1952: Wolfgang Kaiser
September 6th, 2016 Headsman
On this date in 1952, chemistry student Wolfgang Kaiser was guillotined at Dresden as a saboteur.
Back in the years before the Berlin Wall closed East Berlin the Communist half-city’s accessibility to its NATO-aligned western half constantly nettled the security state.
Our man Wolfgang Kaiser (English Wikipedia entry | German) lived in West Berlin but studied in East Berlin — or he did until he lost the spot when trying and failing to transfer to a West Berlin university.
That left Kaiser plenty of time on his hand to vent his political disaffection by working for the anti-communist resistance organization Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit — the “Combat Group Against Inhumanity”. When all was said and done, inhumanity got the best of its combat with Kaiser.
His chemistry background was a welcome skill set for the KgU activists, who put Kaiser to work building fuses for balloons that rained anti-Soviet propaganda leaflets in the east, as well as putting together incendiaries and the like with which to perpetrate nuisance-level harassment. The Stasi had him under surveillance immediately, although his old college buddy was such an amateurish snoop that he flat-out told Kaiser that he was watching him for the East Germans.
Eventually, however, that buddy persuaded Kaiser to turn himself in and become a collaborator himself — with a chance to resume his university career as one of the plums. Instead Kaiser found himself charged up as a saboteur “endangering the peace of the world.” The young man’s fighting spirit was also sabotaged by some sort of misleading representations made to him in his detention, because he entered the show trial believing it to be exactly that: just a show. So mistakenly confident was he that his death sentence was strictly ceremonial that he reportedly bragged about his penthouse accommodations behind bars.
On this day..
- 1917: Sgt. John Wall, Passchendaele casualty - 2020
- 1751: James Welch and Thomas Jones, the right guys this time - 2019
- 1678: Five at Tyburn - 2018
- 1594: Thomas Merry and Rachel Merry, lamentable tragedie - 2017
- 1943: Michal Kruk, Przemysl Pole who aided the Jews - 2015
- 1771: Matthias Klostermayr, the Bavarian Hiasl - 2014
- 1833: Antoine LeBlanc, billfolded - 2013
- 1707: Pierre Fatio, Genevan Gracchus - 2012
- 1811: John Andrews, whisky man - 2011
- 1635: Francisco de Nava, precipitating a church-state conflict - 2010
- 2006: 27 at Abu Ghraib Prison - 2009
- 1872: Patrick Morrissey, by a future U.S. president - 2008
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Beheaded,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,East Germany,Execution,Germany,Guillotine,History,Terrorists
Tags: 1950s, 1952, berlin, cold war, communism, dresden, east berlin, september 6, show trial, stasi, wolfgang kaiser
