Extracts from the experiences of a Bavarian prison chaplain—Life history of a notorious criminal, Joseph Schenk—Early crimes—Kaiserslautern, “The Crescent Moon” prison—Schenk becomes known as the “Prison King”—Punishment has no effect on him—Frequent escapes—Passes through the prisons of WÜrzburg, Munich, Bayreuth—WÜrger, the usurer—Plies his trade when committed to gaol—Anecdotes of his rapacity—The tax collector who becomes his prey—Anna Pfeiffer, a rare example of a female hypocrite—Two recent crimes—The boy murdered in Xanten—A Jewish butcher accused—Trial causes an immense sensation—Gigantic sum stolen from Rothschild’s bank by chief cashier—Eventually arrested in Egypt—The causes of the cashier’s crime.

Some other interesting types of German criminals are described by a Bavarian prison chaplain, the Rev. Otto Fleischmann, who spent a quarter of a century in earnest labours among the inmates of a great penal institution. Some of his descriptions and experiences will be of interest and give us at the same time the life histories of notorious criminals. Let us begin with one Joseph Schenk, a curious example of the old-time convict, one of a class now rarely to be met with in the modern prison.

Joseph Schenk was born in Berlin in 1798. His mother was a canteen woman in a Prussian regiment. His father, whose name he never learned, was no doubt a soldier and a man of coarse, brutal disposition, many of whose worst traits had been clearly transmitted to his son. Joseph Schenk, from his earliest days, exhibited a cruel nature; his temper was ungovernable, his delinquencies incessant; he was given to acts of brutal violence, and to the last he was of an inhuman character. He passed much of his old age in the prison hospital, where his greatest treat as a patient was permission to attend at a post mortem and be present at the dissection of a corpse. It was horrible to see him gloating over the hideous details as he watched the autopsy.

Schenk’s mother, when she left the regiment, went to her native place, Oberlustadt, where her son served his apprenticeship to a weaver and was then drawn by conscription into a regiment of Bavarian light horse. He never talked much of those days (we are still quoting from the chaplain), but it is certain that when the restraints of strict discipline were loosened and he was discharged, he rapidly fell into evil courses and developed into an accomplished miscreant. He went home to Oberlustadt and became the terror of the neighbourhood as the author of repeated dastardly crimes. In 1824 Schenk was put upon his trial to answer for the commission of three heinous offences perpetrated in rapid succession. A large concourse of people attended the trial at the Assizes. He was charged with rape, street robbery and murder, and his sentence was death, but was commuted by the soft-hearted king, Maximilian I, into lifelong imprisonment in chains.

At that time the great central prison of Kaiserslautern, the so called “Crescent Moon,” was still in process of construction, and the reprieved convict was lodged in the gaol of ZweibrÜcken. There he quickly developed into a prison notoriety; he became a terror to his officers from his bold and cunning tricks, and the admiration of his fellow-convicts. He was known as the “prison king,” whom no walls, however high or thick, could hold, and who was endowed with such strength that he could carry with ease a leg chain and bullet weighing 28 pounds. He soon acquired the deepest insight into prison ways and was unceasingly insubordinate and the constant contriver of disturbance. He scoffed at all authority, sought perpetually to attain freedom and was for ever setting all rules and regulations at defiance. When the Kaiserslautern prison was finished he was transferred there to ensure his safe custody, but was still the same reckless, irreconcilable creature. In chapel services, which male and female prisoners attended in common, he attracted the attention of the women and started many intrigues by passing letters and presents to them. When the spirit moved him, he would burst out into loud roars of laughter or mock the officiating clergyman in the middle of the service. He was continually engaged in tampering with officers and guards, bribing them to carry on a clandestine traffic with “outside” and persuading them to supply him with food and prohibited articles. He was a power among his fellow-prisoners, who yielded ready obedience to his caprices and carried out his orders punctiliously. When searched, contraband articles were frequently found in his possession; weapons for assault and tools to be of assistance in his many projected escapes. Punishment, blows and close confinement in a dark cell, he endured with a stoical resignation which earned him the glory of martyrdom. With the higher authorities he comported himself cunningly, adapting himself to their individual peculiarities; he could in turn be cringingly civil, or audaciously impudent, and more than one letter of complaint against them he concocted and contrived to have secretly forwarded to Munich.

