The Third Reich on this date in 1938 guillotined two civilians as French spies.
Seventy-one-year-old merchant Ludwig Maringer had sent French intelligence notes on German industrial production and armaments factories from Berlin.
Thirty-nine-year-old Marie Catherine Kneup had turned mole from the advantageous position of domestic in the household of a German spy.
The latter case specifically — both the execution of Marie Catherine and the prison sentence given her husband Albert — is the subject of the German-language novel Spatzenkirschen.
On this day..
- 1989: Moises Giroldi, Panamanian general
- 1578: Jacob Hessels, "to the gallows, to the gallows!"
- 1564: Fabricius
- 1793: The slave Nell
- 1872: John Barclay
- 1925: Shi Congbin, grievance
- 1648: Alice Bishop
- 1570: Rev. John Kello, the Parson of Spott
- 1843: Allen Mair, irate
- 1689: Quirinus Kuhlmann, mystic poet
- 1917: Jesse Robart Short, Etaples mutineer
- 1621: Not Katharina Kepler, thanks to her son Johannes