its enforcement. The selection of the penalty was dictated not solely by the taking of life: the decree treated the plurality of victims as an aggravating circumstance, while nevertheless dispensing with the supplementary torture of the pincers. This juridical debate is recorded in the pious and moralizing language of the era, telling us quite as much about the institution itself as about the condemned woman.
On December 19, in the public marketplace, the sentence was pronounced anew. The protocol preserved in the Pitaval put three formal questions to her: had she slain Hoffmann and the three children during the night of October 22 to 23? Had she done so to possess herself of money and other goods? Had she carried off what she found? To each question, her reported reply was affirmative. This remains the official account of the court protocol as transmitted by the compiler, and not an archival minute directly inspected by modern hands.
The chapter then transcribes a report drawn up by the clerk of the court, recording the civic preparations, the assembled guilds, the thronging populace, and the solemn progress to the scaffold. The execution did not bring a swift end to Götterich’s life. The report notes that, faced with ineffective blows and prolonged agony, the presiding magistrates commanded the executioner to employ a nail to consummate the death. This administrative precision serves as a grim historical testimony to the public justice of the eighteenth century, rather than an exhibition to be needlessly dwelt upon.
Thus closes the sequence of events chosen by the compiler: shuttered casements that arouse neighborly disquiet, garments gathered in a bundle that direct the pursuit, an arrest leading to shifting declarations, and a court pronouncing the capital decree. On December 19, according to the transcribed report, the sentence was carried out before the multitude. Yet this formal conclusion does not efface the historical distance separating us from the affair. We read an 1863 compilation, derived from legal instruments and an official report, not the complete trial dossier; the statements attributed to Götterich remain those that this specific text chose to preserve. The opening scene remains suspended upon a mundane act of rural life: a wandering beast had nudged open a garden gate, and behind it unfolded an inquiry of which the printed chronicle has bequeathed us only a partial view.