After making several attempts to escape on his own account, he formed a conspiracy with a number of daring convicts, the object of which was to obtain freedom by armed force. The plot was carried out on October 18, 1827, but proved disastrously unsuccessful. The conspirators, who were unable to effect the murder of some of the warders as contemplated, were completely overpowered. A special court met in the following year to sit in judgment on the would-be perpetrators of this foul attempt, and on June 9, 1828, Schenk, as well as two of his associates, was condemned to death for the second time, the execution to be carried out in the market place at Kaiserslautern. King Ludwig, the reigning monarch, was no more in favour of capital punishment than his predecessor, and Schenk’s sentence was again commuted to life-long imprisonment in chains.

His peregrinations now began, for he was transferred from one prison of Bavaria to another, until he had made acquaintance with nearly all. In each his conduct was so outrageous that the managing board always declined to keep him beyond a certain time, deeming him a constant menace to good order. He invariably obtained so great an influence in whatever prison he was held that the officials were in despair. On January 22, 1829, Schenk left Kaiserslautern, laden with chains and escorted by three of the most trustworthy police officials, and arrived at the prison in WÜrzburg on February 1st; he remained there until September 30, 1833. Here every thought was centred on means of escaping. He tried violence, and all kinds of clever schemes and devices, and in spite of being flogged and receiving other punishments, he persevered in his daring ventures until the authorities of the WÜrzburg prison declared that the prison was not sufficiently secure to retain him in durance. He was now transferred to Munich, where an interesting group of the most dangerous malefactors of Bavaria had been collected and were placed under the supervision of a strict and competent prison administrator. In Munich Schenk underwent a series of the most severe punishments that could be inflicted. The governor stated it as his opinion that Schenk was the most dangerous criminal of his kind and of his century. He added that never during the six and thirty years of his official life had he met with such a combination of astute cunning, incomparable audacity and hypocritical deceit.

Schenk remained at Munich until the year 1842, when the minister Abel succeeded in establishing the plan he had conceived of placing the Bavarian prisons on a denominational basis. This might have answered fairly well had the convicts not been allowed to alter their religion while in prison. As it was, whoever had had enough of one institution and desired a change, simply declared himself converted to another belief, and was then transferred to the fresh gaol where its professors were collected. The convicts could change their creed as often as they liked, but Schenk repudiated such weakness of character, and pretended to set great store by his Protestantism. He could not, however, remain at Munich because it was a Catholic prison, and at the beginning of the year 1842 he was removed to St. George at Bayreuth. In this institution he reached the pinnacle of his evil fame and influence. The administrator charged with its management in the years 1848-1849 must have been a young and diffident man, for Schenk intimidated him to such an extent that the prisoner became the actual master of the gaol. Seldom or never, perhaps, has a convict occupied such a position in a prison as Schenk did during his palmy days at Bayreuth. To curry favour with him he was often invited to drink coffee with the governor in the office and while they drank it the governor discussed with him prison problems and the proper treatment of prisoners. It must have been a strange sight to witness the convict in his chains on a sofa and the director doing the honours. Of course a peremptory stop was put to such a scandal. The timid governor was superseded by a more severe disciplinarian and Schenk was grievously annoyed. He stirred up a fierce opposition to the new man, whom he represented as a ruthless despot, and filled his fellow-convicts with apprehension as to the future that lay before them. They determined, therefore, to greet this functionary with a striking proof of their bad humour and distrust. Accordingly, when the new administrator entered the building on February 9, 1850, a general insurrection broke out among the prisoners, which was only quelled with great difficulty by armed force. Schenk’s reign was now over. The new governor soon knew that he had been the ringleader and took measures to subdue his troublesome charge. Instead of coffee, he received hard blows, and in place of the sofa he was provided with a wooden couch.

