Wilhelm Adolf zu Rantzau

Wilhelm Adolf zu Rantzau (* 1688 ; † 1734 in Akershus ) was 4th and last Imperial Count of Rantzau and a member of the Breitenburg line of the noble Rantzau family in Schleswig-Holstein . He was the younger brother of the 3rd Reich Count Christian Detlev zu Rantzau , in whose murder he is said to have participated.

The brother of the 3rd Reich Count

Wilhelm Adolf took over the administration of the Imperial County of Rantzau after his brother was arrested in Berlin in 1715 on charges of homosexual acts and then imprisoned in Spandau . The older brother had caused a number of disputes with the Danish royal family and was feared because of his costly lifestyle and rather despotic rule in the county. Wilhelm Adolf, on the other hand, is said to have behaved more benevolently towards the population, for example at his instigation the new building of the Holy Spirit Church in Barmstedt was built . In 1720 Christian Detlev was released from prison and returned to Barmstedt Castle Rantzau , accompanied by 50 men recruited in Hamburg who served him as an armed guard. The older brother continued his previous lifestyle and thus continued to make himself unpopular.

The murder and the trial

The memorial stone to Christian Detlev zu Rantzau in the Vosslocher forest

On November 10, 1721, Christian Detlev was hunting near the castle island when he was shot from behind and died of his injuries. At first it was believed that it was an accident. Since Christian Detlev left no descendants, Wilhelm Adolf, incomprehensibly, set out for Copenhagen to allow himself to be appointed by the Danish king as the official heir, although the imperial counties, through the Vienna double diploma of 1650, which endowed him with prince-like privileges, gave him exclusively to the emperor and the Subordinated to imperial courts. The Danish king had no right to bring him to trial. During the trip, he was informed that he was suspected of masterminding the murder. Wilhelm Adolf turned back immediately and fled, veiled in peasant clothes, via Holstein to Hamburg . Meanwhile, the estate in Drage was already occupied on the orders of Frederick IV. Wilhelm Adolf was arrested near Pinneberg in the spring of 1722 and was then taken to Rendsburg . There he and a group of men devoted to him were tried for fratricide. Wilhelm Adolf could not be accused of the fatal shot, but as the instigator he was sentenced to a fine of 20,000 Reichstalers and imprisoned from 1726 until the end of his life in the Akershus fortress near Oslo. The son of Elmshorn church bailiff Detlev Prätorius was convicted as the executing perpetrator and executed in 1725; other alleged accomplices and perpetrators were publicly whipped and branded.

The unsolved perpetrator question

Up to the present it is not clear whether Wilhelm Adolf was responsible for the murder of his brother or even carried it out himself. After all, his hasty escape made himself suspicious and the quarrels between the brothers were widely known. But one must also consider that the murder came in handy for the Danish King Friedrich IV, after all he too had his quarrels with Christian Detlev and benefited from Wilhelm Adolf's disempowerment. In an illegal will contract that ignored the authority of the emperor in 1669 it was stipulated that in the event of a missing male heir, the imperial county of Rantzau should "revert" to the Danish king, who had not established the imperial county at all. Since Christian Detlev had no descendants, the childless Wilhelm Adolf was the 4th Reich Count after the death of his older brother. The confiscation of the imperial counties and the goods Drage , Breitenburg and Rantzau carried out by Friedrich IV was also illegal, as demonstrated by the trials that Catharina Countess zu Rantzau (1683–1743) successfully led around the imperial county and the goods Drage and Breitenburg. Everything was restituted to her against assumption of the legal costs (230,000 Reichsthaler, a million euros in today's currency). In order to raise the sum, however, she was forced to sell the imperial county and Drage.

literature

• Richard Haupt: Barmstedt and Rantzau . Vollbehr & Riepen, approx. 1920
• Henning v. Rumohr: castles and mansions in western Schleswig-Holstein . Weidlich Verlag, Würzburg, 1988
• Karl von Rantzau, The Rantzau House: A Family Chronicle, Celle (JG Müller) 1865, digitized in digital-sammlungen.de
• Gottfried Heinrich Handelmann:  Rantzau, Christian Reichsgraf zu . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 27, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1888, p. 275 f.

Web links

• History of the city of Barmstedt on Barmstedt.de
• The Reichsgrafschaft Rantzau on geschichte-sh.de