On this date in 1723, Hermann Christian von Wolffradt was beheaded by the German duchy of Mecklenburg which he had long served as a minister of state.

Pomerania, the territorial strip along the south of the Baltic Sea,* has often been divided in its history — as it is now (between Germany and Poland) and as it was then (between Sweden and the emerging Prussian empire — with Mecklenburg-Schwerin still an independent principality destined eventually to be subsumed into Prussia/Germany). Various products of the noble Wolffradt house lived and served the different realms that planted flags in Pomerania; our man’s father, also named Hermann von Wolffradt, was chancellor of Swedish Pomerania.**

Our Hermann Christian was a chip off the old block, but since he got a slice of the patrimony on the Prussian side, he climbed the ranks of the Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin.

He was a fixture in the court of Duke Friedrich Wilhelm I (not to be confused with his contemporary Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia, Frederick the Great’s severe father). But Wolffradt’s relationship with Friedrich Wilhelm’s son and successor, Karl Leopold, proved to be a strained one even as Wolffradt reached the position of Chancellor in 1721. This was no great distinction, as Karl Leopold’s relations were rocky with just about everyone; he called in Russian troops to beef with the Swedes, and so alienated the Mecklenburg estates that by 1728 the Holy Roman Emperor had him deposed.

Karl Leopold might have first suspected his chancellor — whose wife was incidentally also Karl Leopold’s mistress — of conniving with the duchy’s knights against him in the 1710s. By 1721 the duke was on his guard against his minister once more, and contrived to convict him of disloyalty and have him beheaded at Dömitz.

* Its name derives from the Slavic “po more” — “by the sea”.

** And our executed Hermann’s younger brother Carl Gustav von Wolffradt was a general in the Swedish army, while Carl’s most notable son was Erich Magnus von Wolffradt, a Prussian general.

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