On this date in 1885, anarchists August Reinsdorf and Emil Küchler were guillotined for a failed attempt on the life of Kaiser Wilhelm I.
The King of Prussia turned Emperor of the newborn (in 1871) Deutsches Reich, Wilhelm was honored by assassins equal in enthusiasm to his distinctive whiskers.* The versions distinguished by this post had the cheek to contemplate exploding the Kartätschenprinz** just as he ceremonially inaugurated an important national monument.
The day was wet, and the dynamite fizzled. Everybody departed none the wiser but police spies later caught wind of the attempt, apparently when the would-be bombers Emil Küchler and Franz Reinhold Rupsch asked reimbursement from leftist typesetter August Reinsdorf, the plot’s mastermind.
Eight were eventually rounded up, secretly at first but later publicized to the prejudice of leftist parties.
Reinsdorf, Küchler and Rupsch all received death sentences; Rupsch’s was commuted in consideration of his youth.
The workers build palaces and live in miserable huts; they produce everything and maintain the whole machinery of state, and yet nothing is done for them; they produce all industrial products, and yet they have little and bad to eat; they are always a despised, raw and superstitious mass of servile minds. Everything the state does tends toward perpetuating these conditions forever. The upper ten thousand rest on the shoulders of the great mass. Is this really going to last? Is not a change our duty? Shall we keep our hands in our laps forever?
-Reinsdorf at trial
* We have in these pages already met one such predecessor who went under the fallbeil in 1878; the zeal of such men had given the Reich pretext to ban the Social Democrats.
** “Prince of Grapeshot”, a bygone nickname that paid derisive tribute to Wilhelm’s mailed fist in the Revolutions of 1848.
On this day..
- 1935: David Maskill Blake, wedding's eve murderer
- 1391: Agnese Visconti and Antonio da Scandiano, adulterous lovers?
- 1940: Peter Barnes and James McCormack, the last IRA men hanged
- 1896: Benjamin Ratcliff, school shooter
- 1545: Cornelis Appelman and Willem Zeylmaker, Batenburgers
- 1931: The Longhua Martyrs and the Five Martyrs of the League of Left-Wing Writers
- 1902: Privates Edmond Dubose and Lewis Russell, deserters to the Philippine Resistance
- 1579: Thomas Sherwood, Catholic martyr
- 1714: Various rebel slaves in the Cape Colony
- 1852: Martin Merino, Jesuit assassin
- 1920: The White Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak
- 1868: Susan, a 13-year-old