Franz thousand

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Franz Seraph Tausend (born July 5, 1884 in Krumbach (Swabia) ; † July 9, 1942 in Schwäbisch Hall ) was an alchemist who claimed in the 1920s to be able to produce gold through transmutation . To finance his research, he mainly won business leaders from the right-wing spectrum. A group of ethnic and National Socialist politicians around General Erich Ludendorff benefited from his financial manipulation . In 1931, Tausend was convicted of fraud . He died in prison while serving another sentence.

Life

Until 1920

Franz Tausend was the fifth child of Athanasius and Maria Tausend, nee Böller. The father, initially a plumber , later earned his living as a faith healer who “discussed” animals and people. In 1888 he moved with the family to Aubing . After the training as an elementary school teacher at a preparatory institute in Freising and the visit to the Royal Bavarian NCO School in Bruck failed, Franz Tausend learned the plumbing trade from his father and then completed an apprenticeship as a druggist in Hamburg . During this time he began to deal with Kabbalistic and alchemical scriptures for the first time.

After his military service with the 4th Royal Bavarian Infantry Regiment in Metz , he took on various odd jobs, including as an inspector in a chemical factory. Even then, one thousand seems imposture to have operated. So he used business cards labeled “Dr. Franz Tausend, chemist ”. In 1913 he founded a "scientific violin testing center" in Ludwigshafen and developed a method that supposedly gave ordinary violins the sound of a Stradivarius . The "secret procedure" consisted of brushing the violins with old varnish, and it was an economic failure.

He took part in the First World War as a non-commissioned officer , most recently with the rank of sergeant , and at the end of the war in 1918 he worked in the Munich Military Construction Office , which is far from the front , where financial irregularities are said to have occurred. In 1918 he founded a "Bund der Familienfreunde", which was supposed to procure food for its members. According to the Munich Post of January 24, 1929, Thousand is said to have embezzled the federal members' money deposits. He married a former waitress who worked in the Bavarian War Ministry and whom he had known since the pre-war period, and used the money to pay the deposit for a small estate near Regensburg , where he tried in vain as a farmer.

Contemporary representations describe its external appearance as follows:

“Franz Tausend was a slender man with a long face, accentuated cheekbones, brown hair and a forehead that seemed a little too low and overshadowed his large gray eyes. His voice - he spoke softly and slowly, with an almost feminine timbre - was pleasant and flattering. "

A thousand chemical "researches"

In 1920 Tausend bought a villa in Obermenzing , in which he set up a laboratory in 1921. In 1922 Tausend published the brochure "180 elements, their atomic weights and their integration into the harmonic-periodic system". The book was a mixture of half-digested read scientific facts and imaginative theories. According to a thousand imaginations, modern chemistry is wrong. Metals are organic substances that, if treated properly , could grow like plants . Furthermore, all elements have their own "vibration number" and can be harmoniously connected like musical chords . And just as chords could be transposed , so too could all elements be transformed. A few years later, an expert described the booklet as "the fantasy of an uneducated layman who cannot think logically."

The purpose of the book was to attract donors to his experiments, but it did not succeed. Therefore Tausend first tried to convert table salt into morphine and clay into aluminum and tin in his small laboratory . He also experimented with new methods for the production of nickel alloys and fine steel and tried his hand at remedies against foot-and-mouth disease and aphids , all without success. After the death of his brother in 1923, Tausend acquired his property and a house in Aubing under controversial circumstances, after causing him to disinherit his wife and son on his deathbed.

Tausend came into contact with the young trainee lawyer Rudolf ("Rolf") Rienhardt through a newspaper advertisement . He had been a member of ethnic organizations since his youth, a member of the NSDAP since May 1923 and co-owner of the newspaper Völkischer Kurier , the "Kampfblatt" of the National Socialist Freedom Movement in the mid-1920s . He later became legal advisor to the National Socialist Eher Verlag and, after 1933, a leading Nazi press official. In 1924 Rienhardt was 21 years old and had just run away with the wife of a Prussian landowner, whose money he now wanted to invest profitably. The "Tausend und Rienhardt GmbH for the exploitation of inventions" was founded, which Rienhardt's "fiancée" financed with a loan of 90,000 Reichsmarks .

