She was at most sixteen years old. 557 questions would decide if she lived or died.
Maria Pauer was working as a servant in the household of the smith Jakob Altinger in Mühldorf Austria when strange disturbances began to be reported around her. Witnesses claimed that hammers, iron balls, weights and pieces of furniture moved or flew through the house without explanation. There were noises and falling objects. Maria's lack of fear began to count against her. While the others panicked, she had laughed.
The authorities noticed.
On 27 January 1749 Maria was arrested and taken to the town hall at Mühldorf, where she was confined in a cell known as the Keuche, later remembered as the Hexenkammer, the witches' chamber. It was completely dark and could not be heated. The food was poor, the conditions filthy, and the girl became increasingly confused and apathetic during the months she spent there.
Then came the questioning.
Maria was presented with a catalogue of 557 questions, and they were not simply concerned with what had happened in the smith's house. The interrogators began to place before her the entire machinery of traditional witchcraft belief. Had she travelled through the air? Had she attended witches' gatherings? Had she given herself to the Devil? Had she desecrated the consecrated host? Had she made a pact with evil?
In Mühldorf she was questioned without torture. That did not make it gentle. From 28 January until 27 March 1749 she remained in cold, filthy confinement. Again and again they came back to one question: why had she laughed instead of being afraid? A denial did not end the matter. It produced another question. A contradiction did not weaken the prosecution. It became another reason to continue.
The original mystery had been simple enough: strange noises and moving objects in a smith's house. By the time the interrogators were finished, the case had expanded into flights through the air, witches' gatherings, sacrilege and the Devil. On the night of 31 March 1749 the town official took her to Salzburg, where the higher court had the authority to impose a death sentence.
The questioning began again in April.
She confessed and by the end she believed that she was guilty. The interrogators kept asking who else had taken part, and the case eventually reached her own mother. Anna Maria Zötlin was a forty-eight-year-old rope-maker's daughter from Neumarkt. She was questioned at Landshut and named another woman, Liesel Gusterer. Both women were executed swiftly in 1749. Maria's case continued.
By the time Maria's own case reached its conclusion, the events in the smith's house had almost disappeared beneath the much larger story constructed around them. On 10 September 1750 the Salzburg court found her guilty and sentenced her to death by the sword, with her body to be burned afterwards. A request for mercy was rejected by Archbishop Andreas Jakob von Dietrichstein.
Maria Pauer was executed in Salzburg on 6 October 1750, still only around sixteen or seventeen years old.
More than two and a half centuries later, Salzburg returned to the story. In 2009 Archbishop Alois Kothgasser publicly described Maria Pauer's prosecution as a judicial murder and a dreadful crime, and asked forgiveness for what had been done.
It had taken 259 years for an archbishop of Salzburg to say what the court that condemned her would not.
