Swedish Drink - Worst Punishments in the History of Mankind

"In conclusion, whether you’re being filled with liquid cow dung and human pee-pee, or whether you are being filled with good ole tap water, the result would be very painful, and if you kept being filled the outcome could easily be death."

- The Infographics Show

Swedish Drink - Worst Punishments in the History of Mankind is a video on the Infographics Show.

Synopsis
If anyone ever offers you a "Swedish Drink" at a bar, turn and run for your life! In today's video we're going to ruin your lunch with this horrific worst punishment in the history of mankind. This one is not for the squeamish so put down that sandwich and discover something you will never be able to forget.

Transcript
It’s the break of day in a small European village circa 1650. Amid the sound of chickens clucking and the distant moos of cows, a blacksmith’s hammer can be heard. A woman carries a pail of milk across the road, and as she stops to wipe the sweat from her face, she sees in the distance an approaching mass of ragged-looking men. Soon after, people are dragged screaming from their homes. Children’s cries fill the village. The marauders, savages without a modicum of morality, tie one man down to a wooden board.

His mouth is pulled open and a wedge is forced between his teeth. He’s asked one time to tell them where the money is hidden. The marauders hold a bucket of human waste over his head, a noxious mixture of urine and excrement. He’s about to taste the lethal Swedish Drink. You can only imagine what it would be like to be forced to swallow a bucket of pee and poop, but it seems that wasn’t the only thing used in this terrible punishment. If no human sewage was on hand, the drink might well have been boiling hot water or liquid manure. Whatever the case, as you’ll soon see, if enough of any mixture is forceokayfed to a human, the results can be horrifying. But before we get into the physical side of things, let’s have a look at where this particularly disgusting punishment came from.

It’s called the “Swedish Drink”, so it looks as though we can blame the Swedes for this one. This is apparently how it came to life. From 1618 to 1648 there was something called the “Thirty Years' War” in Europe, which while you might not have heard of it, was one of the deadliest wars in European history. It’s thought that as many as eight million people lost their lives, but the war itself is not something we’re going to discuss in detail today. All you need to know is that much of the war was fought in Germany, and for all manner of reasons, including commercial rivalries, religion, and territory, many countries were at each other’s throats. After it finished the map of Europe looked significantly different, with many nations gaining or having to concede territory.

Okay, so now the floor is set, you need to know that Sweden was one of the main countries involved. It amassed an army, but it also hired regular citizens as mercenaries. They weren’t exactly paid a lot, so part of the deal was that they got to raid villages and keep the spoils. They did so all over Germany, and at times used the method of torture talked about today to get what they wanted. The drink was actually given a German name, “Schwedentrunk” since it was German victims that suffered the ordeal and Swedish mercenaries that handed it out.

The problem was, often the most valuable things in a town or village were hidden, so the mercenaries invented this torture to get people to speak. Why they concocted the Swedish Drink and didn’t just chop off a few fingers we’ll never know… perhaps the drink put the fear of God in people, or the mercenaries just enjoyed the process. It’s more likely it just worked very well in extracting confessions.

It was indeed horrific, so it was something you’d think would get people talking before the first bits of the drink were administered. What was in the drink would change, but it was usually anything awful the mercenaries could get their hands on. That was human excrement, animal feces, sludge, urine, and generally anything else you wouldn’t want in your stomach. It goes without saying that swallowing a load of this stuff would not have been pleasant, but then there were bacterial infections to think about on top of the nasty experience itself. You also have to think about what would happen if they just kept pouring? Would a person internally explode?

Before we get to that you need to know that word on the street says once the person was significantly bloated, the mercenaries would then start doing things like walking over the victims’ distended bellies. They’d be prodded with sticks, punched, and according to some sources, have their stomach pressed at each side with wooden boards. The pain of that was of course excruciating, but it’s best we don’t go any further until we hear some real-life accounts of the Swedish Drink. Oh, and so as not to upset our Swedish viewers, while the torture is eponymous with Sweden, it seems many different armies and their mercenaries did it.

One man that was around in those days was the German writer, Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen. This is how he described a working model of the Swedish Drink: “They laid the servant tied on the ground, stuck a plywood in his mouth, and poured a milk bucket full of nasty dung-pool water into his body, which they called a Swedish trunk.” Then there was a man named Peter Thiele – no relation to the investor. He described an event in the German town of Beelitz in which a man was tortured this way. It went like this. “The robbers and murderers took hold of the poor people by their throats, stirred water, then poured it in, and yes, probably people’s feces. The people were miserably tormented for money, like the one citizen in Beelitz, called David Örtel, and soon he died of it.”

It was these few accounts that made the Swedish Drink a talking point in Europe, but you have to wonder just how common it was. Remember that punishments of the past were sometimes exaggerated as a means to make the other side look like savages, less than human, which has always been a go-to kind of propaganda. Nonetheless, it’s very likely there was such a thing as the Swedish Drink and it’s very likely people died from it. We say that because there’s lots of evidence of a punishment called the “Water Cure.” It was similar, but different.

