Johann David Lens

Johann David Linse in 1789 in the prison in Ludwigsburg

Johann David Linse (also Linsing and Lensing , * 1751 in Großbottwar ; † November 21, 1789 in Ludwigsburg ) was an innkeeper and notorious robber in northern Württemberg .

Life

Johann David was the son of from Stuttgart originating butcher Häusser († 1760) and Clare Wildermuth from Rielingshausen . He was the oldest child and had two younger sisters. The parents ran the inn Zum Weißen Rößle , a shield tavern outside the city walls of Großbottwar. After the early death of the father, the mother married the butcher Andreas Linse (1719–1777), also from Stuttgart, who continued to run the Rößle with her . Johann David was meanwhile cellar master and waiter at the Goldenes Ochsen in Heidelberg before he returned to Großbottwar after the death of his stepfather to continue running the Rössle with his mother and sisters . In spring 1780 he married the Pleidelsheim pastor's daughter Johanna Elisabeth Faber, who was expecting a child from him. In 1780 the young couple bought the Rößle from Linses mother and sisters for the purchase price of 1650 guilders.

Even before the inn was bought, in 1779, Linse was responsible for the theft of 160 guilders from Grönninger's widow in Großbottwar. At the latest, the debts after buying the inn led to a number of other break-ins and thefts in the vicinity. His inn, located outside the city walls, was not only a meeting place for several local guilds and a focal point for honorable travelers, but also all kinds of traveling people with dubious intentions frequented it. At that time, taverns were an important place for the exchange of information and therefore a frequent starting point for raids. Not infrequently, the innkeepers were also stolen , which traded the stolen goods to their customers. And especially during Linse's time, several innkeepers in his area were on record as robbers themselves, including innkeeper Heinrich Weiß from Mainhardt and the sun innkeeper Johann Friedrich Schwahn, who denounced several southwest German innkeepers as fences when making a confession in 1760.

Linses broke into the landscape treasury in Stuttgart in March 1782, where he and an accomplice gained access through a hole in the wall and caused a loss of 6301 guilders. With his share of around 1200 guilders from the booty, he paid off his debts and began to build a house. In 1783 in Heilbronn he stole around 1200 guilders from the merchant Gsell. In addition to Stuttgart, where he often stole silverware, and Heilbronn, Ludwigsburg was also one of his favorite destinations. He also committed a variety of minor thefts in his immediate vicinity in Großbottwar, where he u. a. Beds and cattle stole. Lens committed the majority of his crimes at night, usually alone or with an accomplice.

Linse was briefly imprisoned in 1788 when he was observed by two boys stealing cattle in Großbottwar, but was released after a few days, probably under the influence of the Stuttgart family. His break-ins remained unexplained until he was caught and arrested in a break-in in Kornwestheim in April 1789 . During a subsequent house search, vast amounts of stolen property were found in many of the buildings belonging to Linses estate, in attics, chambers, stables and barns, for which hiding places such as a deep, hidden pit had been created in the shed. Linse was brought into custody in the breeding and work house in Ludwigsburg, from where it was reported on July 30, 1789 that his clothes, which had been left at the time of his arrest, were tattered and that the prisoner himself was infested with vermin.

The written trial against Linse before the Ludwigsburg city court was conducted by Ludwigsburg chief bailiff Christoph Ludwig Kerner , Justinus Kerner's father . After a legal opinion by the law faculty of the University of Tübingen , Linse was finally sentenced to death. The decisive factor for the harsh verdict was probably the burglary of the landscape treasury, which was rated as a particularly serious criminal offense. The judgment was publicly carried out on November 21, 1789 at the Ludwigsburg gallows .

A Gottfried Gruber from Gronau was sentenced to at least two and a half years in prison as an accomplice in the break-in in Kornwestheim. Linse's wife Johanna Elisabeth was sentenced to four weeks in prison in the summer of 1790 for participating in her husband's crimes, which she then served in the Ludwigsburg prison. Several other accomplices, some of them from Linse's relatives, were sentenced to public works or symbolic prison terms of one to three days with bread and water . The trail of Linses relatives is lost after the trials. His underage son was to be sent to a Ludwigsburg orphanage, where he can no longer be proven due to the incomplete files. The Gasthaus Rößle came to Johann Konrad Schuler, who changed the name of the restaurant to Zur Rose because of the bad reputation of the Rößleswirt .

Contemporaries soon compared Linse to the robber captain Hannikel (Jakob Reinhardt), who was hanged in 1787 and who had led one of the last significant robber gangs in southwest Germany. One of the scouts who had helped to catch Hannikels was mentioned in Linses court files in connection with a forgery offense. In later stories, Linse was also charged with other unsolved crimes such as the killing of the Großbottwarer cooper Johann Daniel Baur in January 1788. The vernacular spanned several legends about the Rößleswirt and brought it in connection with the Großbottwarer execution place, where it was not hung.

literature

• Erich Viehöfer: Historical robbers in Württemberg. The Rößleswirt from Großbottwar. In: History sheets from the Bottwartal. No. 8, 1999, ISSN  0948-1532 , pp. 13-24.