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What this episode is about
In the fall of 1589, the wealthy farmer Peter Stubbe was executed as a werewolf near Bedburg in the Rhineland. His case was printed all over Europe and still shapes how we picture the werewolf today. In this episode I show why the story doesn’t add up, and what a guest at the scaffold has to do with it.
A name that is a wound
Stubbe, Stumpp, Stumpf: the man appears under many spellings and was probably born around 1530 in Epprath near Bedburg. The parish registers burned in the Thirty Years’ War. One interpretation links the nickname “Stumpf” (stump) to a mutilated hand, which would match the severed wolf’s paw in the legend.
The wolf in the cornfield and the confession
After years of wolf attacks, men corner an animal in 1589 and find Stubbe in its place. Under threat of torture, he confesses: a belt from the Devil, 25 years of murder, fourteen children and two pregnant women, cannibalism, incest. The belt was never found. The list reads less like a description of crimes and more like a catalog of every crime imaginable.
The source
The most important source is the pamphlet The Damnable Life and Death of one Stubbe Peeter, London 1590, itself a translation of a lost German print. Montague Summers made it known again in the 20th century. The diary of the Cologne city councilor Hermann von Weinsberg independently confirms the execution.
What a werewolf really was
Rolf Schulte describes the werewolf as the male counterpart of the witch. Elmar Lorey shows that suspicion usually fell on people at the margins of society: newcomers, shepherds, outsiders. Peter Stubbe doesn’t fit this profile at all.
The detail that doesn’t fit
From 1583 to 1588 the Cologne War raged after Archbishop Gebhard Truchsess converted to Protestantism. Bedburg was right in the middle of it. In 1587 the castle fell to the Catholic Werner von Salm-Reifferscheidt-Dyck. Stubbe was very likely a Protestant, and the new archbishop and prince-elector himself is said to have watched his execution. Some researchers therefore see the trial as a thinly veiled political message. That is an interpretation, not proof.
Wheel, fire, stake
On October 31, 1589, Stubbe was broken on the wheel and beheaded. His daughter Beele and Katharina Trump died with him. His limbs were broken so that he couldn’t return from the grave, the same logic as with the Nachzehrer. A pole with the wheel, a wolf figure and his head was left standing as a warning.
Frequently asked questions
Who was Peter Stubbe?
A wealthy farmer from the area around Bedburg who was executed as a werewolf in 1589. His case is the best-known werewolf trial in Germany.
Was Peter Stubbe really a murderer?
There’s no way to settle that. The confession was made under threat of torture, and the political background of the Cologne War suggests that the trial was also meant to intimidate.
More in the lexicon: Werewolf.
About this episode
In the autumn of 1589, near Bedburg in the German Rhineland, a wealthy farmer is broken to death as a werewolf. His name: Peter Stubbe. His case was printed across Europe and shaped our image of the werewolf to this day. But the closer you look, the less the story adds up — right down to a guest at the scaffold who had no business being there. An investigation across the records, the pamphlet, and the war that explains it all.
📚 Sources & further reading (selection):
- “The Damnable Life and Death of one Stubbe Peeter,” London 1590 (trans. George Bores) – the central primary source; the German original print is lost.
- Diary of Hermann von Weinsberg, Cologne alderman – independent contemporary attestation.
- Woodcut/broadsheet attributed to Lukas Mayer (Nuremberg); engraving by Franz Hogenberg.
- Montague Summers, “The Werewolf” (1933) – reprint of the pamphlet, rediscovered 1920.
- Rolf Schulte, study of men in the witch trials (c. 2000) – the werewolf as the male counterpart to the witch.
- Elmar Lorey (1945–2019), research on early modern werewolf trials – the werewolf as an instrumentalised variant of the charge (elmar-lorey.de).
- On the political context: the Cologne / Truchsess War, 1583–1588.
⚠️ Note: Several details of this case (birth year, the reading of the name, the question of guilt, the political motive) are uncertain or scholarly interpretation.
#Werewolf #PeterStubbe #Bedburg #History #Folklore #WitchTrials #TrueCrime #Medieval #EarlyModern #Cologne