East Germany beheaded Sylvester Murau by fallbeil on this date in 1956.

A blue-collar laborer who served a jail sentence for poaching under the Third Reich, he’d joined GDR’s feared security service, the Stasi — until he was dismissed when some fascist dalliances during the war years came to light.

He then transitioned from Stasi agent Sylvester Murau to defector Sylvester Murau, fleeing to West Berlin and settled down in West Germany for life as a communist apostate.

That was in 1954. Later that same year, his daughter Brigitte “Gitta” Cullmann, popped in for a visit — transit between East and West Germany was not yet impeded by any wall back then — and fell to drinking with him in Heubach with some pals.

Well, it turns out that Brigitte was a Tier 1 Operative of a Stasi agent herself, albeit a real bum as a child: her presence induced dad to let his guard down with her acquaintances, and once ol’ Sly was sufficiently sauced, the visitors tossed him into a car and bundled him back over the border. It’s among hundreds of cases where Communist bloc defectors were forcibly repatriated eastward by Stasi kidnappers, there to meet all manner of mistreatment — but Murau’s situation was surely exceptional in depending on such obligingly disloyal kin for its very implementation.

Ruthless Gitta later married the Stasi colonel who planned the body-snatch.

On this day..

• 1979: Kampatimar Shankariya
• 1968: Karol Kot, the Vampire of Krakow
• 1946: Bruno Tesch and Karl Weinbacher, Zyklon-B manufacturers
• 1849: Quddus
• 1746: Three Catholic servants
• 1857: 52 European prisoners at Delhi
• 1963: Oleg Penkovsky, Cuban Missile Crisis spy
• 1920: Maria Bochkareva, Russian Joan of Arc
• 1691: Jacob Leisler, "a Walloon who has sett at the head of the Rable"
• 1879: Three botches in three states
• 1975: Michael X
• 1569: Dirk Willems, for loving his enemy