Yet Schenk contrived secretly that a letter full of complaints of the new director, whom he described as a bloodhound hungry for the life of a peaceful, inoffensive man, meaning himself, should reach the authorities at Munich. The director accused was not slow to explain the true facts; the lying denouncer met with his deserts and was soundly flogged. He was still untamed, however, and fought on stubbornly until his iron constitution began to give way. As his health declined and he felt that death was approaching, he became for a time singularly amenable. At last, in 1860, he was finally transferred to Plassenburg prison, which he entered for the first time. His old audacious and rebellious spirit reasserted itself, and he succeeded in breaking out of prison with several companions. They were all promptly recaptured by the peasants in the first village they reached, and laid by the heels like wild beasts escaped from their cages. When once more in durance, Schenk devoted himself to the writing of petitions for milder treatment, and he was granted a few small privileges, such as the lightening of his chains. In 1863 he was taken back to Kaiserslautern after an absence of thirty-four years. Although feeble and broken in health, he still enjoyed a great influence over the other prisoners, and, when he chose, could still incite them to mutiny and rebellion. In January, 1864, a violent outbreak occurred at Kaiserslautern in which he did not figure personally but which he had no doubt brought about.

It was at this period of his career that Herr Fleischmann became acquainted with him and writes: “Schenk’s every thought was now centred in obtaining a pardon. I often heard him exclaim, ‘I would gladly die, if I could but enjoy freedom for a single day.’” His passionate appeals were nearly bearing fruit when the inhabitants of Oberlustadt protested, and, still remembering his parting threats on leaving the town, hastily sent in a petition against the liberation of so dangerous a man. With his hopes thus dashed to the ground forever, a last spark of energy revived and he made a final attempt to escape from the hospital, which miscarried, and in the end his release was only compassed by death. For forty-seven years he had maintained a ceaseless conflict with law and authority.

Herr Fleischmann gives a graphic presentment of this remarkable criminal, whom he first met in the hospital toward the end of his life. “My interlocutor was an old man in the seventies. I shall never forget his appearance, for I never beheld a more hideous or repulsive countenance. He was of medium height, strongly built, and dragged one leg slightly, like all those who have worn chains and balls for years. His head was covered with thin gray hair always carefully brushed. One side of his face was completely distorted from the effects of a stroke of paralysis. Half the mouth and one wrinkled cheek hung down flabbily; one bloodshot eye stared dimly from its socket, but the other, on the contrary, was light gray and quite alive, with a look of extreme cunning. He was a man of great natural intelligence, unusually gifted, and he had improved himself by much reading; he expressed himself well, possessed a keen knowledge of human nature and often succeeded in deceiving the prison officials by his masterly power of dissimulation.”

We have to thank our reverend author for one or two more types of German prisoners. He speaks of one, WÜrger by name, who was of Jewish extraction, but a Christian according to the testimony of his baptismal certificate, although there was little to prove his real religion in the records of his life. As to the outer man, he was short of stature and very broad-shouldered; he had an enormous head with bushy, prominent eyebrows and teeth large and pointed like the fangs of a wild beast. His eyes were gray and cold but acute in their expression. The first time the chaplain visited him in his cell he was sitting on the edge of a big chest filled with papers and literally in hysterics. No other word could adequately describe the passionate outburst of rage and despair to which he was giving vent. When asked the cause of his distress, he asserted with renewed wails that he was a ruined man. The facts came out gradually. His wife had sent the huge chest to him, because not even the most astute man of business in her vicinity to whom she had applied could disentangle the mass of promissory notes and dubious deeds which it contained. She had also written that no one admitted indebtedness to him, and indeed, several of his debtors had already run off. She said he must put the papers in order himself and send the chest to some agent with instructions to act for him. The box was full of documents, and represented the ruin and wretchedness of the impecunious victims of his remorseless usury.

The chaplain had little sympathy with his whining regrets and strongly urged him to commit the contents of the box to the flames, but this advice WÜrger received with horror. It would bring his family to penury, he declared; he had done no one any harm but had rather been a public benefactor, honest and straightforward in all his dealings, and he had been ill-rewarded for his efforts to benefit his fellow creatures. The tears streamed from the eyes of this friend of humanity as he uttered this lying statement.