As a "gold maker"

In order not to lose Rienhardt's support, Tausend first declared in early 1925 that he could produce gold chemically. Rienhardt took Thousand's testimony seriously and saw the industrial production of gold as an opportunity to solve Germany's financial distress through the reparation demands of the Versailles Treaty . That is why he turned to the Reich President Paul von Hindenburg in Berlin , albeit in vain. In addition, according to some newspaper reports, he sought contact with the Luther government in the Reich Chancellery , where he was referred to General Erich Ludendorff as the “trustee” of the Reich. Ludendorff's only precautionary measure before his personal engagement was the examination of a thousand procedures by Johannes Kummer, an alleged "expert" from his political environment. This was a dropped out chemistry student without a degree, but still ran a biological-chemical laboratory in Freiberg (Saxony) .

Thousand used various methods of allegedly producing gold. Two of the methods are described in more detail in the literature:

“He operated with two solutions, which he described to the viewer in great detail during his experiments. One consisted of lead chloride that had been melted in potassium hydroxide - when it got cold, the mass was coated with a layer of paraffin . The other solution consisted of potassium , sodium , paraffin, and mercury ; A thousand left it until it was hard. The manufacture of these two alloys, however, was only the preliminary stage for the actual gold-making experiment. A small amount of Solution No. 1 was melted down until it turned a dark red color; it turned yellow on cooling, with the formation of tiny crystal needles. This melting and cooling process was repeated twice. Now Thousand added a few grams of the second solution and the mixture was heated again; after cooling, golden yellow crystals appeared. Heating and cooling were repeated. In the end, Tausend broke the metal-like mass apart - and lo and behold, on the bottom of the crucible were a few tiny spheres that looked like gold. "

With Ludendorff as a figurehead, numerous investors quickly found themselves among the "rich citizens pressing for the National Socialist Party". One of the investors later described it as follows: “One thing in which Ludendorff was so heavily involved seemed as good as certain.” In October 1925, the “Society 164” under the expert guidance of Justizrat Christoph Schramm (1871-1966) was named legal representative of Ludendorff founded. General Counsel of the company's lawyer August Buckeley, former National Socialist councilor in Munich. Ludendorff's stepson Heinz Pernet , co-defendant in the Hitler trial in 1924, made sure that his stepfather's interests were protected. The financial backers were numerous, mostly right-wing industrialists and manufacturers, including the wholesale merchant Adolf Held from Bremen, the Freiberg Johann Küchenmeister, who was involved in the preparation of the Rathenau murder in 1922, the Berlin engineer and steel manufacturer Alfred Mannesmann, Wilhelm Peters, Erich Watrin and Freiherr von Plattenberg-Mehrum from Cologne, Richard von Schoeller and his nephew Philipp Alois von Schoeller from Vienna, the businessman Otto Tietgen and the tobacco manufacturer Johann Wilhelm von Eicken from Hamburg and the bank director Leopold Osthoff from Munich. “National Socialists as donors”, this is how the Kölnische Volkszeitung later summarized this illustrious group.

The newly founded company began its activity with a debt of 500,000 marks, because Ludendorff had simply settled part of his creditors with company shares of the never officially registered GbR . According to the articles of association, Ludendorff was to receive 75% of the profits from Tausend's gold production, and Tausend only 5%. 8% should get the employees, 12% the donors. However, since the company did not generate any profits, the corresponding sums were paid for by the donors. According to the articles of association, Ludendorff was to use his share "for patriotic purposes and for the good of the German people". But he did not have to give an account of the whereabouts of the money. In practice, “Gesellschaft 164” was used as a money laundering facility for illegal party donations and most of Ludendorff's money was used to finance the deficit Nazi party newspaper Völkischer Kurier .

At the end of 1925, “Gesellschaft 164” moved its headquarters and the laboratory to the Gilching forester's house . In December 1926, Ludendorff, who had meanwhile become suspicious, took an impending major operation as an opportunity to withdraw from the company, which led to its dissolution.

