Black Peter One of Schinderhannes' accomplices was
Peter Petri, nicknamed "Black Peter", who is described as a black-haired man who was as gentle as a lamb when sober, but became violent when drunk and no longer in control of himself. Polecat Jacob (
Iltis-Jacob) and Reidenbach had already been his accomplices in numerous raids in the Hunsrück. When Petri and Polecat were on their way home from a christening with their wife, Petri and Jacob's wife remained a little behind and crawled into the grass. The passing
Jewish cattle dealer, Simon Seligmann, from
Seibersbach discovered the lovers and betrayed them to the aforementioned Polecat. He came back and strangled his unfaithful wife. Petri, however, could not forgive the Jew who had caught him at his tryst and betrayed him to Polecat. A little later he was with Johannes Bückler in the Thiergarten forester's lodge at
Argenthal and celebrated with him and friends where they had ordered Jewish bankers to make music. Meanwhile, Seligmann passed the house with a cow and was seen by Petri. Petri asked Bückler to follow him. In pairs, they attacked the Jew and stabbed him repeatedly to death before plundering his body. Whether Johannes Bückler also murdered Seligmann could not be proven. A
juridical review of all the records has shown that an accusation of murder could not be upheld against him.
Placken-Klos At first, the gang was mainly up to no good in the then
cantons of Kirn,
(Bad) Sobernheim,
Herrstein,
Rhaunen,
Kirchberg,
Simmern and
Stromberg. Later, its field of activity shifted to areas beyond
Nahe. In the canton of Kirn, the robbers often stayed in at
Hahnenbach and
Schneppenbach. In Hahnenbach, Johannes Bückler had accommodated his lover, Elise Werner, with a "
dirty old woman", Anne Marie Frey. Elise Schäfer from
Faid lived in Schneppenbach with her 14-year-old daughter
"Amie". This girl is described as intelligent,
"not prim and fleshy to feel" and was courted by Bückler and Seibert along with some others.
"Placken-Klos", who had given his Elise to Johannes Bückler, became jealous about it. One day
Placken-Klos came into the house of Elise and Amie and demanded the surrender of Amie to his
"constant company". Amie, who was in love with Johannes Bückler, was able to defend herself successfully against this request, but had to hand over her clothes to
Placken-Klos, who was looking for a way out. A little later Bückler appeared with Seibert, Fink and other journeymen with Elise and Amie and learned what had happened. They decided to visit the robber, and finally found him at the
Baldenauer Hof near
Morscheid, where he was killed by Seibert and Bückler on 22 December 1797. The murder of
Placken-Klos by Johannes Bückler could also not be proven beyond doubt.
Imprisonment By the time of his arrest in Simmern in February 1799, Bückler had committed more than 40 cattle and horse thefts. Johannes Bückler returned to Wallenbrück around 1800, where he tried to steal horses from the mill now run by Conrad Weyrich. Another longer residence of Bückler was the settlement near
Dickenschied Scheidbach. At the end of February 1799, the Kirn gendarmerie were able to capture Johannes Bückler in Schneppenbach by surrounding the house of Elise and Amie and surprising him in his sleep. He was brought before the magistrate in Kirn, where he confessed to some of his crimes. With his companion, Johann Müller, he was taken to the prison tower in Simmern, where Elise was able to visit him twice. With the help of his friend, Philipp Arnold, who sat in the guard room, Johannes Bückler was able to flee on the night of 19/20 August 1799. The dungeon in the tower was in its round basement, which could only be reached from above through a hatch through which the prisoners were lowered and raised. The prisoners were also supplied through this hole with the most essential food. However, Bückler was not kept in this dungeon, but in a prison cell above it. Bückler cut through the door boards with a secretly hidden knife and glued them back together again with chewed bread as glue. When a good opportunity arose, he left the cell, broke through a kitchen window loosely barred with iron, and from there jumped from the first floor into the moat of the city wall, dislocating his leg or breaking his fibula.
Crime spree After his escape from the tower at Simmern, Bückler turned mainly to robbery and extortion, because horse theft had become too burdensome and not profitable enough. He committed these acts with an average number of five accomplices. A large proportion of his criminal activity was
directed against Jews, perhaps because attacks on
Jews would result in negligible interference from the part rest of the population. Locations: • Around 1800 Johannes Bückler moved his "residence" to the semi-ruined castle of
Schmidtburg in the
Hahnenbach valley and used Schloss
Kallenfels above Kirn, as an alternative base and observation post. valley between
Schneppenbach and
Bundenbach :The local population were aware of the presence of the robbers in the whole of Kallenfels, Hahnenbach, Sonnschied and
Griebelschied, but nothing was revealed to the authorities. In Griebelschied a so-called 'robber ball' was celebrated in August, where the robbers enjoyed the company of the women of the village. Perhaps it was a result of this cockiness that the gang, which had long been a focus of police interest, was able to be located. Numerous robberies followed, mainly against Jews. The robbers became more audacious and moved beyond their home area into the
Saar area. • In
Wickenhof, after an armed street robbery (on 18 December 1799), Johannes Bückler got to know a woman called Julchen around Easter 1800. Julchen later became his wife and companion and also took part in his raids. Bückler had already had eight lovers before Julchen, four of whom are known by name: Elise Werner, Buzliese-Amie, Katharina Pfeiffer and Margarete Blasius. All in all, however, it can be ascertained that, in particular, the numerous tramps and vagrants tried to secure a subsistence living by thefts. Short-term associations were the rule. However, Bückler had acquired an increasingly important reputation in the course of 1800, so many people with dubious reputations were happy to join him or even stayed on guard without being asked when he was e.g. in a restaurant. As the new century began, the French police system gradually began to take effect. In 1800, Johannes Bückler also came under the lens of law enforcement agencies on a supra-regional level, according to a decree by the General Government Commissioner,
Jean-Baptiste-Moïse Jollivet, so that under the pseudonym of
Jakob Ofenloch he began a travelling shopkeeper's trade in the lands on the bank of the Rhine.
