In 1672, the De Witt brothers were beaten, mutilated, and hanged before a crowd. It is even said that the people themselves committed an act of cannibalism with their severed body parts.

_{Tongue and finger of the De Witt brothers}

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Supporters of the De Witt brothers kept Johan’s tongue and a Cornelis’ finger as relics in lead boxes. It also contained documents explaining its contents. Based on these notes, we know that Nicolaas Witsen, mayor of Amsterdam, owned the relics between 1672 and 1717. In 1889 D.J. Cockuyt from Leiden gave the tongue, finger and the accompanying evidence to the museum. The then director had a “small coffin made of old oak wood, with a glass lid” made to display “these important historical objects”. Many museum visitors were shocked at the sight of this new acquisition. On October 23, 1893, the city council of The Hague banned the exhibition of the tongue and finger. Despite this, the body parts of the De Witt brothers have been on display in the gallery for the last thirty years.

In 2011, researchers from the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) determined that the alleged big toe of Cornelis’s left foot was a finger. On the television program ‘Historisch Bewijs’ (Historical Evidence), the tongue and finger were once again scrutinized, this time to investigate their authenticity. It was not possible to draw up a DNA profile with material from the tongue and finger, but it could be established that ‘the finger was forcibly removed from the body and belonged to a man between 40 and 50 in the year 1672’. This makes it a lot more likely that the body parts do indeed come from the brothers Johan and Cornelis de Witt.