Franz Tausend then founded the “Chemische Studiengesellschaft Tausend e. V. "based in Frankfurt am Main. In 1928, in order to support the bankrupt Freiberg entrepreneur Johannes Küchenmeister, the latter acquired his former flax processing plant on the site of the closed colliery Himmelfahrt Fundgrube in Freiberg at a significantly inflated price of 150,000  RM and set up another laboratory there. At that time, Tausend also promoted the production of gold by the unemployed using home appliances he designed. He also had other investors through a kind of pyramid scheme advertise and began worthless "gold certificates" to sell.

At the end of the 1920s, Tausend owned several castles, including the Paschbach residence , the Eppan castle and the Tharandt castle . He had the latter modernized at great expense without paying the craftsmen and maintained a comfortable apartment not far from it in Dresden . In addition, in 1927 he had acquired Meinhold's Munich villa at Romanstrasse 25 in exchange for company shares. There were also numerous industrial plants. In general, the buildings and land were registered in the name of millennium woman and immediately after the purchase by land charges highly mortgaged, often far beyond the purchase price also.

In November 1928, investors in Berlin's Kaiserhof called a shareholders' meeting of the “Chemical Study Society Tausend”, to which Tausend did not appear. Investors saw themselves cheated out of their money and realized that they had been a charlatan. At the beginning of 1929 bankruptcy proceedings were opened against the study society and Tausend fled from his creditors to Paschbach. An arrest warrant was issued against him in Munich and a thousand people were put out to be wanted.

As early as October 1928, Tausend had tried to sell his process to the Italian state. To this end, he made contact with Tommaso (Maso) Bisi, at the time Undersecretary of State in the Italian Ministry of Economic Affairs, who had personal connections with Mussolini . During the examination of his so-called "Thermit process" for extracting gold from lead, Tausend was exposed as a fraud by the Italian chemist and inventor Quirino Sestini in 1928. His German financiers only found out about these events in 1931.

Arrest and trial

After a traffic accident on the Brenner Pass , Tausend was arrested in Paschbach by the Italian authorities for a runaway and transferred to Neudeck prison on June 4, 1929 . On October 3, 1929, prisoner on remand, Tausend, demonstrated his method of producing gold from lead with surprising success under judicial supervision at the Munich main mint. It was later speculated whether the gold obtained was smuggled in via cigarettes or from the gold nib of his pen holder. However, the application for release from prison submitted by his defense lawyer Count Anton von Pestalozza was rejected. And one journalist asked the question:

“Why didn't Mr. Thousand finance himself in this way when he was still at liberty? Anyone who can make gold in a few hours in a foreign laboratory using simple methods still needs financiers? "

It took the public prosecutor, August Schäfer, two years to collect evidence against a thousand. The trial only opened in Munich in January 1931. “Since 1924”, according to the indictment, “the defendant has lived exclusively from fraud. He's an international impostor of stature. ”The work of the prosecution was so difficult because apart from one donor, no one in a thousand victims was willing to testify against him. Of the 50 or so former members of “Society 164” summoned as witnesses, the most prominent ones did not appear, most of the others describe themselves as “undamaged”. The mockery should not harm either. "Tausends arrest is most regrettable," said a former employee of Tausends, "because if he were free now, Germany would have huge gold reserves."

On February 5, 1931, Tausend was sentenced to three years and eight months in prison for fraud. In its judgment, however, the court found that a thousand had also been exploited. Of the amounts paid into his ventures, which, depending on the estimate, were between 1.37 and 2.5 million marks, he received “only the smallest part.” However, it was around 460,000 marks.

From 1933

In February 1933, Tausend was released from prison after serving the full sentence. Undeterred, he resumed his gold-making activity. "Franz Tausend wants to make 'gold' again - gold from salt", was the headline of the Munich-Augsburger Abendzeitung on April 3, 1933. Since the attempts continued to lead to no verifiable success, Tausend stayed afloat with small frauds. In 1938 he was sentenced to three years in prison and preventive detention in Stuttgart .

