Luggage Left in Pawn
In order to set out to kill an emperor, Franz Reinhold Rupsch had been obliged to pawn his trunk. The subscriptions collected among his comrades were insufficient to defray the costs of the journey; the saddler had thus abandoned all he possessed to the moneylender, so that he might take to the road alongside Emil Küchler. Three months later, the Emperor still drew breath, the monument they had intended to encircle with corpses received its throng of visitors, and Rupsch had not redeemed his baggage. He demanded reimbursement for his disbursements. Through this petty debt, the abortive outrage was to gain a notoriety its authors had never foreseen.
Hugo Friedländer recounts the scene as having unfolded at a workers’ assembly held after Christmas 1883 in Elberfeld. A social gathering had yielded a modest surplus; Rupsch laid claim to a portion thereof to cover the charges of the journey to Rüdesheim. The chronicler conjectures that an informer sat among the company. This indiscretion does not alone account for the entire police enquiry, yet it retains its bitter irony: an enterprise devised to shake the foundations of the Empire resurfaced in the petty balance-sheet of an evening’s revelry.
A Visitor at the Sickbed
August Reinsdorf had conceived the design some months beforehand. A compositor and anarchist militant, tossed about by itinerant labour and successive expulsions, he lay in September in the infirmary at Elberfeld. Küchler had made his acquaintance whilst visiting the sick on behalf of a typographical association. The mutual aid of artisans had furnished the occasion for their meeting; their colloquies were soon to turn upon assistance of a vastly different nature.
On the twenty-eighth of September, Wilhelm I was scheduled to unveil the Niederwald monument, erected high above the Rhine to commemorate the German victory over France. Sovereign princes, state dignitaries, and a dense multitude were to attend the solemnities. Reinsdorf perceived in this concourse of the mighty an opportunity such as ordinary circumstances could never afford: that of striking down, at a single blow, those who embodied the established order he was sworn to overthrow.
He charged Küchler and Rupsch with repairing to the place. Other men supplied moneys or apparatus; some of them were later to disclaim any knowledge of the true object of their aid. This distinction, initially submerged beneath the generic label of conspiracy, was to prove decisive at the bar of justice. To bestow a few marks for a railway journey did not perforce imply an assent to the slaughter to which that journey was intended to lead.
The Solemnity Proceeded
The two emissaries reached Rüdesheim on the twenty-seventh of September. The rain fell steadily. They gained the approaches to the monument, laid their infernal engine, and returned on the morrow. But the downpour had thoroughly drenched the apparatus. At the expected moment, no detonation occurred. The procession pursued its march; cheers and brass fanfares occupied the space wherein the conspirators had reckoned on hearing the roar of their triumph.
Subsequently, each man was to offer an explanation of this misfire designed to show himself in the fairest light. Küchler asserted that he had accompanied Rupsch solely to avert the crime. Rupsch maintained that he had himself rendered the mechanism harmless. Two men had travelled together, laboured together, and kept watch together; before the bench, they sought to transfigure this fellowship into a reciprocal surveillance exercised for the salvation of the intended victims.
Their conduct following the mishap singularly confounded such a defence. On the evening of that very day, an explosion damaged the festive hall of Rüdesheim. It did not produce the carnage that had been feared. Yet, in the eyes of the magistracy, this second attempt bore little semblance to the repentant return to reason of two men who had deliberately spared the Sovereign. Küchler and Rupsch retraced their steps to Elberfeld. The day of imperial pomp had possessed an underside of which most who attended were utterly oblivious.
Eight Men upon the Dock
A wave of arrests at length gathered together the travellers, their associates, and Reinsdorf himself, who was apprehended in Hamburg in January 1884. The trial opened on the fifteenth of December in Leipzig. The lack of spacious chambers and the perils attending the conveyance of the prisoners had raised serious difficulties; the proceedings were accordingly installed within the court connected directly with the prison. Police officers lined the approaches, the corridors, and the courtroom itself. The authorities took good care, this time, not to discover too late the designs forming in their very shadow.
Eight prisoners were placed at the bar. Another detonation, which had occurred in September 1883 in an Elberfeld establishment frequented by medical practitioners, was drawn into the indictments. The pot-boy Fricke had been grievously injured thereby. Bachmann stood prosecuted as the perpetrator, Reinsdorf as the instigator. The serving-man introduced into the political debate a reality far less accommodating than revolutionary manifestos: the victims of an outrage directed against the possessing classes might well be the very persons who served their tables.
The examinations brought forth a tangled web of contradictions. Küchler had commenced by denying all connection with Rupsch, and then his very presence at the Niederwald. He was now confronted with his recorded movements and his earlier depositions. The narrative of a voyage undertaken to forestall a felony had made a singularly tardy appearance. Rupsch, for his part, accused Küchler of mendacity. Each sought from the judges a measure of credit which he was at pains to strip from his confederate.
Reinsdorf adopted a wholly different bearing. He contested individual testimonies, denounced the police, but boldly affirmed his revolutionary intent. His advocate strove to preserve his life; the accused seemed at times to covet a death that would endow his name with the exemplary force of martyrdom. The consumption wasting his lungs rendered this divergence all the more poignant: counsel pleaded for a future which his client declared he had no wish to drag out within a dungeon.
Moneys of Unacknowledged Origin
The witness Palm had delivered money into Küchler’s hands. Reinsdorf demanded of him whence those forty marks had proceeded, asserting roundly that they came from the police. Palm declined to reply, pleading the danger of self-incrimination. Police Commissioner Gottschalk, when interrogated regarding his sources of intelligence, likewise kept certain confidences to himself. The defence was thus furnished with a grave suspicion for debate, yet lacked the definitive proof that a police bureau had suborned the outrage.
This twilight zone did not efface the overt acts imputed to the travellers. The advocates likewise debated the subtle boundary between mere preparation and criminal attempt: at what precise juncture had the design passed beyond contemplation to become a crime begun? The prosecution replied by pointing to the acts accomplished and the reiterated efforts made to bring about the explosion. The tribunal dismissed the tales of deliberate sabotage, retaining the capital intention to slay the Emperor and those of his train.
Three sentences of death were pronounced: against Reinsdorf, Küchler, and Rupsch. Bachmann and Holzhauer each received ten years’ penal servitude for their proven share in the deeds. Söhngen, Rheinbach, and Töllner were acquitted, their knowledge of the true destination of their remittances having remained unestablished. Those who stepped forth into freedom clasped the hands of those who remained in bonds.
Rupsch obtained a commutation of his sentence to penal servitude for life, his youth pleading in his favour. Reinsdorf and Küchler were executed at Halle in February 1885. In his narrative of that grim dawn, Friedländer contrasts the fiery proclamations of the former with the agonised cries of the latter for his wife and children. A single judgment had united their fates; it had endowed them neither with the same constancy nor with the same manner of meeting death.
The solemnity at the Niederwald had celebrated an enduring Empire. Its adversaries had sought to make answer by an instantaneous stroke of annihilation. Between these two vast ambitions, the judicial file preserves an injured pot-boy, grieving families, three acquittals, and a pawned trunk. Great historic enterprises never wholly shake off the modest destinies they sweep along in their wake.