Early in 1851, an informant’s denunciation reached the Berlin police. A man reported dead during the tempestuous days of 1848 was said to be living beyond the borders of Prussia, in his native township, his demise having been feigned to pocket insurance monies. Investigators soon discovered that Franz Tomascheck, formerly a tailor in Copenhagen, was residing in Bohemia, near Sobietusch, under his own name. His brother Anton had seen him buried in Berlin. The name of the deceased had not been concealed; it was his grave that held no dead man.
Two years earlier, Anton had already caught the eye of the Berlin gazettes. Having aired a dispute with the company insuring his household furniture against fire, he had caused a singular woodcut to be published: a grotesque figure, an iron collar about his neck, accompanied by a declaration wherein he presented himself as a man taking an oath under that very yoke. The notice provoked only a fleeting curiosity. The police of 1851 did not rely upon it to establish the life insurance fraud; it reappeared in the commentaries merely as Anton’s first public appearance, with no proven causal link to the subsequent denunciation.
Franz had quitted Copenhagen, where he pursued his trade as a tailor, with the professed intent of returning to his native soil. The tribulations of 1848 and mounting hostility toward Germans in Denmark were advanced by him and his advocates as the occasion for his departure. He arrived at Anton’s lodgings in Berlin toward the end of October. He had a wife and children. He held, moreover, two contracts of insurance upon his life: one for a thousand Reichsbankthalers subscribed at Copenhagen in 1845, and another for one thousand pounds sterling taken with the Globe company of London in July 1848. These policies were intended to secure his heirs. In this capital, the two brothers discerned the means to relieve their pecuniary distress.
The contrivance demanded that the passing appear unexceptional. A pulmonary affection was chosen: Franz was to be seized with persistent blood-spitting and succumb in Berlin. A medical certificate, ascribed to a Dr. Meyer, described the fatal course of the distemper; attestations and ecclesiastical papers would authorize the burial. Yet Kunze, the practitioner who had long attended Anton’s household, was merely a Wundarzt—a surgeon unqualified to issue the requisite medical certificate upon his own authority. Anton prevailed upon him to sign in the name of Dr. Meyer and to prepare the instruments that would lend the death an official sanction.
The masquerade unfolded amid the general turmoil of Berlin. On November 20, the death was announced; on the morrow, a certificate confirmed it. On the twenty-third, at seven o’clock in the morning, Franz took the train for Frankfurt. Anton prepared the obsequies and nailed down the coffin. In lieu of the announced corpse lay an ironing board, wood shavings, and straw. The chronicler relates that the entrails of a goose were likewise placed within the bier to simulate the stench of decomposition, thereby deterring Anton’s eleven-year-old son, who wished to look upon his uncle one last time, from drawing near. On the following day, Anton had the coffin interred in Saint Hedwig’s cemetery. The indictment portrayed him as the sole mourner following the hearse in a mourning carriage; questioned long afterward, the gravedigger could no longer confirm this detail.
The administrative formalities were of equal moment to the pantomime. The initial burial voucher remained with the police; the church thereafter delivered a death certificate, signed by Provost Brinkmann, followed by a report from Dr. Meyer dated December 28. Anton dispatched these instruments to Franz’s widow. The London company insisted upon verifying the circumstances. Its agent, Fuchs, learned from Anton that Kunze had attended Franz before Meyer was summoned. He submitted six questions to the practitioner. Kunze replied with a minute medical narrative, maintaining that the physician’s ministrations had proved unavailing. Fuchs accepted the explanation. The policies were surrendered and the benefits discharged: one thousand Reichsbankthalers on April 13, followed by one thousand pounds sterling in four bills of exchange presented on May 10, 1849.
Franz’s wife subsequently remitted to Anton a draft for two thousand Danish thalers drawn upon the banking house of Mendelssohn. Anton cashed it in company with Ferdinand, Franz’s son. The proceeds of this draft were conveyed to Franz in Bohemia, after certain deductions to cover the charges of the imposture. There, the money was to sustain the man who had been pronounced dead. In that refuge, Franz lent money and lived upon the interest. His capital traversed borders; his identity remained undisturbed. He had not even assumed an alias to dwell near the place of his birth.
For a season, Berlin remembered Franz as one departed. Wreaths and verses appeared in the gazettes, and then his memory sank into oblivion. In 1851, the denunciation disclosed that the deceased was living near his native village. Anton was arrested and confessed upon his very first police interrogation. He laid bare the entire stratagem: a grave without a body, a fabricated demise to secure the funds of two underwriters. Kunze was taken in his turn, acknowledging that he had drawn up the counterfeit certificates, attestations, and prescriptions under the name of Meyer.