There is no evidence that Tausend was transferred to a concentration camp for his experiments, as is occasionally claimed . He is also said to have carried out his experiments in the service of Heinrich Himmler on the grounds of the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais in the mid-1930s , as Adolf Eichmann remembers in his memoirs written in Israeli custody. In this case, too, further evidence is missing. In all likelihood, Eichmann was mistaken for the gold maker Heinz Kurschildgen , who was actually imprisoned there . There is evidence that Kurschildgen was a special prisoner in the Gestapo headquarters, Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8 , in Berlin in 1935 and in the Columbia concentration camp in 1936 . Franz Tausend, on the other hand, is not listed in the prisoner lists.

Tausend died in 1942 as a prisoner in the state prison in Schwäbisch Hall.

“Goldmaker” as a Zeitgeist phenomenon

The claim of a thousand didn't even look particularly exotic in the scientific context of the time. The Nobel Prize winner Fritz Haber tried in these years to win gold from sea water and professor at the TH Charlottenburg Adolf Miethe excited 1924-1926 sensation with his attempts to synthesize gold from mercury. The Japanese physics professor Hantaro Nagaoka pursued the same goal from 1924 with strong electric fields. In the USA, finally, the stock corporation "Argentaurum Company" of metallurgist Stephen H. Emmens had been active since 1897 , which allegedly produced an artificial gold-silver mixture and sold it to the United States Mint .

There were also numerous “gold makers” without a scientific background. In 1926 Hans Unruh was sentenced to several years in prison in Munich for fraud. Starting in 1924, he had pretended to be able to extract gold from ordinary salt by supplying electricity, thereby giving numerous investors financial advantages.

The case of the Hilden alchemist Heinz (sometimes: Heinrich) Kurschildgen shows astonishing parallels to the story of a thousand . He had already appeared as a gold maker in 1922/23 and was declared insane after his exposure. At the end of the 1920s he got in touch with Graf Perponcher, a high functionary of the German National People's Party , who advertised donors for the project. Here, too, it was planned to use the expected profit to pay Germany's reparation debts. In 1931, Kurschildgen was sentenced to 18 months in prison for fraudulent 15 times. After 1933, Kurschildgen sought contact with the ruling National Socialists. Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary in January 1935: “Himmler fell for a gold and gasoline maker Kurschildgen. Wanted to trick me too. I recognized him straight away. ”Kurschildgen was arrested by the Gestapo and taken as a special prisoner to the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, where he had to continue his experiments in a small shed. When he could not deliver a useful result, he received a prison sentence of several years.

At the end of 1937 Heinrich Himmler and Oswald Pohl finally met the alleged gold maker Karl Malchus in Munich , set up a laboratory for him in the SS training camp attached to the Dachau concentration camp and paid him from the budget of Himmler's personal management staff. Malchus wanted to make gold from Isarkies . After these attempts also remained unsuccessful, he was simply transferred to the Dachau concentration camp as a prisoner for four months. At the beginning of the 1950s, Malchus tried again with his idea to win financial backers.

Medial and artistic processing

Immediately after the arrest of a thousand and during the subsequent trial, the “gold maker” case was discussed in the general public and artistically processed. Franz Tausend has been described in several books and treated in numerous poems, satires and caricatures. The Simplicissimus even devoted several front pages to the case, for example in the November 11, 1929 issue, where Ludendorff and the other investors were portrayed as donkeys. And on the cover of the February 9, 1931 edition, the draftsman Ludendorff complained:

"Yes, yes, dear master thousand, we would both have saved Germany for sure if another damned stab in the back hadn't come up ."

Alfred Kerr dedicated a radio cover to the case, Erich Kästner mentions it in his time poem “Autumn, from the train”. And Erich Weinert rhymed a little awkwardly, but with bitter mockery:

A gentleman introduced himself to him:
He said: Herr Ludendorff, do you need money?
I am the gold maker a thousand!
Egg the thousand! said Ludendorff there.
Where do you have the samples, dear?
Mr. Thousand said: Please! One a!

