At two o’clock in the morning, a clerk at the postal sorting office on Oranienburger Straße observed that a parcel was leaking fluid and exuding a pungent reek of petroleum. The address bore the name of a certain Colonel Krause, at No. 2 Alexanderplatz; the intended recipient, awakened at No. 5, replied that he was expecting nothing of the kind. The police had the crate carried into the courtyard and prised it open with the utmost circumspection. Within lay an infernal machine devised to explode, its clockwork mechanism timed to strike the following morning. On that June night in 1895, a vigilant official had stayed the parcel before the bomb could be delivered into the hands of its quarry.
Hugo Friedländer, the chronicler of the courts, revisited the affair in a chapter published in 1911. He describes a twenty-five-pound wooden crate, dispatched from Fürstenwalde and arriving in Berlin during the night of June 29–30. A single line in his text, however, assigns the posting at Fürstenwalde to June 20, whereas his narrative of the dispatch, the nocturnal arrival, and the depositions places this same juncture on the 29th; I adhere to the reiterated sequence while recording the discrepancy. Bottles, gunpowder, fuses, and a small clockwork movement formed the apparatus; an expert report cited by the journalist computed the measure of powder and flammable liquid. This assemblage, as Friedländer delineates it, was engineered to unleash a conflagration no less than an explosion. There is no need to inventory its every part to grasp what so alarmed the constabulary: the crate might detonate at the appointed hour, but it would likewise fire should anyone prematurely lift its lid.
The particulars of the superscription rendered the intent less transparent than it first appeared. The label was directed to “Oberst Krause” at No. 2 Alexanderplatz; the police colonel resided at No. 5. A postal clerk testified that he could never have delivered the crate to an address differing from the one inscribed. The error might have been calculated, or it may have betrayed an imperfect acquaintance with the addressee; it did not unmask its author. The colonel declared that he had only learned of the parcel’s existence when aroused by the night bell. He added that, had the crate been forced open, his son would in all likelihood have been the victim. It was a testimony to the peril, not an answer to the riddle of the sender.
The initial description of the bearer further tangled the inquiry. The witnesses at Fürstenwalde spoke of a beardless youth of an appearance they deemed effeminate, who walked with a peculiar, tripping gait. The police were thus pursuing a silhouette rather than a name. A bounty was proclaimed. Suspicion presently settled upon Paul Koschemann, a twenty-one-year-old mechanic employed at Ludwig Löwe’s works, already known to the authorities for his anarchist affiliations. A relative, the librarian Johannes Brede, avowed having heard him utter threats against the colonel some weeks prior: “The first to fall shall be Krause.” He recounted further that Koschemann had purchased an alarm clock during an excursion to Königs-Wusterhausen.
Such utterances carried weight, yet they fell short of an eyewitness sighting of the crate. Koschemann was taken into custody, then released for want of sufficient corroboration. He was subsequently sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment for disseminating anarchist tracts inciting to violence; his confinement gave fresh impetus to the investigation of the outrage, though this distinct conviction offered no proof that he had constructed the bomb. The inquiry narrowed its focus onto his traffic with Max Westphal, a metalworker, Wilhelm Weber, Elise Westphal, and Josephine Gürtler. A fresh search, in July 1896, yielded from the family lodgings a grey suit which the police likened to the attire described by the witnesses. Bösel pointed out that several gazettes had announced the seizure of the garment before it had even been executed; he brandished this chronology to rebut the allegation, likewise aired in the press, that the police had planted the clothing in the dwelling.
The trial opened in Berlin on April 6, 1897, and ran until the 15th. Five prisoners stood in the dock under diverse indictments. Koschemann and Westphal were charged with having prepared the outrage; Elise Westphal and Weber with having failed to notify the authorities though privy to the design; Gürtler with having aided Koschemann in evading justice and with lèse-majesté. The proceedings did not merely ask whether the crate was a lethal engine: they were tasked with determining who had dispatched it, who had abetted him, and what each party knew either before or after its arrival.
