Schinderhannes
He then turned to break-ins and armed robbery on both sides of the Rhine, which was the border between France and the Holy Roman Empire.
The legend of Schinderhannes truly emerged from his escape from a prison tower in Simmern, a market town in the Hunsrück region of the Rhineland.
At the time, the west bank of the Rhine was under French occupation, and the peasantry was happy to celebrate anyone who was able to flout the law.
Imprisoned in a wooden tower in Simmern that most believed to be impenetrable, he used a kitchen knife, smuggled in by a sympathetic guard, and cut a hole in a small window to escape.
The prison escape became widely reported, exciting the public and making Schinderhannes a folk hero.
After things began to get too dangerous for him, Schinderhannes fled across the Rhine and enlisted in the Austrian Army under the assumed name of Jakob Schweikart.
He was recognized, however, by a former associate, handed over to the French authorities and imprisoned in a tower of the medieval defensive wall of Mainz (the so-called "Holzturm").
During the War of the Palatine Succession the French demanded a fee which he could not pay, so he was dismissed in 1693 and replaced by the executioner, Dillendorf, from Corray at Zell on the Moselle.
However, one and a half years later, on 16 February 1722, the Kirchberg upper office reversed the decision; Eva Bickler now received the deed.
Otto Philipp Bickler, Niclas' son, became an executioner in Wartelstein, today's Schloss Wartenstein [de] near Kirn.
The passing Jewish cattle dealer, Simon Seligmann, from Seibersbach discovered the lovers and betrayed them to the aforementioned 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.
At first, the gang was mainly up to no good in the then cantons of Kirn, (Bad) Sobernheim, Herrstein, Rhaunen, Kirchberg, Simmern and Stromberg.
In Hahnenbach, Johannes Bückler had accommodated his lover, Elise Werner, with a "dirty old woman", Anne Marie Frey.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[5] 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.
Locations: Among his companions were: In the time leading up to his final imprisonment, there were several murders which could possibly be attributed to Bückler.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[8] In Czechoslovakian TV-Series Slavné historky zbojnické (1985), Schinderhannes is played by Czech actor Miroslav Vladyka.
