I. Preliminaries

On May 10, 1851 Nothjung was arrested in Leipzig and Bürgers,
Röser, Daniels, Becker and the others were arrested shortly after. The arrested
men appeared before the Court of Assizes in Cologne on October 4, 1852 on a
charge of “treasonable conspiracy” against the Prussian state. Thus
the preliminary detention (in solitary confinement) had lasted a year and a
half.

When Nothjung and Bürgers were arrested the police discovered copies of the
Manifesto of the Communist Party, the “Rules of the Communist
League” (a communist propaganda society), two Addresses of the Central
Authority of this League as well as a number of addresses and other
publications. A week after Nothjung’s arrest had become public knowledge
there were house-searches and arrests in Cologne. So if there had still been
something to discover it would certainly have disappeared by then. And in fact
the haul yielded only a few irrelevant letters. A year and a half later when
the accused finally appeared before the jury, the bona fide material
in the possession of the prosecution had not been augmented by a single
document. Nevertheless as we are assured by the Public Prosecutor’s
office (represented by von Seckendorf and Saedt) all government departments of
the Prussian state had undertaken the most strenuous and many-sided activity.
What then had they been doing? Nous verrons!

The unusually long period of pre-trial detention was explained in the most
ingenious way. At first it was claimed that the Saxon government refused to
extradite Bürgers and Nothjung to Prussia.

The court in Cologne appealed in vain to the ministry in Berlin, which
appealed in vain to the authorities in Saxony. The Saxon authorities however
relented. Bürgers and Nothjung were handed over. By October 1851 enough
progress had been made at last for the files to be presented to the indictment
board of the Cologne Court of Appeal. The board ruled that “there was no
factual evidence of an indictable offence and ... the investigation must
therefore start again from the beginning”. Meanwhile the zeal of the
courts had been kindled by a recently approved disciplinary law which enabled
the Prussian government to dismiss any official of the judiciary who incurred
its displeasure. Accordingly the case was dismissed on this occasion because
there was no evidence of an indictable offence. At the following quarterly
session of the assizes it had to be postponed because there was too much
evidence. The mass of documents was said to be so huge that the prosecutor was
unable to digest it. Gradually he did digest it, the bill of indictment was
presented to the prisoners and the action was due to be heard on July 28. But
in the meantime the great driving wheel of the government’s case, Chief
of Police Schulz, fell ill. The accused had to sit in gaol for another three
months awaiting an improvement in Schulz’s health. Fortunately Schulz
died, the public became impatient and the government had to bring up the
curtain.

Throughout this whole period the police authorities in Cologne, the police
headquarters in Berlin and the Ministries of Justice and of the Interior had
continually intervened in the investigations, just as Stieber, their worthy
representative, was to intervene later on as witness in the public court
proceedings in Cologne. The government succeeded in assembling a jury that is
quite unprecedented in the annals of the Rhine Province. In addition to members
of the upper bourgeoisie (Herstadt, Leiden, Joest), there were city patricians
(von Bianca, vom Rath), country squires (Häbling von Lanzenauer, Freiherr [i.e. baron] von Fürstenberg, etc.), two Prussian
government officials, one of them a royal chamberlain (von Münch-Bellinghausen)
and finally a Prussian professor (Kräusler). Thus in this jury every one of the
ruling classes in Germany was represented and only these classes were
represented.

With this jury the Prussian government, it seems, could stop beating about
the bush and make the case into a political trial pure and simple. The
documents seized from Nothjung, Bürgers and the others and admitted by them to
be genuine did not indeed prove the existence of a plot; in fact they did not
prove the existence of any action provided for in the Code pénal. But
they showed conclusively the hostility of the accused to the existing
government and the existing social order. However, what the intelligence of the
legislators had failed to achieve might well be made good by the conscience of
the jury. Was it not a stratagem of the accused that they should have conducted
their hostile activities directed against the existing social order in such a
way that they did not violate any article of the Code? Does a disease cease to
be infectious because it is not listed in the Police Medical Register? If the
Prussian government had restricted itself to using the material actually
available to prove the harmfulness of the accused and if the jury had confined
itself to rendering them harmless by its verdict of guilty, who could censure
either government or jury? Who indeed but the foolish dreamer who imagines that
the Prussian government and the ruling classes in Prussia are strong enough to
give even their opponents a free rein as long as they confine themselves to
discussion and propaganda.

However the Prussian government had deprived itself of the opportunity of
using this broad highway of political trials. Owing to the unusual delay in
bringing the case before the court, the Ministry’s direct intervention in
the proceedings, the mysterious hints about unheard-of horrors, the rodomontade
about a conspiracy ensnaring the whole of Europe and, finally, the signally
brutal treatment of the prisoners, the trial was swollen into a procès
monstre, the eyes of the European press were upon it and the curiosity and
suspicions of the public were fully aroused. The Prussian government had put
itself in a position in which for decency’s sake the prosecution was
simply obliged to produce evidence and the jury to demand it. The jury itself
had to face another jury, the jury of public opinion.

To rectify its first blunder, the government was forced into a second one.
The police, who acted as examining magistrates during the preliminary
investigation, had to appear as witnesses during the trial. By the side of the
ordinary Public Prosecutor the government had to put an extraordinary one,
beside the Public Prosecutor’s office the police, beside a Saedt and
Seckendorf a Stieber together with his Wermuth, his griffin Greif and his
little Goldheim. It was inevitable that yet another government department
should intervene in court and, by virtue of the miraculous powers of the
police, should continuously supply the facts whose shadows the legal
prosecution had pursued in vain. The court was so thoroughly aware of the
position that with the most laudable resignation the President, the judge and
the prosecutor abandoned their functions to Stieber the Police Superintendent
and the witness and continually disappeared behind him. Before we proceed to
elucidate these revelations made by the police, revelations which form the
basis of the “indictable offence” that the indictment board was
unable to discover, one more preliminary observation remains to be made.