Arrest and fate On 31 May 1802, he was tracked down in the eastern
Hinter Taunus between Wolfenhausen and Haintchen by the
Electorate of Trier's manorial court councillor and official administrator of
Limburg a.d. Lahn, Mr. Fuchs, at dawn with troops from
Niederselters. When they were still a quarter of an hour away from Wolfenhausen, they saw a person walking out of a cornfield onto the road 300 paces away. The troops felt he was acting oddly and he was immediately arrested. At that time it was not known that the stranger was Schinderhannes. Rather, Johannes Bückler had been expelled from Wolfenhausen by a patrol two days earlier and had been picked up again by the same patrol and then arrested. He was led to Wolfenhausen, where the
lieutenant and patrol for
Wied-Runkel were based. From there he was taken to
Runkel. With the statement that he,
Jakob Schweikard, as he called himself, wanted to report for military service, he tried to secure his release. He was taken from Runkel to Limburg to
Haus Rütsche 5, the seat of the recruitment office, under light surveillance. At that time it was still not known that this man was Johannes Bückler. The light guard had more to do with his wish of the army service, because many of the volunteers had made off with the hand money. Only in Limburg was he betrayed by a man named Zerfass from the
long hedge, today
Villmar-Langhecke, and after a short detention in the basement of the recruiting office, under heavy guard, he was transferred to the
imperial city of
Frankfurt am Main. At that time, Bückler's determination to lead a robber's life was wavering. He promised the imperial authorities to provide information about all his crimes as long as he was not extradited to the
French authorities who had occupied the Electorate of Trier, west of the Rhine, since 1801. After several thorough interrogations, however, he was handed over to the authorities with Julchen and some accomplices on 16 June 1802 and they were taken to French-occupied
Mainz. After being handed over, Bückler was imprisoned in the
Wooden Tower of Mainz and subjected during the 16-month preliminary investigation by
Johann Wilhelm Wernher to several dozen individual interrogations, during which 565 questions were asked. In addition, there were numerous
identity parades. The court upheld Bückler's plea for a merciful sentence and was thus able to elicit an extensive
confession from him. Without incriminating himself with violent offences, he named well over 100 persons who were connected with his crimes. With him, a further 19 accomplices were sentenced to death by a total of 68 defendants.
Trial The trial began on 24 October 1803 and attracted a large crowd. Three defendants had already died in custody. The reading of the 72-page
indictment in German and French took one and a half days. The trial was chaired by
Georg Friedrich Rebmann, the president of the Mainz Criminal Court. The trial took place in the then-academy hall of the former
Electoral Palace in Mainz. 400 witnesses were questioned. The employment of professional judges, officers, interpreters and defence lawyers allows the conclusion to be drawn that, at least in rudimentary terms, there was a safeguarding of the rule of law and the public in today's sense. Between 1803 and 1811, Georg Friedrich von Rebmann was the presiding judge at the Mainz Special Court. After the conclusion of the proceedings, there were 20 acquittals, 18 were given prison sentences in chains or were exiled, and 20 were sentenced to death. The accused were charged with various offences, including
vagrancy and
coercion, attempted burglary and theft, food theft and fraud, cattle theft, burglary, extortion,
handling stolen goods,
grievous bodily harm resulting in death, murder and robbery.
Execution Bückler was sentenced to
death on the basis of the statutory provision which provided for the death penalty for armed burglaries. The verdict had already been reached before the start of the main trial, since the court had already invited friends and acquaintances to the execution on 21 November 1803 in October. Johann Bückler's father was sentenced to 22 years in chains, but died after a few weeks on 28 December 1803. Julchen Blasius served two years in
prison. She gave birth to Bückler's son, Franz Wilhelm, before the trial on 1 October 1802. His direct descendants still live in the Taunus today. The sentencing of Bückler and 19 of his followers to death by guillotine was announced on 20 November 1803. Because of the large crowd (about 30,000 onlookers) the
guillotine was not constructed, as was usual, near the Gau Gate (
Gautor), but outside the walls directly in front of the New Gate (
Neutor). On 21 November 1803, the condemned were driven in five open wagons to the public place of execution. Bückler was the first to be led to the
scaffold. Seconds later the
execution was completed. 24 minutes after the first execution, it was all over. After the severed heads had fallen, by means of a device into the lower, covered part of the scaffold and first examinations had been made, their bodies were taken to a nearby barracks built especially for this purpose. Professors of the
École Supérieure in Mainz (formerly the
university) and scientists of the Mainz Private Medical Association (
Medizinische Privatgesellschaft zu Mainz) carried out
inter alia investigations with electricity in order to test whether decapitated persons still showed sensations. Based on these investigations, the true location of Bückler's body can no longer be determined. Although today in the anatomical collection of the
University of Heidelberg there is a skeleton with the inscription
Schinderhannes, this skeleton is missing Bückler's known arm and leg fracture, it also has a different body size and has had a different skull since 1945. According to an evaluation of the contemporary medical reports, Bückler also had the last stage of
tuberculosis in his chest. ==Popular culture==