On 24 February 1889, Friedrich Sutter, of Neudorf near Strasbourg, was apprehended in Karlsruhe whilst attempting to pay for a sausage with a counterfeit thaler. This arrest brought the magistrates upon the trace of a clandestine coining operation whose pieces were circulating along both banks of the Rhine.
Sutter began with denials. Presently, however, he acknowledged having put counterfeit thalers into circulation, naming an unknown man from Strasbourg as his supplier. This stranger was not entirely unknown to the courts. Behind the name of Mischke lay an individual convicted in 1885 of manufacturing forged postage stamps. On that occasion, he had affected the bearing of a military officer and frequented the barracks, where his easy manners and address enabled him to offer his stamps without exciting immediate suspicion. Imprisonment, far from causing him to renounce the art of forgery, had afforded him the leisure to contrive a fresh branch of it.
In the autumn of 1888, being without employment, he undertook the manufacture of coin in his lodgings in the Ludwigsgasse, in Strasbourg. His workshop bore none of that laboratory apparatus which fancy readily attributes to the coiner. He began by purchasing Britannia-metal spoons at a so-called fifty-pfennig bazaar; the chronicle notes that a dozen such spoons cost one or two marks. Procuring plaster of Paris, he pressed genuine coins into the paste, thereby obtaining moulds. Over a spirit-lamp, the metal was melted in an old iron ladle; poured into the plaster, it took the form of a five-mark piece, a thaler, or a two-mark coin.
The labour did not end with the casting. It remained to impart to the coins their legend, their relief, and those minute details that allow a piece to pass from hand to hand without inviting scrutiny. Mischke first incised the letters and ornaments with a common sewing needle. Later, he fashioned brass punches, which he struck into the metal. In this manner he endowed his productions with the portrait of the German Emperor, the mint-mark A, and the dates 1874 or 1876. He did not pretend to have succeeded at every trial: two ten-mark pieces had indeed been cast, but he had proved unable to impart to them the requisite colour.
This detail demonstrates well enough that the enterprise advanced by halting experiments, yet the successful pieces proved sufficient to disquiet the shopkeepers. The alloy, composed chiefly of copper and bismuth with a slight addition of tin and lead, yielded coins that did not feel greasy to the touch; nor did their ring betray them. Several had been cast with such fidelity that they bore an astonishing resemblance to genuine specie. One had to turn the piece, examine its edge, detect a faint bluish cast or an imperfect strike. Therein lay, according to the testimony delivered at the trial, the most discernible defect: the rims of the false coins had been turned or filed smooth.
From the autumn of 1888 until the following March, Mischke manufactured, according to the minimum estimate admitted by the court, a value of at least four hundred marks: some fifty to sixty five-mark pieces, thirteen thalers, and an undetermined number of two-mark coins. These quantities remain approximate; they do not reconstruct the whole extent of the circulation, since the police were unable to trace the destiny of every coin. Mischke delivered some one hundred and twenty marks’ worth to Sutter, who was charged with uttering them and returning half the profit to the maker. To the wife of Knebler, Mischke repaid in counterfeit specie some twenty to thirty marks she had lent him, without initially apprising her of his trade.
When the coining implements were unearthed in Sutter’s cellar and in Belling’s lodgings, Mischke resolved to speak. He confessed to the workmanship, but sought to reserve all the credit and all the guilt unto himself. In his initial declaration, he asserted that no one had assisted him in casting the pieces; Sutter, he maintained, had merely uttered them at his behest. He added that the other members of the Sutter household, with few exceptions, were aware of what was afoot, whilst affirming that Sutter’s wife had done everything in her power to turn her husband from that path. He further insisted that his own wife was innocent and had ceaselessly admonished him. These statements, gathered during the preliminary inquiry, must not be confounded with a general admission of guilt on the part of all the accused.
Sutter likewise came to acknowledge his share. He had received the coins from Mischke and offered them in payment, knowing full well that they were false. He recounted having witnessed, on two or three occasions, the metal poured into the plaster moulds. The entire process was contained within a bedchamber: an old iron ladle thrust into an aperture in the wall, a small tin lamp resting upon the table, and the metal melting over the flame. He had not attended every casting, but he was sufficiently acquainted with the work never to have mistaken its fruits for lawful money.
On 13 February 1889, Sutter departed for Grafenstaden in company with his son Karl. The father waited in the street. The youth entered two shops, purchased trifling articles, and tendered on each occasion a counterfeit five-mark piece; he carried away the change in lawful silver. The prosecution charged Karl with having aided his father in uttering the pieces, and the young man admitted the fact. This scene enlarged the scope of the affair beyond Mischke’s chamber: the coin possessed no value for its makers save on the condition that another hand presented it across the counter.
The Knebler household was not merely a house through which the metal had passed. Knebler’s wife had observed Mischke at his task and acquired enough of his method to fabricate, in January 1889, at least thirty two-mark coins. She failed in her attempts to produce five-mark pieces; in February, Mischke cast nineteen for her. She put them into circulation, together with several two-mark pieces he had given her before Christmas, the spurious nature of which she knew. Her husband, by contrast, denied all participation. The record thus distinguished between the acts of the wife and those of the husband, even though the same roof sheltered them both.
A further episode unfolded at Belling’s dwelling. On 8 March, Mischke arrived there with his implements and displayed several counterfeit two-mark coins. He requested permission from Belling and Gieler to work within their lodgings. They consented. Aided by the spirit-lamp they furnished him, he cast two counterfeit five-mark pieces before their eyes. Both men admitted the essential truth of these occurrences; the search produced precise exhibits in corroboration: a cigar-box containing plaster of Paris, an iron spoon bearing crusts of hardened paste, two fragments of zinc—one smeared with the same matter—and two files.
The complicity imputed to Belling did not end with that sitting. When Mischke no longer felt secure in Strasbourg and resolved to flee, Belling provided him with a coat, a pair of trousers, and a workman’s apron; he likewise harboured him during the night preceding his departure on 23 March. The garments might assist the fugitive in altering his appearance; the chronicle characterizes this assistance as harbouring. Here, the coiner was no longer merely the artisan who melted the metal: he had now to be shielded from the hue and cry.
Before the Assize Court, the manufacture, the distribution, and the aid afforded to the flight were examined together, yet the degrees of responsibility were kept distinct. The account of the proceedings lays stress upon the address with which Mischke conducted his own defence, as a man of intellect and thoroughly versed in outward appearances; it records also that the judges were not slow in arriving at a conviction of the prisoners’ guilt. It does not, however, record their individual sentences. It specifies only that all received long terms of penal servitude, with the exception of young Sutter and Knebler. One cannot, therefore, assign to each a term which the archive has failed to preserve.
The first coin had been proffered for a sausage; others had purchased trifling wares or paid for a reckoning at an inn. Their very modesty rendered the enterprise insidious: the counterfeit money did not seek to dazzle, but to slip unobserved into the transactions of daily life. It needed only that a shopkeeper scrutinize a rim, that a youth speak, that a lamp be discovered in a bedchamber, for the net to close. Thus did the base metal intended to pass for silver conduct the magistrates from the counters of Baden to the Ludwigsgasse, and thence from that garret to the cellars and thresholds that had afforded it shelter.