On your right is the spot where Bamberg once had one of its darkest addresses: the Drudenhaus. The name gets translated a few ways… “witch house,” “witch prison,” even “Malefizhaus,” basically a jail for “evil deeds.” Because nothing says “due process” like designing a whole building around a panic.
Here’s the unsettling part: you’re not looking at a preserved ruin. The Drudenhaus was built in 1627 and it was gone by the mid-1600s. But for a few years, this stretch of street was a purpose-built machine for accusing, imprisoning, and breaking people-men and women-suspected of witchcraft.
The timing matters. From 1626 to 1631, Bamberg went through its biggest and final wave of witch trials. Under the rule of Prince-Bishop Johann Georg II Fuchs von Dornheim, at least 642 people were swept up as victims. And this wasn’t only poor outsiders or “odd” neighbors. It reached straight into the city’s leadership-mayors, councilmen, even the prince-bishop’s own chancellor and his family. If you had status, it didn’t protect you… it just made your fall more dramatic.
Up until 1627, many interrogations and executions were centered outside the city, in Zeil am Main. People from Bamberg were literally carted there-imagine that jolt of wheels on ruts, the cold air, the crowd’s stare, and the awful certainty that you weren’t coming back. By the end of 1627, the machinery moved into Bamberg itself. That’s when the Drudenhaus becomes a main player. Between 1628 and 1631, 196 Bamberg citizens were jailed for witchcraft-most of them here.
We even know what it looked like, thanks to a detailed copper engraving from 1627 that the prince-bishop himself circulated. It showed the building and its floor plan like a proud real-estate brochure… for a prison. The plan reveals 26 single cells and two slightly larger ones-room for roughly 30 prisoners. Over the portal was a Latin line from Virgil: “Learn justice… and do not scorn the gods.” That’s a heavy slogan to hang above a doorway people entered in chains.
And nearby-close enough to hear, if you had the imagination and the misfortune-was a separate torture site, the “Peinliche Frag,” literally the painful questioning. It stood around where the street numbers nearby are today. The Drudenhaus itself was roughly around this section of Franz-Ludwig-Straße.
Paper trails survive, too. A “catalog” from April 1631 lists names, arrest dates, and even estimates of what each prisoner owned. It also tallies money seized from those “justified”-meaning condemned-at a minimum of 500,000 gulden, with some claims as high as 1.5 million. In today’s terms, you’re looking at something like tens of millions of dollars… and possibly far more. Accusations may have been spiritual, but the profits were very earthly.
Despite imperial orders to stop, releases didn’t come until panic changed sides: in February 1632, as Swedish troops approached during the Thirty Years’ War, the last prisoners were freed-but only after swearing an oath to keep quiet about what happened inside. Even freedom came with a gag order.
When you’re ready, the Natural History Museum is a 4-minute walk heading west.
