Prager Tagblatt
- Foreigners in Italy
- Blasco Ibáñez Was to Become President
- "Gädicke Must Disappear"
The Prager Tagblatt of 9 November 1926 carried reports on politics and public order from Italy, Spain and Germany. From Rome it summarized a new police bill due before the Italian parliament, about ten of whose articles dealt with foreigners: they would still have to register and might have to appear before the police in person, and anyone letting a foreigner use property or real estate would have to notify the police in writing. From Spain it described a conspiracy reaching across the country, above all Barcelona and Madrid, to overthrow the dictatorship and the monarchy and set up a federal republic, naming Blasco Ibáñez as its president and Leroux as the would-be premier. From a German trial it reported a striking turn in the morning session. The indictment rested on Lieutenant Hahn's earlier testimony that in June 1923 First Lieutenant Schulz, angry at Sergeant Gädicke's munitions dealing, had said Gädicke "must disappear" and that Klapproth would take care of the rest.
Translation
Foreigners in Italy
Rome, November 8. The papers are publishing the text of the police bill that is to come before Parliament tomorrow. About ten articles of this new bill concern foreigners. Foreigners will continue to have to register and may also have to present themselves to the police in person. Anyone who allows a foreigner the use of his property or the usufruct of real estate will be required to notify the police of this in writing.
Blasco Ibáñez Was to Become President
The matter concerns a plot with ramifications across the whole of Spain, chiefly Barcelona and Madrid, to overthrow the dictatorship and the monarchy and to establish a federalist republic in Spain, whose president is named as Blasco Ibáñez. Leroux wanted to take over the premiership.
"Gädicke Must Disappear"
Already in the morning session a very striking turn occurred. The indictment rested on the statements made before the examining magistrate by the co-defendant Lieutenant Hahn, a friend of Schlageter's. Hahn had testified at the time that on June 16, 1923, he had met First Lieutenant Schulz in a coffeehouse, and that Schulz had spoken with great indignation about Sergeant Gädicke's racketeering in munitions. Schulz, he said, had then declared: "Gädicke must disappear. Hahn should go to the Tschernow forest; there Klapproth would take care of the rest."
Context
Why Italy tightened police control over foreigners in November 1926
The Rome dispatch reports that a police bill with about ten articles on foreigners was due before parliament on 9 November. The bill came at the end of a year of attacks on Mussolini. On 7 April 1926 Violet Gibson fired a pistol at him and grazed his nose. On 11 September the anarchist marble worker Gino Lucetti threw a bomb at his car at Porta Pia in Rome and injured four other people. On 31 October a shot fired at Mussolini in Bologna led to the lynching of 15-year-old Anteo Zamboni; the terrorism specialist J. Bowyer Bell judged the boy likely innocent and the affair either staged or a plot among Fascists. The Bologna attempt resulted in laws creating Mussolini's secret police, adding to laws of late 1925 that already allowed the suppression of any opposition organization. The registration rules, the personal appearances before the police and the written reports required from anyone letting property to a foreigner, as the paper describes them, were the part of this crackdown that touched people from abroad directly. Those details come from the paper's summary of the bill, not from the final text of the law.
The Catalan raid stopped on the French border days earlier
The Spanish report appeared five days after French police stopped Francesc Macià's attempt to invade Catalonia from Prats de Molló, on the French side of the Pyrenees. Macià, the leader of Estat Català, had met representatives of the CNT and radical Basque nationalists in Paris in January 1925 to prepare coordinated uprisings. He was arrested on 4 November 1926 in the country house he was using, while Spanish police in Barcelona, who also knew of the operation, arrested the plotters inside Catalonia. The expedition failed because the French police had been warned, apparently through a leak from the group of Italian exiles around Ricciotti Garibaldi Jr, grandson of the hero of Italian unification, who was in fact a double agent spying for Fascist Italy. Macià was later sentenced to two months in jail and a fine of 100 francs. The Prager Tagblatt describes something wider: a conspiracy reaching across Spain, chiefly Barcelona and Madrid, against both the dictatorship and the monarchy, aiming at a federalist republic with Blasco Ibáñez as president and Leroux as premier. Those two names, and any link between their plan and Macià's raid, rest on the paper's report and on the timing, since the accounts of the Prats de Molló affair do not mention either man.
The Black Reichswehr and the logic of Feme killings
The trial reported here grew out of the Black Reichswehr, a paramilitary organization in the Weimar Republic that supplied extra manpower reserves for the Reichswehr in violation of the Versailles Treaty. Because such units depended on secrecy, suspected betrayal could be punished by death. The word Fememord referred to killing "traitors" who knew a group's secrets and had reported them to the authorities or threatened to do so. Within the Black Reichswehr, First Lieutenant Paul Schulz commanded a special unit that killed men seen as having betrayed the country by leaking military secrets. Such killings peaked in 1923, when hyperinflation, the Allied occupation of the Ruhr and repeated putsch and separatist attempts shook Germany. The testimony quoted by the paper belongs to that year: in June 1923 Schulz is said to have raged at Sergeant Gädicke's munitions dealing and sent Hahn to Klapproth. The case came to court while parliament was also investigating: in January 1926, at the request of the Social Democrats, the Reichstag had set up an investigative committee on these killings.
What later happened to Schulz and Klapproth
Schulz had been arrested in March 1925 for inciting several murders. On 26 March 1927, a little over four months after this session, he was sentenced to death for inciting the murder of Black Reichswehr Sergeant Walter Wilms, a different victim from the Gädicke named in this report. First Lieutenant Fritz Fuhrmann and Sergeant Erich Klapproth, who carried out that murder, were sentenced to death with him. President Paul von Hindenburg commuted all three sentences to life imprisonment in February 1928. A political amnesty freed Schulz in October 1930, and he joined the Nazi Party on 24 October 1930. The Germans who had exposed the killings fared differently: they were tried and convicted for insulting the military establishment, even when their allegations were true.
Original
Die Fremden in Italien.
Rom, 8. November. Die Blätter veröffentlichen den Text der Polizeivorlage, die morgen vor das Parlament kommen soll. Ungefähr zehn Artikel dieser neuen Vorlage betreffen die Ausländer. Die Ausländer werden sich auch fernerhin anmelden und sich eventuell der Polizei persönlich vorstellen müssen. Jeder, der einem Ausländer die Benützung seines Eigentumes oder die Nutznießung von Immobilien zugesteht, wird verpflichtet, schriftlich der Polizei hievon Mitteilung zu machen.
Blasco Ibanez sollte Präsident werden.
Es handelt sich um ein über ganz Spanien, hauptsächlich Barcelona und Madrid verzweigtes Komplott zum Sturze der Diktatur und Monarchie und Errichtung einer föderalistischen Republik in Spanien, als deren Präsident Blasco Ibannez genannt wird. Leroux wollte die Ministerpräsidentschaft übernehmen.
Gädicke muß verschwinden.
In der Vormittagssitzung bereits trat eine sehr auffällige Wendung ein. Die Anklage gründete sich auf die Aussagen des mitangeklagten Leutnants Hahn, eines Freundes Schlageters, vor dem Untersuchungsrichter. Hahn hat damals ausgesagt, er sei am 16. Juni 1923 im Kaffeehaus mit Oberleutnant Schulz zusammengekommen, der voller Entrüstung über die Munitionsschiebungen des Feldwebels Gädicke sprach. Schulz habe damals erklärt: " Gädicke muß verschwinden. Hahn solle nach dem Forst Tschernow gehen, dort würde Klapproth das Weitere besorgen. "