Deep within the woods, the dusk was already gathering when the Oberförster von Wrede caught sight of a man fleeing before him. The forester raised his voice. The answer, as recorded in the Pitaval, was a menace: let him come no nearer, or the fellow would fire. Von Wrede rode on. A shot rang out; horse and rider came crashing down together. The marksman vanished into the timber. The wounded officer was unable to recognise his assailant.
On the evening of 1 October 1867, the wounded official was conveyed to Hardehausen. Dr Baruch, summoned from Rhoden, discovered seven or eight deep, bleeding, circular punctures in his left leg. From these he extracted a flattened lead shot. The discharge, he concluded, had been delivered at close quarters; the bone was struck. Von Wrede recovered sufficiently to resume his duties some months later, yet the physician pronounced the wound severe. The judicial inquiry, for its part, possessed as yet not even a name to pursue.
Police and magistrates redoubled their searches. The government of Minden offered two hundred thalers to whomsoever should bring about the offender’s discovery. All was in vain. The marksman was a poacher whom the woods seemed to know far better than did the authorities. It was only four months later, on 1 February 1868, that another armed encounter gave the affair an altered complexion.
On that day, the Waldeck forestry officer Heinemann was patrolling his district. Hearing two distant reports, he suspected the presence of clandestine huntsmen. He hailed two woodcutters, August and Karl Beneke, and laid an ambush near a bridge over the Orpe. A man emerged between the trees, a roebuck slung across his shoulder. The Pitaval names him: Hermann Klostermann, already known to Heinemann. The officer stepped forward. The man waited until he was but a few paces off, raised his piece to his shoulder, and pulled the trigger.
The projectile entered the left arm, tore through toward the chest, and penetrated the lung. Dr Baruch described a gaping wound at the shoulder, shreds of paper and wool lodged in its tract, and grains of lead that had grazed the skin beneath the collarbone. Heinemann was bedridden for three months. He survived, but the medical deposition read at the trial depicted him as permanently disabled: his arm never recovered its use, and his chest remained frail. This time, the witnesses had seen the man, and the man had a name.
Warrants of apprehension were transformed into an organised battue. Minden and the Principality of Waldeck promised substantial rewards. Troops occupied Westheim, where Klostermann was wont to lodge; gendarmes and foresters beat through the coverts. Yet the weeks dragged on. The searchers found the traces of gralloched deer, occasionally heard a shot, and met not a soul. The chronicler of the Pitaval embellishes the portrait of a quarry almost ethereal; he relates anecdotes of disguises, leaps from upper-storey windows, and concealment in a lime pit. It is prudent to read these as episodes transmitted by this chronicle, rather than as scenes entered into an official procès-verbal.
On 24 May, in the valley of the Orpe, thirteen men—soldiers, gendarmes, and foresters—took up their stations at dawn. Their design was to close the passes through which the poachers returned to the forest. Two armed figures broke cover. At the first alarm, they fled; their pursuers fired, without hitting them. The runaways then turned upon the soldier Struck. One raised his weapon; Struck returned the fire and struck down one of the pair, the shoemaker Lohoff, who expired a few hours later.
Beside the corpse, the searchers found his gun still fully loaded, with its percussion cap in place. From this circumstance the chronicle draws a decisive deduction: Lohoff’s gun, remaining loaded, proved that he had not fired upon Struck; the soldier had struck him down with his return shot. The first discharge had issued from a percussion piece, whereas Struck was armed with a Dreyse needle-gun. Struck, however, could not swear that Klostermann had fired the shot himself. In the narrative of the Pitaval, therefore, the scene provided no unassailable visual identification; it was the condition of the weapons, weighed alongside the remaining testimony, that sustained the indictment.
Klostermann once more slipped through the net. His capture occurred on the night of 13 to 14 June, not in a forest clearing, but at the workshop of the gunsmith Lutter in Brilon. He knocked upon the door and gave his name. Lutter let him enter; Klostermann asked for a cup of coffee. While the gunsmith’s wife stole out to alert the constabulary, Lutter engaged the fugitive in delay. Constables crept up to the house, then burst into the bedchamber. The outlaw, seated upon the edge of the bed, had no time to flee. The electric telegraph soon proclaimed his arrest; he was subsequently conveyed to Paderborn.