As early as 1932 there was the first play about the "Goldmaker Thousand". The playwright Ferdinand Bruckner also worked on the material, but gave it up in 1932 in favor of “Timon and the Gold”. And Hundertmark in his colportage novel. The story of a deep staple . (Berlin 1934) the writer Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen transposed Tausend's career into the story of his hero “Friedrich Percyval Hundertmark”, with the title hero being portrayed “from an elective relationship”.

Finally, in 1969, Tausends Geschichte was filmed for Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR) by Theo Mezger and Gustav Strübel under the title “Goldmacher Tausend” . Rudolf Wessely played the main role . In the 1980s, his story was to be filmed under the title "The Gold Maker" with the singer Falco in the role of the thousand. The project remained unrealized. In Gilching, where Tausend maintained a secret laboratory on Steinberg No. 123, a path on Steinberg was named "Goldmacherweg" in memory of it in 1957.

The fraudster Dr. Toussaint alias Fredi Schmerbeck from Robert Hältner's novel “Inspector Kajetan and the Fraudsters” is based on Franz Tausend.

In 2020 the novel "The Golden Years of Franz Thousand" by Titus Müller was published .

Publications

  • 180 elements, their atomic weights and their integration into the harmonic periodic system , self-published, Obermenzing 1922

literature

  • Alexander Heiss, Fred R. Wagner: A thousand as martyrs. Secrets behind the scenes. Munich: Herold Heiss, 1931.
  • Egon Larson: Gold for the general . In: Ders .: impostor . Hamburg: Egon Kabel Verlag, 1984, pp. 232-252. ISBN 3-921909-42-2
  • Werner Richter: The prophet of the fine people. Goldmaker thousand. In: Rudolf Olden (ed.): Prophets in German Crisis. The wonderful or the enchanted. Berlin: Rowohlt, 1932, pp. 108-137.
  • Heinrich Schleff: The gold maker Franz Tausend, the greatest adventurer of the present. Dießen am Ammersee ; Publishing house Jos. C. Huber , 1929.
  • Franz Wegener: The alchemist Franz thousand. Alchemy and National Socialism . Gladbeck: KFVR - Kulturförderverein Ruhrgebiet, 2006 (Political Religion of National Socialism; 6). ISBN 3-931300-18-8
  • Franz Wegener:  Tausend, Franz. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 25, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-428-11206-7 , p. 810 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The gold maker Franz Tausend - The story of one of the most spectacular cases of fraud of the 20th century. Exhibition of the Aubing Archive. Munich 2008.
  2. ↑ Heinrich Schleff: The gold maker Franz thousand, the greatest adventurer of the present. Diessen before Munich 1929, pp. 15, 46, 49.
  3. ↑ Franz Wegener: The alchemist Franz thousand. Alchemy and National Socialism . Gladbeck 2006, p. 35ff.
  4. ^ A b c d e Egon Larson: Gold for the general . In: Ders .: impostor . Hamburg: Egon Kabel Verlag, 1984, pp. 232-252.
  5. ↑ Egon Larson: Gold for the General . In: Ders .: impostor . Hamburg 1984, p. 233.
  6. ↑ a b c d e Gold Maker Ludendorff! In: Sozialdemokratischer Pressedienst , January 19, 1931, pp. 12-14; fes.de (PDF)
  7. ↑ Heinrich Schleff: The gold maker Franz thousand, the greatest adventurer of the present. Diessen before Munich 1929, p. 19.
  8. ↑ a b c From a "gold maker" in Bavaria. In: Kölnische Volkszeitung v. October 12, 1929 ( facsimile ( memento of February 1, 2012 in the Internet Archive )).
  9. ↑ a b c Statement by Franz Tausend. Process protocol 1921. State Archives Munich AG 69.264; excerpt. printed in: Franz Wegener: The Alchemist Franz Tausend. Alchemy and National Socialism . Gladbeck 2006, pp. 52-57.