Two anecdotes told by the writer will give some idea of the character of this rapacious creature. His wife, who belonged to a good family, had once instituted divorce proceedings against him. Her lawyer insisted before the court that WÜrger was essentially a bad, vicious person, but that his client had been quite unaware of his evil tendencies before her marriage. WÜrger’s lawyer then took up the parable and exclaimed,—“What, the plaintiff pretends ignorance of what sort of man my client is! Why, it is notorious that in the whole of Pfalz there is no worse fellow than WÜrger. And you worshipful judges,” he added, “you certainly cannot assume that WÜrger’s wife was the only person who did not know anything about it.” The wife’s petition was dismissed and WÜrger, on hearing the result of the proceedings, rubbed his hands, smirked with glee and clapped his lawyer on the back, saying, “That was a lucky hit of yours, calling me the worst fellow in Pfalz; you deserve great credit for the conduct of my case.”

When WÜrger was in prison awaiting trial, a fraudulent tax-collector, whom an auditor had caught embezzling public money, occupied the same cell as the usurer. The collector was a man of fair character but afflicted with a consuming thirst and fit for nothing until he had swallowed many pints of beer. He brought into prison with him a certain sum in cash, a silver watch and chain and a gold ring. Here was WÜrger’s opportunity. He saw his companion’s funds gradually diminish by his terrible thirst, and when they were exhausted, proposed to buy his fellow-prisoner’s silver chain, and offered a ludicrously low price for it. Bargaining and haggling went on for some time but without result, although the usurer strove hard and backed up his offer by constantly calculating how many pints of beer the suggested price would buy. Every time WÜrger mentioned the word “beer” the other would sigh deeply until the temptation conquered him, and finally the chain passed into WÜrger’s hands. The price of the chain was consumed in drink and the silver watch was the next to go. The last struggle was for the gold wedding ring. The poor collector was quite determined not to part with it; he inwardly took a solemn oath to conquer himself and not to sacrifice this last precious treasure. WÜrger did not utter a word for some days nor seem to notice the tortures of his mate. Finally, however, he appeared softened by the moans and groans of his companion who grew more and more thirsty, and offered to help him, but only at the cost of the ring. The tax-collector fell on his knees and begged the tyrant to lend him the money only and let him but pawn the ring; but WÜrger drove him to distraction by ordering a pint of beer which he slowly consumed before the drunkard. Again and again he tempted and played upon the appetite of the unfortunate man until at last the collector, half mad, tore the ring from his finger and threw it at the feet of the usurer, who smilingly slipped it into his pocket.

In prison WÜrger’s behaviour was cringing and artful. At the exercises in chapel he would sit with his head bowed, evidently cogitating over his impending lawsuits and thinking of his gold. His fellow-prisoners treated him with contempt, and revelled in the knowledge that this rich fiend, who had cheated many a poor man out of his last farthing, was now one of themselves; and on Sunday especially they would cast up his misdeeds against him and hold him up to ridicule. Toward the end of his term he went to the chaplain and bought a Bible. This reckless extravagance seemed odd, but it became known that the chaplain bought his Bibles at a reduced rate, and the usurer had calculated that he could sell at a profit.

“A clergyman’s task,” says Herr Fleischmann, “is far more difficult in a prison for women than in one for men. In the latter he has to deal with coarseness, brutality and moral degradation, but in the former he meets with many despicable traits: unlimited cunning, spitefulness, love of revenge, deceit and artifice. The man often reveals himself as he is, while the woman, on the contrary, having lost caste, desires to conceal her abject condition and, with rare exceptions, assumes some part foreign to her real nature which she plays cleverly throughout. I was often obliged in spite of myself to compare the man’s gaol to a menagerie, the woman’s to a theatre or stage.

