“Professional killers like Frantz Schmidt have long been feared, despised, and even pitied, but rarely considered as genuine individuals, capable - or worthy - of being known to posterity,” Harrington tells us in the book’s opening pages, as Schmidt subjects a “penitent counterfeiter” to the prescribed punishment of being burned alive. Harrington addresses this conundrum with remarkable skill in his fascinating exploration of the life and times of a 16th-century executioner named Frantz Schmidt, who practiced his “odious craft” for more than 40 years at Nuremberg, of all places. “It is the job of thinking people,” Albert Camus once observed, “not to be on the side of the executioners.” But what are we to do when the executioner is himself a thinking person? Joel F.
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