  10. ↑ Munzinger Archive 18/1948 v. April 19, 1948.
  11. ↑ Go Codex of Special Pharmaceutical Preparations. Dresden 1928, p. 163; Franz Wegener: The alchemist Franz thousand. Alchemy and National Socialism . Gladbeck 2006, pp. 57, 60f.
  12. ↑ Quotation from Egon Larson: Gold for the General . In: Ders .: impostor . Hamburg 1984, p. 238f .; further descriptions in: Heinrich Schleff: The gold maker Franz Tausend, the greatest adventurer of the present. Diessen before Munich 1929, p. 35f .; Franz Wegener: The alchemist Franz thousand. Alchemy and National Socialism . Gladbeck 2006, p. 40ff.
  13. ↑ Two years. In: Social Democratic Press Service , November 11, 1930, p. 14; fes.de (PDF).
  14. ↑ Why not Ludendorff? In: Frankfurter Zeitung v. January 24, 1931 ( facsimile ( memento of February 1, 2012 in the Internet Archive )).
  15. ↑ 1897 admitted to the bar. Schramm was Ernst Röhm's defense counsel in the Hitler trial .
  16. ↑ Werner Richter: The prophet of the fine people. Goldmaker thousand. In: Rudolf Olden (ed.): Prophets in German Crisis. The wonderful or the enchanted. Berlin: 1932, p. 124.
  17. ↑ Franz Wegener: The alchemist Franz thousand. Alchemy and National Socialism . Gladbeck 2006, pp. 47, 58.
  18. ↑ Heinz Fiedler: The great swindle of Franz Tausend , Sächsische Zeitung, Freital edition, September 19, 2013, p. 20.
  19. ↑ Franz Wegener: The alchemist Franz thousand. Alchemy and National Socialism . Gladbeck 2006, p. 46 Note 1.
  20. ↑ Stefano Milioto, Enzo Scrivano (ed.): Pirandello e la cultura del suo tempo. Milan 1984, p. 243.
  21. ^ Professor at the "Politecnico di Bergamo ", co-founder of the SIAD industrial group that still exists today; s. Company website .
  22. ↑ A thousand exposed? In: Social Democratic Press Service , January 31, 1931, p. 9 f .; fes.de (PDF)
  23. ↑ Happiness and the end of the goldmaker's thousand In: Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung v. January 12, 1931 ( facsimile ( memento of February 1, 2012 in the Internet Archive )).
  24. ↑ a b The Munich gold maker. In: Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung v. October 10, 1929 ( facsimile ( memento of February 1, 2012 in the Internet Archive )).
  25. ↑ Gold from the "gold maker" thousand? In: Bayerische Staatszeitung , October 10, 1929; hwwa.de (PDF).
  26. ↑ Dr. Anton Graf von Pestalozza (1877–1938) (short biography).
  27. ↑ The gold maker. In: Frankfurter Zeitung v. October 15, 1929 ( facsimile ( memento of February 1, 2012 in the Internet Archive )).
  28. ↑ cit. n. Egon Larson: Gold for the general . In: Ders .: impostor . Hamburg 1984, p. 250.
  29. ↑ cit. n. Egon Larson: Gold for the general . In: Ders .: impostor . Hamburg 1984, p. 251.
  30. ↑ 3.8 years in prison for a thousand! In: Social Democratic Press Service v. February 5, 1931, p. 12; fes.de (PDF). Franz Wegener: The alchemist Franz thousand. Alchemy and National Socialism . Gladbeck 2006, p. 90, note 2.
  31. ↑ Quotation from Franz Wegener: The Alchemist Franz Tausend. Alchemy and National Socialism . Gladbeck 2006, p. 92 Note 4.
  32. ↑ all relevant references are based on a remark in Wilhelm Theodor H. Wulff's questionable book Zodiac and Swastika. As an astrologer at Himmler's court. Gütersloh 1968, p. 127; At the time indicated by Wulff, Tausend was already dead.
  33. ^ Adolf Eichmann: Idols . Part I., sheet 58f. ( online ( memento of October 6, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) in the Mazal Library ).
  34. ↑ a b Erika Bucholtz: The "house prison" of the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Terror and Resistance 1933–1945. Berlin 2005, p. 224; Ferdinand Friedensburg : Memoirs. Frankfurt / M. (1969), pp. 256f.