At twenty-nine years of age, he had already incurred seven prior convictions for unlawful hunting, threats, resistance, and evading police surveillance. Born at Retzin in Brandenburg, the son of a miller who had died young, he had served in the infantry before working as a day labourer. The chronicler portrays him as a dead shot, an indefatigable walker, and a steady purveyor of venison; he invests him likewise with the repute of a lavish dancer and a rustic hero. This romantic veneer belongs to the text of 1869. It must not obscure the fact that two men were grievously injured, that another perished in the pursuit, and that the court was trying acts of violence committed against officers in the execution of their duty.
The judicial examination was divided into three counts: the shot fired at von Wrede, that directed against Heinemann, and the affray in which Lohoff met his death. Klostermann had initially denied everything. He maintained that he had spent the whole of the first of October at Westheim, entering the forest only afterward. The Fleckners, man and wife, under whose roof he had called that evening, possessed no clock; they placed his visit after night had fallen and the curfew bell had rung. Other villagers recalled that he had informed them of the shot fired at the head forester, asserting that von Wrede had cleared him of suspicion. These hours and utterances, preserved through memory, were collated with the nature of the wound and the feasible journeys between the woods and the hamlet.
The prosecution produced, moreover, the deposition of Lohoff’s widow. She testified that Klostermann had confessed to her having fired upon both von Wrede and Heinemann. Dr Baruch recounted that prior to his death, Lohoff had attributed the two shootings to the fugitive, reiterating that he had heard the admission from Klostermann’s own lips. The prisoner retorted that these witnesses were perjured: Lohoff, he said, had stolen a piece from him; Lutter was himself a consort of poachers. The chronicle represents these statements as converging, but it does not spread before us the original minutes of the hearing. Their cogency reaches us solely through the chronicler’s pen.
Touching Heinemann, the wounded keeper and the Beneke brothers gave their testimony. Karl identified Klostermann with great firmness; August added a reservation: if no other man bore so close a resemblance to him, then it was he. The accused denied it. He described an arm and a gun-barrel espied through the firs, declaring that he had discharged his weapon merely to avert an imminent peril. The witnesses contradicted this version: the trees, though of a man’s height, were sparse; Heinemann had been seated between the two woodcutters, after which August had stepped forward. In their judgment, Klostermann had deliberately aimed at the forester, who carried his piece under his arm, and not at an adversary about to fire.
The third episode raised a narrower point of law. Klostermann admitted to having fled with the others, but denied firing upon Struck. He pointed to Lohoff as the marksman. Yet Lohoff was dead, and his gun, which remained loaded, could not have discharged the shot. An expert explained that the report of a percussion arm was readily distinguished from that of Struck’s needle-gun; the soldier had sworn that one of the fugitives fired before him. In the eyes of the Pitaval, these material traces refuted the imputation cast upon the dead man, without entirely dispelling the uncertainty as to whose finger had pressed the trigger.
The trial opened at Paderborn on 12 November 1868 and sat until the 15th. A concourse drawn from the town and from Waldeck pressed in to behold the “Rinaldo” of the woods. The narrative dwells upon his composure and upon the marked attention he paid to the gentlemen of the press. His advocate challenged the presence of several burgomasters and local magistrates among the jurors; the court overruled the exception, resting upon a Prussian statutory provision which, according to the report, curtailed the grounds for such recusations.
Before the bar, Klostermann conceded having wounded von Wrede and Heinemann, yet pleaded self-defence. He maintained that he had not recognised the former, and affirmed that, in the latter instance, he had aimed only at an armed arm concealed behind a tree. He denied having fired upon Struck. The public prosecutor demanded twenty years’ penal servitude; the defence prayed for three, urging in particular that the more lenient laws of Waldeck should govern the assault perpetrated within its borders.
To the questions concerning attempted murder and the assault upon Struck, the jury returned a negative finding. They declared the prisoner guilty, however, of having offered violent resistance to von Wrede and Heinemann in the discharge of their offices, and of having inflicted grievous bodily harm upon their persons. The court, combining the penal statutes of Prussia and Waldeck, pronounced a sentence of eight years’ Zuchthaus, or hard labour in a house of correction. The term fell short of the twenty years sought by the Crown, yet exceeded the three years proposed by the defence.
Thus the assizes did not ratify all that the prosecution had put forward. The court sustained neither attempted murder nor an attack upon Struck; it condemned Klostermann for grievous acts of violence committed against the two foresters. The Pitaval permits the outlaw to pass into legend, only to reduce that legend to eight years of servitude. Between the two, a piece that remained loaded told against the deceased, witnesses contradicted themselves or faltered, and the prisoner at length acknowledged a portion of the charges. It is not the silhouette of a popular hero that concludes the affair, but the precise boundary traced by the jurors between what they deemed established and what they refused to pronounce proven.