Thiess of Kaltenbrun

At the time in his eighties, Thiess openly proclaimed himself to be a werewolf (wahrwolff), claiming that he ventured into Hell with other werewolves in order to do battle with the Devil and his witches.

In his book The Night Battles (1966), the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg compared Thiess' practices to those of the benandanti of northeastern Italy, and argued that they represented a survival of pre-Christian shamanic beliefs.

[1][2] Thiess proceeded to offer them an account of lycanthropy that differed significantly from the traditional view of the werewolf then prevalent in northern Germany and the Baltic countries.

According to the story that he had then told, he had travelled down to Hell as a wolf, where the farmer, who was a practicing Satanic witch, had beat him on the nose with a broomstick decorated with horses' tails.

[1] This time, the judges of Jürgensburg decided to take his claims more seriously, and trying to establish if he was mad or sane, they asked several individuals in the court who knew Thiess if he was of sound mind.

[2][3] He told them of how the previous year he had traveled to Hell as a werewolf, and that he had managed to carry as much barley, oats and rye as he could away back to Earth in order to ensure a bountiful harvest.

[8] According to Dutch historian Willem de Blécourt, Thiess' case was first brought to the attention of English-speaking scholars by the German anthropologist Hans Peter Duerr (1943–) in his book Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization (1978, English translation 1985).

[9] Duerr briefly discussed the Livonian werewolf in a chapter of Dreamtime entitled "Wild Women and Werewolves" in which he dealt with various European folk traditions in which individuals broke social taboos and made mischief in public, arguing that they represented a battle between the forces of chaos and order.

[3] The Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg (1939–) discussed the case of the Livonian werewolf in his book The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1966, English translation 1983).

Ginzburg believed that there were definite similarities between the benandanti and the case of Thiess, noting that both contained "battles waged by means of sticks and blows, enacted on certain nights to secure the fertility of fields, minutely and concretely described.

Dutch historian Willem de Blécourt noted that in Dreamtime, the German anthropologist Hans Peter Duerr had refrained from making an explicit link between shamans and werewolves, although he did acknowledge the similarities between Thiess and the benandanti.