“I was twenty-six years of age when I started on my official career of activity in K. On making my first rounds through the cells on the female side, I found one woman sitting with her head on the table weeping bitterly. She gave no sign that she had noticed my entrance, but when I wished her ‘Good morning,’ she slowly lifted her head and transfixed me with an uncomprehending gaze from soft, tear-dimmed brown eyes. She was apparently about fifty years of age and retained traces of great beauty.

“‘I am your new pastor’ I said. What is your name?’ Then she passed her hand across her forehead as if to dispel an evil dream and, rising from her seat with a great show of good feeling, begged me to excuse her seeming rudeness, but in truth she had been absorbed in the contemplation of her past life. She claimed to be unfeignedly grateful for my visit and as she spoke she seized my hand and would have kissed it had I not drawn it away. I asked her name. ‘Ursula Pfeiffer, reverend sir,’ she replied. ‘Very well,’ I said, ‘I will look into your record and the next time I come we will discuss your past.’ But she continued, ‘Let me confess at once; I am the greatest sinner in the whole prison, but thank heaven, I have at last found peace within these walls.’

“On the prison registers this woman’s record ran thus: ‘Anna Ursula Pfeiffer, born at Zirndorf, near NÜrnberg, in 1813, sentenced for repeated thefts to four years’ penal servitude. Was, from 1838 to 1863, punished forty-one times for leading a vicious life, vagrancy and theft.’ During my next few visits, her behaviour was characterised by reserve, which led me to think she had realised that she must not lay on her colours too thick. After the lapse of some weeks, she told me her history simply, without flourishes, and I recognised from her manner of relating that I had before me a woman of uncommon mental gifts.

“Her parents had been poor people, earning an honest livelihood, who brought up their children respectably. They thought a great deal of their Ursula, who always took a high place in school. Her intelligence and her beauty, however, were to prove her curse. She went into domestic service with a rich Jewish family, where the son of the house seduced her and, when the consequences of the intrigue could no longer be concealed, she was dismissed ignominiously. She moved to NÜrnberg, where she took to disreputable ways, and she always had plenty of money until her beauty began to wane. Then she gradually sank lower and lower in the social scale, and finally became addicted to thieving, which landed her continually in prison.

“I observed my penitent closely, but saw no reason to doubt or mistrust her. I now and then made use of a text on Sunday to inveigh against hypocrisy, but she continued to play the part of the crushed and contrite Magdalen and asked permission to take down my sermon on her slate. To this I could not, of course, object. I would sometimes look at the slate and compare it with my manuscript and seldom found a word wrong. What might not this woman have become had she been born in a higher sphere? When her term of solitary confinement had expired, she requested that it might be extended over her full time, and remained for two years longer in her cell. By and by she became a prison nurse, and not only tended the sick with kindness and devotion but also with uncommon skill. Her conduct was exemplary to the last, and when she finally departed, it was with many protestations of gratitude and the most heartfelt assurances of reform.

“Yet a few months later, Ursula Pfeiffer’s papers were asked for by some other penal institution. She had soon fallen back into evil ways, and was sentenced to a fresh imprisonment. I was convinced that my first impression of her as a hypocrite and a dissembler was absolutely correct.”

The Reverend Otto Fleischmann’s experience will be borne out by hundreds of other God-fearing, philanthropic ministers who have devoted themselves to the care and possible regeneration of criminals.

Two sensational crimes committed in our own day, and which made a great stir in Germany, were much commented on in the journals of the time. One was the murder of a boy of five years old at Xanten in Prussian Rhineland. The trial took place at the provincial court of justice at Kleve, and the hall used was part of the ancient castle of the dukes of Kleve, around which the legend of the “Knights of the Swan” (Lohengrin) still lingers. The case excited widespread interest. The man accused was a Jew and the fiercest passions caused by religious hatred were engendered. Excesses were committed in the town; the case became a subject of heated dispute in the popular assemblies, and more than once occupied the attention of the Prussian Chamber of Deputies.