  35. ^ A b Manfred Franke: Everything was just invented. The alchemist of the Nazis . one day , June 23, 2010.
  36. ↑ Erika Bucholtz: The "house prison" of the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Terror and Resistance 1933–1945. Berlin 2005.
  37. ↑ Ralf Hahn: Gold from the sea. The research of the Nobel Prize winner Fritz Haber in the years 1922–1927. Diepholz, Stuttgart / Berlin 1999.
  38. ↑ Adolf Miethe: Gold from Mercury. In: Die Naturwissenschaften , 13, 1925, pp. 635–637; Hans Christian Förster: How quickly does world fame go. In: TU Berlin intern , No. 12/2005; an-morgen-haben.de (PDF).
  39. ↑ Hantaro Nagaoka: The conversion of mercury into gold. In: Die Naturwissenschaften 13 (1925), pp. 692-694; Robert A. Nelson: Transmutations of Mercury to Gold. In: Ders .: Adept Alchemy. Jean (NV) 1998, Part II, Chapter 7.
  40. ↑ s. Vincent H. Gaddis : America's Amazing Alchemist (1997).
  41. ↑ s. Franz Wegener: The alchemist Franz thousand. Alchemy and National Socialism . Gladbeck 2006, pp. 90ff.
  42. ↑ Goldmachers luck and end. In: Social Democratic Press Service , May 21, 1930, p. 19 f .; fes.de (PDF).
  43. ^ Adolf Uzarski: Kurschildgen. In: Die Weltbühne , No. 53, December 30, 1930, p. 1000. Social Democratic Press Service , December 5, 1930, p. 5; fes.de (PDF). The "gold maker" in court. In: Social Democratic Press Service , December 19, 1930, p. 12 f .; fes.de (PDF). Gold maker. Imprisoned for Fraud. In: The Canberra Times v. January 21, 1931, p. 1.
  44. ^ Goebbels diaries , entry v. January 27, 1935.
  45. ↑ Franz Wegener: The alchemist Franz thousand. Alchemy and National Socialism . Gladbeck 2006, p. 137 ff.
  46. ↑ Heinrich Schleff: The gold maker Franz thousand, the greatest adventurer of the present. Diessen before Munich 1929; Alexander Heiss, Fred R. Wagner: A thousand as martyrs. Secrets behind the scenes. Munich 1931; Werner Richter: The prophet of the fine people. Goldmaker thousand. In: Rudolf Olden (ed.): Prophets in German Crisis. The wonderful or the enchanted. 1932, pp. 108-137.
  47. ↑ Facsimiles in Franz Wegener: The Alchemist Franz Tausend. Alchemy and National Socialism . Gladbeck 2006, p. 15.
  48. ↑ Erich Schilling: Goldmacher Tausend, p. 400 ( illustration ).
  49. ↑ E. Schilling: The stab in the back of the public prosecutor. Title page of Simplicissimus v. February 9, 1931 ( illustration ); s. a. Simplicissimus v. February 23, 1931 with Tausend, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Weißenberg , drawing by Th. Th. Heine ( illustration ).
  50. ^ Alfred Kerr: Goldmacher Tausend , February 1, 1931; Recording in DRA Ffm 2622010 .
  51. ↑ Harald Hartung: An undertone of luck. About poets and poems. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2007, p. 70.
  52. ↑ Erich Weinert: Collected poems. Berlin 1970, p. 265.
  53. ↑ Deutsches Bühnenjahrbuch 1932 , p. 376 and 634.
  54. ^ Christiane Lehfeldt: The playwright Ferdinand Bruckner. Göppingen 1975, p. 29.
  55. ↑ Alphons Kappeler: A case of “pseudologia phantastica” in German literature. Fritz Reck-Malleczewen. Göppingen 1975, p. 331ff.
  56. ↑ Falco is shooting with Tom Cruise. In: Bravo , No. 48/1986.
personal data
SURNAME A thousand, Franz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Tausend, Franz Seraph (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German alchemist and impostor
DATE OF BIRTH July 5, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH Krumbach (Swabia)
DATE OF DEATH July 9, 1942
Place of death Schwäbisch Hall