The witnesses offered no harmonious identification. In open court, Koschemann was compelled to don a jacket fashioned after the description of the courier and to pace the room bearing the crate. Witnesses discerned a resemblance; none, according to the chronicler, could swear with certainty that they recognized the man of Fürstenwalde. Two young lads who had directed the bearer to the post office failed to pick him out unerringly. The watchmaker of Königs-Wusterhausen confirmed the sale of an alarm clock, but retained no memory of the purchaser; the shop ledger, moreover, bore an emended date. Thus, the very object that might have bound the prisoner to the mechanism failed to furnish an unclouded recognition.
Brede, by contrast, maintained under oath his account of the conversation and of the timepiece wrapped in a red handkerchief. He conceded that Koschemann had denied his words. The court questioned him also touching certain books he had lent without leave—a circumstance that might impair his credit without automatically nullifying his deposition. Breuer the barber and his journeyman placed Koschemann and Westphal in their shop on the evening of June 29; their estimates of the hour diverged. A throng of witnesses swore to having seen Koschemann at a factory festival in Weißensee, some around six o’clock, others later. The question was not whether he had repaired thither, but at what precise moment he might have quitted the quarter to reach the post office at Fürstenwalde.
Prosecutor Kanzow wove these disparate fragments into a web of circumstantial evidence: the silhouette, the watch, the threat reported by Brede, the anarchist circle, the suit of clothes, and Koschemann’s own explanations regarding a clockwork apparatus he claimed he wished to contrive to signal a physician’s night bell. In the submission of the Crown, the contradictions in the alibi were not the work of chance. The defense countered that no witness had seen the accused post the parcel, that the descriptions remained nebulous, and that his presence at the festival disproved the proposed itinerary. Counsel also disputed that the device was necessarily the handiwork of a skilled mechanic, inasmuch as an expert had pronounced it clumsily assembled.
A second, murkier debate turned upon the matter of provocateurs and informers. Koschemann hinted that the crate was the fruit of a police machination designed to justify political repression. Inspector Bösel denied under oath that he had ever instigated the plot or found any shred of proof for such a hypothesis. Gustav Landauer, the anarchist man of letters called to the stand, related that a watchmaker named Henkmann had proposed an ignition mechanism and uttered threats against Krause; he believed this man had acted as an agent provocateur. Landauer added that Henkmann had perished by his own hand alongside his wife prior to the trial. Bösel retorted that he had never employed him as an agent. The tale opened a trail, yet it proved neither that Henkmann had fashioned the crate nor that he had put it in the post.
The voice of the prosecution itself betrayed less assurance than is customary in a closing address. After having styled the case overwhelming, Bösel was obliged to concede that his phrase had been prompted by the heat of emotion. Kanzow declared in his turn that at that juncture he did not regard the evidence as overwhelming against all five defendants. In his final summation, he nevertheless maintained Koschemann’s guilt as principal, or at least as an accessory, and Westphal’s as an auxiliary. He moved for the acquittal of Elise Westphal and Weber for want of proof that they were cognizant of the plot; Gürtler, on the other hand, he deemed guilty of having aided Koschemann, while exonerating her of insulting the Sovereign. The defense exhorted the jury to divorce the certainty of the crime—for the crate was indeed perilous—from the uncertainty enveloping those who had prepared it.
Following two hours of deliberation, the jurors returned a nuanced verdict. They found Koschemann guilty of complicity in attempted murder and of an infraction of the law governing explosives, yet the verdict did not name him as the material sender of the crate. They convicted Westphal of having harbored Koschemann after the fact to shield him from justice. The questions concerning Elise Westphal, Weber, and Gürtler were answered in the negative. Koschemann was sentenced to ten years and one month of hard labor; Westphal, to one year’s imprisonment. Both convicts lodged an appeal, which the Reichsgericht rejected.
Friedländer relates that Koschemann walked out of the penitentiary in the summer of 1907, broken in health, still protesting his innocence. This conclusion does not resolve the enigma of the crate. The judgment established Koschemann’s complicity in the eyes of the jury, and the subsequent concealment imputed to Westphal; it identifies with no certitude neither the artificer nor the bearer. In the journalist’s chronicle, the parcel stayed by a post-office clerk remains far more distinctly portrayed than the hand that committed it to the post. How could guilt as an accessory be established without identifying beyond doubt the person who had sent the crate? The verdict pronounced upon criminal liability; the chronicle leaves unresolved the identity of the direct perpetrator.