Julius Krautz

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Julius Krautz (born September 11, 1843 in Zehden , † April 24, 1921 in Rüdersdorf near Berlin ) was a Prussian executioner .

Julius Krautz is considered the most famous executioner in German history. The clothes that are commonly associated with the office go back to him: tailcoat, white gloves and top hat.

Life

As the 16th child of a Zehden knacker , he began an apprenticeship as a pastry chef , which he never finished. He left his hometown and went to Jerichow near Tangermünde in 1857 at the age of 14 to learn his trade with the local knacker. Then Krautz worked in various cover shops. He did his military service in the Prussian army , took part in the wars of 1866 and 1870/1871, was promoted to NCO and was awarded the Iron Cross . He went to Berlin and became the works manager of the big Berlin fiscal masking shop on Wedding. He later took the position of executioner.

His first execution on August 16, 1878 was that of the anarchist Max Hödel , who carried out a revolver assassination attempt on Kaiser Wilhelm I on May 12, 1878 . In Berlin at that time , beheadings were carried out with a hand ax, the so-called judging ax . Since Krautz did not own an ax of his own at that time, he borrowed a copy of an ax from the Märkisches Provinzial-Museum in Berlin. The executioner Friedrich Reindel , who worked in Magdeburg , had loaned it there in March 1876 for exhibition purposes. The ax and the execution block can still be seen today in the Berlin Märkisches Museum. A little later, Krautz received his own ax.

By April 1889, Krautz had beheaded 53 men and one woman, eight of them in Berlin and the Mark Brandenburg, 36 in Prussian provinces and ten in non-Prussian countries. As an executioner, Krautz received 300 to 500 marks per execution  , but had to bear the necessary expenses for himself and his three assistants, so that the net profit was around 150 marks per execution.

During a fight in an inn in April 1889, Krautz killed his former assistant Gummich in self-defense , was arrested, tried and acquitted. However, the Berlin judiciary renounced the services of Krautz as an executioner.

The 3000-page colportage novel Der Scharfrichter von Berlin, a novel based on acts, records and communications by the executioner Julius Krautz, achieved almost legendary fame . Despite its high price of 13 gold marks, the work published in 1889 found a quarter of a million buyers. The work, published weekly in 130 issues of ten pfennigs each, had 260,000 subscribers. The novel is said to have found widespread circulation among Berlin maids. In terms of composition, it is built up from a chain of sensations, with the highlights being applied to a poorly elaborated sequence of actions, as in a bench song . The first chapters offer, among other things, the following actions: "Execution of an innocent girl, fall of an artist from the trapeze, oath of revenge, child robbery, criminal hunt, escape of the executed, preparations for child murder, escape with child, railway accident, adultery" etc.

Krautz then leased a horse slaughterhouse and also worked as an innkeeper. He sold his ax to Castan's Panoptikum on Friedrichstrasse in Berlin, where it was lost after 1920. He later moved to Burig near Neu Zittau, east of Berlin. At the turn of the century, Krautz was the best-known representative of his guild. The doctor and brain physiologist Ernst Below reported in his memoirs on a Sunday morning in Dalldorf about an executioner Krautz who lived in an old tiling shop.

The folk festival on the occasion of the 10th German Federal Shooting in Berlin-Pankow listed among the attractions in 1890: “Eppmann, contract. Reiber, Straightening Tools of Executioner Krautz ”.

literature

  • Christa Berg: Handbook of the German history of education . Volume IV. CH Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Munich 1991, ISBN 978-3-406-32467-3 , p. 491
  • Matthias Blazek: Executioner in Prussia and in the German Empire 1866–1945 . Ibidem-Verlag, Stuttgart 2010, ISBN 978-3-8382-0107-8
  • Heiner Boehncke, Hans Sarkowicz: The metropolis of crime: robbers and crooks in Berlin and Brandenburg . Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-8218-1167-6 , p. 156
  • Johann Dachs: Death by the guillotine: The German executioner Johann Reichhart (1893–1972) . Ullstein, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-548-36243-5
  • Richard J. Evans: Rituals of retribution: capital punishment in Germany, 1600–1987 . 1996, p. 372
  • Richard J. Evans: Rituals of Retribution - The Death Penalty in German History 1532–1987 . Kindler, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-463-40400-1 , p. 462 ff.
  • Victor von Falk: The executioner of Berlin. Novel based on acts, records and communications by the executioner Julius Krautz . Weichert, Berlin 1890
  • Helmuth Nürnberger (Ed.): Theodor Fontane - Works, Writings and Letters , Volume 2; Volume 5. Darmstadt 1994, ISBN 3-446-14909-0 , p. 1012
  • Werner Hutterli, Knut Hickethier, Michael Schwelling: Myth Berlin: On the history of perception of an industrial metropolis . Verlag Ästhetik und Kommunikation, Berlin 1984, p. 120
  • Tankred Koch: History of the executioners - Fate of executioners from eight centuries , Heidelberg: Manfred Pawlak 1988 ISBN 3-88199-882-9 , p. 267 ff. (Portrait of Julius Krautz on p. 275)
  • Rudolf Schenda: People without a book: Studies on the social history of popular reading materials 1770-1910 . Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt a. M. 1970
  • Maximilian Schmidt: Julius Krautz the executioner of Berlin - A cultural image from the nineteenth century, etc. self-published, 1893
  • Ilse Schumann: An unusual biography . In: From Galgenstrick and hangman's knot (Die Mark Brandenburg, issue 22). Lucie Großer, Berlin 1996
  • International Archive for the Social History of German Literature , Volume 31. Vienna 2006, p. 223
  • Journal of History , Volume 50, Issues 7-12. Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2002, p. 745
  • Uwe Winkler: From the museum to the scaffold. A little story of an ax. Verlag M, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-9812257-3-0

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Evans: Rituals of Retribution . P. 462.
  2. ↑ Koch: History of the executioner . P. 267. Koch says that Krautz's father was a sergeant by profession.
  3. ↑ Kriminalbiologische Gesellschaft: monthly for criminal psychology and criminal law reform , volume 21, 5th issue, Heidelberg 1930, p. 276.
  4. ↑ Petra Brinkmeier: Female youth care between sociability and morality - On the history of the Association of Evangelical Virgins' Associations in Germany (1890-1918) . Diss., Potsdam 2003, p. 234.
  5. ^ Vossische Zeitung , July 31, 1898, morning edition
  6. ↑ schaubuden.de with reference to Hammer, 1987, p. 15 f.
personal data
SURNAME Krautz, Julius
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German executioner
DATE OF BIRTH September 11, 1843
PLACE OF BIRTH Toes
DATE OF DEATH April 24, 1921
Place of death Rüdersdorf near Berlin