On June 29, 1891, soon after six o’clock, a servant maid, Dora Moll, found the body of a boy, Johann Hegemann, with his throat cut, in a barn where fruit was stored, belonging to a town councilman named Kupper. The boy was the son of the carpenter and coffin-maker of the place. At noon on the same day the child, a fine and healthy boy, had been seen playing near the barn. The wound was a clean one and there seemed to be no doubt that a murder had been committed, but there appeared to be no motive for it. Soon, however, suspicion fell upon Adolf Buschoff, a butcher and also the superintendent of the Jewish congregation. Several persons testified to the boy having been attracted by Buschoff’s wife and daughter to the butcher’s shop, situated close by the Kupper barn, on the eve of the crime. Other causes for suspicion were suggested, with the immediate result that Buschoff’s property was laid waste by his enraged fellow-citizens and “Murderer’s house” was written on his abode. Many shops belonging to Jews were also sacked; indignation was intensified by a report that the boy had been done to death by a knife such as is used by Jewish butchers, and that murder had been committed because the Jews require Christian blood for their Passover feast. The excitement of the Christian population grew to such a pitch that the Jewish community of Xanten begged, in their own defence, that a special detective might be employed to follow up the crime. The result of this inquiry was the arrest of Buschoff, with his wife and daughter, and their committal to the prison at Kleve, from which they were at last released on December 23rd.

Anti-Semitism, however, constantly rankled and inflamed public opinion; the case was re-opened, and Buschoff, who had settled at Cologne, was again arrested on the plea that further suspicion had arisen. His wife and daughter escaped, although a warrant had been issued against them as being also privy to the crime. Hitherto Buschoff had been looked upon as a popular and harmless citizen, but now feeling ran high against him and it was generally believed that the charge of deliberate murder would be fully proved.

The court was crowded to suffocation; many ladies looked down upon the crowd in the place set apart for them. A hum was heard like that in a theatre before the curtain rises, followed by a painful silence when the prisoner entered and took his place behind the barrier. Buschoff was a man of fifty, strongly built and of medium height. He sat with downcast eyes, his hands trembling; his colour was so ruddy that, but for the signs of inward agitation expressed in his face, it would not have been easy to suppose that he had spent a long time in prison awaiting trial. The case lasted ten days and many witnesses were called, but no evidence was adduced incriminating Buschoff, who, when interrogated, steadfastly denied his guilt. A professor of Semitic lore and an expert in interpreting the Talmud, was asked if murders in the cause of ritual were anywhere justified in the Talmud. This he denied, and other witnesses testified that Buschoff belonged to the order of priests commonly called Levites, who are not allowed to approach a corpse except those of their parents or brethren. On the sixth day, a bag belonging to Buschoff, apparently blood-stained, was examined, but it could not be proved to be human blood. On the seventh day, the chief interest was centred in the evidence of the provincial judge, Brixius, who had examined Buschoff at the time of his first arrest. The result was, upon the whole, favourable to the accused, as Brixius considered many of the statements which had been made by witnesses the result of heated fancy and unbridled imagination dictated by hatred of the Jews. On the last day of the trial, Frau Buschoff, who had not as yet been called, had to appear. The accused wept bitterly at the sight of his wife. She corroborated the testimony which had been given by her husband and daughter.

The jury was then asked to decide whether “the accused Adolf Buschoff were guilty of having deliberately murdered Johann Hegemann in Xanten on the 29th June, 1891.” A speech for the defence then followed, which lasted two hours, and in the afternoon a second counsel spoke for the prisoner, setting forth the innocence of the accused and appealing to the jury to acquit him. Then followed the judge’s summing up, which was absolutely fair and impartial. He called attention to the fact that the population of Germany was divided between friends and foes of the Jews. “Before the court of justice, however,” he said, “all men are equal. A judge’s task is not to inquire to what religion an accused belongs; he must have no partisan feeling.” The jury was absent for only half an hour, and returned with the verdict of “not guilty,” which was received with storms of applause. So ended a trial which produced an immense sensation, not only in the Rhine provinces but to the furthest confines of Germany, and was followed with strained and feverish attention.

