Heraldic fraud

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Coats of arms fraud is understood as the deliberate deception of the buyer of a coat of arms about the age, the scope of the management authorization or the source.

If the age is deceived , either a self-designed coat of arms is sold as an outdated one or a new coat of arms with an invented genealogy . The scope of the management authorization is not correctly reproduced if the coat of arms impostor sells an existing coat of arms of a family with the same or a similar name and claims that all bearers of the same name are entitled to use the coat of arms as well. The source of the supposedly old coat of arms is misleading if a non-existent source of the coat of arms is given or an existing source is given that does not contain it.

The heraldic fraud companies were mainly active from 1806 to 1932. One reason for this was that since the end of the Old Kingdom (1806) the German princely courts stopped issuing coats of arms , apart from a few exceptions, because the Hofpfalzgrafen , who had carried out this up until then, had disappeared with its end. Only in 1912 did King Friedrich August III. of Saxony a "Saxon Foundation for Family Research", which issued coats of arms for commoners in his name.

Well-known heraldic swindlers

  • Max Asten (called himself "von Asten"; * 1828; † 1897), around 1850 to 1895 in Neustadt an der Saale
  • Hugo Bieler (* 1827) in Berlin from 1856 to 1890
  • Karl Fleischmann (* 1849; † 1913) in Munich
  • Gebhard Gartenschild (* 1773) in Vienna
  • Berthold Großkopf (* 1874; † 1915) in Karlsruhe. After his death, his brother Emil took over the workshop
  • Paul Gründel (* 1857; † 1931) in Dresden
  • Raimund Günther (* 1860; † 1935) in Salzburg
  • Adolph Hebensperger (* 1864; † 1897) in Munich
  • Hermann Hermann (* 1874; † 1952) in Vienna
  • Levi Herschbach (also Leopold or Hirschbach; * 1805; † 1893) in Cologne

literature

  • Jürgen Arndt (arrangement): The crest fraud. Its workshops and their owners. A look into the heraldic subculture. Degener & Co., Neustadt ad Aisch 1997, ISBN 3-7686-7013-9 .