The police thereupon opened the grave in Saint Hedwig’s cemetery, by night, under torchlight. The coffin was identified; its lid was prized open before the officers of the police and the judiciary. There was no cadaver to be found. Beneath the straw and shavings lay the ironing board, clothed in a shroud and crowned with a white nightcap, according to the official report. The coffin had never harboured a soul interred alive, notwithstanding the tale Franz was later to relate; it had been vacant of human flesh since the hour of the ceremony.
Apprehended in Bohemia, Franz at first put forward a different account. He claimed to have quitted Copenhagen by reason of losses and hardships, to have fallen sick beneath his brother’s roof, and then to have regained his senses in or near a coffin after a clot of blood was dislodged from his throat. He alleged that he had fled, terrified, toward the Frankfurt railway terminus, and thence reached Bohemia. This tale of a man buried alive was refuted by Anton’s admissions and the preparations for the obsequies. Franz ultimately conceded that the mound was indeed his supposed resting place, and that the deception had been concerted with his brother.
The instruments also laid bare Kunze’s precise part in the affair. He admitted to having drafted two forged certificates of death under Dr. Meyer’s name, composed the medical deposition requested by Fuchs, and dispatched prescriptions to Copenhagen. He acknowledged having received eight ducats, and later fifty thalers; Anton maintained he had been obliged to wrest the first certificate from him after placing the eight coins in his hand. Meyer, summoned to the bar, denied all acquaintance with Tomascheck and testified that the signatures purporting to be his were forgeries. Fischer, the Globe’s initial Berlin representative, had sought Dr. Meyer in vain. Fuchs had resumed the inquiries in the interval and addressed himself to Kunze. The surgeon had made himself sufficiently plausible to be invited to the agent’s table: he had won a confidence which his own documents ought to have destroyed.
The trial opened on April 15, 1852. Anton reaffirmed his confession, recounting the fabrication of the papers. Franz recanted: he contended that his initial admission was false and that he had never resolved with his brother to feign his death. The hearing was adjourned to obtain depositions from his family in Copenhagen and their declarations touching the sums received. On September 4, his wife and daughter testified that he had imparted to them his design to perpetrate the fraud. The household had thus been privy to the consequences of the supposed death; their testimony at the bar confounded Franz’s denial.
The pleadings likewise turned upon the jurisdiction of the tribunal and the legal character of the falsified documents. The transactions touched several jurisdictions: the contracts originated in London and Copenhagen, Franz had been apprehended in Bohemia, and Anton and Kunze stood in the dock in Berlin. An agreement between the Prussian and Danish authorities reserved to Copenhagen the examination of the kinsfolk resident there, whilst the prisoners present in Berlin answered before the local court. The magistrates were called upon to decide whether the certificates and attestations constituted forged public instruments, and whether each man had taken part in the misappropriation of the funds.
The judgment pronounced all three men guilty of the forgery of public documents and of fraud. Each received three years of penal servitude for the forgery. The fraud carried in addition a fine; in default of payment, it was to be commuted to five additional years of imprisonment for the Tomascheck brothers, and four for Kunze. Kunze was stripped of his right to practice his art, declared ineligible for public office, and, like Anton, placed under police surveillance for eight years following his sentence. Franz was condemned to banishment from Prussian soil.
In Berlin, the grave had contained nothing more than a board, yet the docket revealed far more than a coarse farce. Underwriters had been persuaded by certificates bearing the name of a physician who had never ministered to the sick man; a family had received the price of a death that had never occurred; an eleven-year-old child had been kept at bay by a manufactured stench; Anton had marshalled the obsequies and driven the nails into the bier. When the denunciation arrived, the buried man was living at a distance which the railway rendered trivial to cross, hard by his birthplace, under his true name. The space between the tomb and the living man had not proved wide enough to shield the lie.
The notices of the iron collar, published some years prior, had made Anton familiar to the reading public, but nothing indicates that they provoked the inquest. The fatal thread was more immediate: an informant’s report announced that Franz was alive, the police ran him to ground in Bohemia, Anton made a clean breast of it, and the tomb was broken open. In the dead of night, torches illuminated a coffin whose lid still bore the imprint of the nails. The timber was raised; no corpse was revealed. Only linen, straw, and an ironing board—the poor paraphernalia of a death which paper alone had made credible.