Another great crime is of about the same date, but of a very different character,—the theft and misappropriation of gigantic sums by the chief cashier, Rudolf Jaeger, of the Rothschild banking-house at Frankfurt-on-the-Main. The story will be best understood by an extract from the indictment on which he was eventually charged. It stated that on Good Friday, April 15, 1892, the chief cashier of the banking-house of M. A. Rothschild and Sons disappeared, but was not missed until April 20th by reason of intervening holidays, both Christian and Jewish. The suspicion of his flight was confirmed by two letters from him posted at Darmstadt. One was to a Frau Hoch, who sent it to the Rothschild house; the other was addressed to Baron Rothschild’s private secretary, Herr Kirch. In both letters Jaeger stated that he had been guilty of embezzlement and that he meant to take his own life. In the letter to Kirch he carried the comedy to the extent of sealing his letter with black, using a black-edged envelope and placing a memorial cross under his signature. He confessed that he had lost 1,700,000 marks by unlucky speculations on the bourse with money entrusted to him in the course of business by others, including the bank. The money was gone, he declared briefly, and he meant to expiate his deed by death, hoping for mercy from God alone.

Rudolf Jaeger first entered the Rothschild house as assistant to his father, then chief cashier, and on his father’s death he succeeded to the position. His salary was 4,500 marks; besides this, he received other payments for keeping the private accounts of the Barons Wilhelm and Mayer Karl Rothschild, as well as the New Year’s bonus, and such other extras, so that his circumstances were easy. He married in 1877. His first wrongdoing was when he embarked upon an egg-trading business in partnership with one Heusel, who subsequently entered the dock by his side. Heusel was always in financial straits, insatiable in his demands for money, and although Jaeger had advanced the sum of 102,000 marks, he clamoured incessantly for more, and to satisfy him Jaeger made his first fatal dip into the Rothschild safe, which was in his keeping. For a long time he managed his depredations most skilfully, and his methods of throwing dust into the eyes of the clerks under him by manipulating the books of the bank were extremely clever. Even when a revision of the books took place, after he had gone so far as to falsify them, his dishonesty was not suspected. However, he only narrowly escaped. He felt he was on the verge of being discovered and began his preparations for flight, in company with Josephine Klez, with whom he had been intimate for some time.

The fugitives went first to Hamburg and thence to Marseilles, where they embarked for Egypt. Having arrived there, they considered themselves safe and went about freely and openly, frequenting different hotels. Jaeger bought many valuable jewels for Klez in Alexandria and Cairo. The police in pursuit were soon upon their track and on May 10th both were arrested by the German consul, with the assistance of the Egyptian authorities, at Ramleh in the Hotel Miramare, and their goods were seized. Both carried revolvers. Jaeger attempted to draw his, but was prevented. At first, both endeavoured to deny their identity, but in the end they gave their real names. Jaeger maintained, when brought before the consul, that he had lost the greater part of the embezzled sum on the bourses, but the examination of his luggage proved this to be false, and a sum of 489,779 marks was found among his effects. Part of it consisted in thousand mark notes, which Klez had sewn into a pin-cushion. She had two purses, a black and a red one; in the first was English, French and Egyptian money, and the second contained German bank bills and marks in gold. On a second search, one hundred notes of a thousand marks each were extracted from a pillow. Among the papers seized, the most important was Jaeger’s note book, for pasted under its cover was a slip of paper with abbreviated figures not very difficult to decipher, and with a complete account of the embezzled sum and of the persons in whose hands the money had been deposited; so, thanks to the discovery of this memorandum, the greater portion of the sums left in Frankfurt was discovered.

When Jaeger and Klez arrived in Germany, they were committed to the Frankfurt prison, where a number of their accomplices were already lodged. Jaeger, when arraigned, pleaded guilty on every count. The woman Klez admitted her complicity in the flight, but denied that she was concerned in the frauds or had accepted anything but jewelry from Jaeger. The trial was brief and judgment was soon given. Jaeger was condemned to ten years’ imprisonment and, over and above this, to five years’ deprivation of his civic rights, “because he was so lost to all sense of decency as to leave his family and elope with a shameless woman.” Klez was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, Heusel to six years, and others concerned to short terms.