As for the word ‘cure’, that was American forces being ironic, since it was far from being a cure. This time the drink in some cases might have just been water, not the worst thing someone could drink. Although the punishment would consist of forcing a person’s mouth open and via a funnel, pouring in large amounts of water. The person would fill up, which was painful enough if not deadly, and if they puked, it would begin again.

We now have to look at something that was called the “Amboyna massacre.” It happened on the Ambon Island in Indonesia in 1623. The victims were English East India Company employees, as well as Japanese and Portuguese traders. The perpetrators were people working for the Dutch East India Company. It seems there was a conspiracy between the English, Japanese and Portuguese to take out the Dutch so once they were captured they were tortured.

This is how the torture was described: “They poured the water softly upon his head until the cloth was full, up to the mouth and nostrils, and somewhat higher; so that he could not draw breath, but he must suck in the water: which being still continued to be poured in softly, forced all his inward parts, come out of his nose, ears, eyes, and often as it was stifling and choking him, at length took away his breath, and brought him to a swoon or fainting.” This action was repeated several times. It sounds a lot like extreme waterboarding, although the person was pretty much filled up rather than given the occasional break. According to that same writer, the victim was two or three times bigger in the belly when the torturers were done.

Over in France at around the same time the English were being waterboarded by the Dutch, the French had a torture method called “The Questioning.” This basically meant having eight pints of water (3.6 liters) forced by way of a funnel into a person’s mouth. If that didn’t work to make the person spill the beans, the French had the “Extraordinary Question” which was exactly double the amount of water. As you’ll soon see, this could be lethal for many reasons.

The inquisitors of Spain weren’t averse to using water as a kind of punishment, either. We know this because a Scottish guy named William Lithgow wrote about his experience in a book published in 1632. He said the inquisitors wedged an iron prong into his mouth. The Spanish called this a “bostezo.” Lithgow had also been starved first. His description was this: “My hunger-clunged belly waxing great, grew drum-like imbolstered: for it being a suffocating pain…my throat with a struggling force; it strangled and swallowed up my breath from yowling and groaning.” Yeah, the language is a bit dated, but you get the point.

Then came the American military, which was a proponent of the water cure during the Philippine–American War. President Theodore Roosevelt once called it a “mild torture”, but quickly changed his mind after a fact-finding mission. He then court-martialed an American general who refused to comply with his order to end the torture. There was also an official report that said, “A soldier who was with General Funston had stated that he helped to administer the water cure to one hundred and sixty natives, all but twenty-six of whom died.” It could hardly have been mild. it was also written about in detail by Lieutenant Grover Flint. He said a Filipino prisoner would be forced on his back and held down by a bunch of men. His jaw was then held wide open and secured, after which water was poured down his throat until he became unconscious.

In a book written by US author and activist Sidney Lens, he said that a reporter from the New York Evening Post saw such torture. He said that water just kept being poured until the man’s body was “an object frightful to contemplate.” The victim was then jumped on until the water made its way out, and there was a rinse and repeat routine until the person either talked or died. The question is, whether just water or a bucket of watery poop, just how much would kill a person?

A US pathologist noted in one article that the average human stomach is good with about one and a half liters of water, and three liters is a pretty big fill. However, six liters of water could rupture the stomach. Most people of course wouldn’t even try to drink that much, but when you’re tied to a piece of wood and have a wedge in your mouth you don’t really have much choice. The pathologist said that the walls of the stomach in such a torture would be under so much pressure that the tissue would get weaker until it tore. The content of the stomach would then enter parts of the body, causing incredible pain and probably infection. This is likely the point of no return. There’s also another great risk of being forced to drink lots of water. It’s called water intoxication, and it has killed many people who drank a lot of water of their own accord.

It happened to a 28-year-old California woman in 2007 after she drank six liters of water in a competition to win a Nintendo game console. She threw up, got a searing headache later, and then died. It happened in 2005, too, also in the US. A student at California State University was involved in some kind of hazing ritual which involved him drinking lots and lots of water. It even famously happened to a British raver back in the day because she’d heard you could get dehydrated after taking ecstasy. She died from excessive water consumption after downing seven liters. The tabloids demonized the E, but it was the drink that did it. People have also died from drinking too much after exercising.

In all, water isn’t toxic, but it can be if you go overboard with drinking it. We don’t mean to scare anyone away from drinking water. You really have to drink ridiculous amounts of the stuff in a short period of time. In laymen’s terms, drinking that much will prevent the kidneys from working as they should and the person’s body for all intents and purposes will become waterlogged. The cells swell, and as they can’t really do that too much in the brain, the next step could be seizure, followed by coma, with death around the corner.

In conclusion, whether you’re being filled with liquid cow dung and human pee-pee, or whether you are being filled with good ole tap water, the result would be very painful, and if you kept being filled the outcome could easily be death.