It became evident from the papers seized from the accused, as well as from
their own statements, that a German communist society had existed with a
central authority originally based in London. On September 15, 1850, the
Central Authority split. The majority — referred to in the indictment as
the “Marx party” — moved the seat of the Central
Authority to Cologne. The minority, which was later expelled from the League by
the group in Cologne, established itself as an independent central authority in
London and founded a separate league [265] in London and on the continent. The
indictment refers to this minority and its supporters as the
“Willich-Schapper party”.

Saedt-Seckendorf claim that the split in the London Central Authority had
its origin solely in personal disagreements. Long before Saedt-Seckendorf the
“chivalrous Willich” had spread the most vicious rumours among the
London émigrés about the causes of the split and had found in Herr Arnold Ruge,
that fifth wheel on the state coach of European Central Democracy, and in
others of the same sort, people who were willing to act as channels leading to
the German and American press. The democrats realised that they could gain an
easy victory over the Communists by making the “chivalrous Willich”
the impromptu representative of the Communists. The “chivalrous
Willich” for his part realised that the “Marx party” could
not reveal the causes of the split without betraying the existence of a secret
society in Germany and in particular exposing the Central Authority in Cologne
to the paternal attention of the Prussian police. This situation no longer
obtains and so we may cite a few passages from the minutes of the last session
of the London Central Authority, dated September 15, 1850.

In support of his motion calling for separation, Marx said inter alia the
following which is given here verbatim:

“The point of view of the minority is dogmatic instead
of critical, idealistic instead of materialistic. They regard not the real
conditions but a mere effort of will as the driving force of the
revolution. Whereas we say to the workers: ‘You will have to go through
15, 20, 50 years of civil wars and national struggles not only to bring about a
change in society but also to change yourselves, and prepare yourselves for the
exercise of political power’, you say on the contrary: ‘Either we
seize power at once, or else we might as well just take to our beds.’
Whereas we are at pains to show the German workers in particular how
rudimentary the development of the German proletariat is, you appeal to the
patriotic feelings and the class prejudice of the German artisans, flattering
them in the grossest way possible, and this is a more popular method, of
course. Just as the word ‘people’ has been given an aura of
sanctity by the democrats, so you have done the same for the word
‘proletariat’. Like the democrats you substitute the catchword of
revolution for revolutionary development,” etc., etc.

Herr Schapper’s verbatim reply was as follows:

“I have voiced the opinion attacked here because I am
in general an enthusiast in this matter. The question at issue is whether we
ourselves chop off a few heads right at the start or whether it is our own
heads that will fall.” (Schapper even promised to lose his own head in a
year, i.e. on September 15, 1851) “In France the workers will come to
power and thereby we in Germany too. Were this not the case I would indeed take
to my bed; in that event I would he able to enjoy a different material
position. If we come to power we can take such measures as are necessary to
ensure the rule of the proletariat. I am a fanatical supporter of this view but
the Central Authority favours the very opposite,” etc., etc.

It is obvious that it was not for personal reasons that the Central
Authority was divided. But it would be just as wrong to speak of a difference
of principle. The Schapper-Willich party have never laid claim to the dignity
of having their own ideas. Their own contribution is the peculiar
misunderstanding of other people’s ideas which they set up as dogmas and,
reducing these to a phrase, they imagine to have made them their own. It would
be no less incorrect to agree with the prosecution in describing the
Willich-Schapper party as the “party of action”, unless by action
one understands indolence concealed behind beerhouse bluster, simulated
conspiracies and meaningless pseudo-alliances.

II The Dietz Archive

The document found in the possession of the accused, the
Manifesto of the Communist Party, which had been printed before the
February revolution and had been available from booksellers for some years,
could neither in its form nor in its aims be the programme of a
“plot”. The confiscated Addresses of the Central Authority
were concerned exclusively with the relations of the Communists to the future
democratic government and therefore not to the government of Frederick William
IV. Lastly, the “Rules” were indeed the rules of a secret
propaganda society, but the Code pénal prescribes no penalties for
secret societies. The ultimate aim of this propaganda is said to be the
destruction of existing society; but the Prussian state has already perished
once and could perish ten times more and indeed for good and all without the
existing social order being even the slightest bit harmed. The Communists can
help accelerate the dissolution of bourgeois society and yet leave the
dissolution of the Prussian state in the hands of bourgeois society. If a man
whose immediate aim was the overthrow of the Prussian state were to preach the
destruction of the social order as a means to this end he would be like that
deranged engineer who wished to blow up the whole planet in order to remove a
rubbish-heap.

But if the final goal of the League is the overthrowing of the social
order, the method by which this is to be achieved is necessarily that of
political revolution and this entails the overthrow of the Prussian
state, just as an earthquake entails the overthrow of a chicken-house. The
accused, however, proceed in fact from the outrageous assumption that the
present Prussian government would collapse without their having to lift a
finger. They accordingly did not found a league to overturn the present
government of Prussia, and were not guilty of any “treasonable
conspiracy”.

Has anyone ever accused the early Christians of aiming at the overthrow of
some obscure Roman prefect? The Prussian political philosophers from Leibniz to
Hegel have laboured to dethrone God, and if I dethrone God I also dethrone the
king who reigns by the grace of God. But has anyone ever prosecuted them for
lèse-majesté against the house of Hohenzollern?

From whatever angle one looked at it, when the corpus delicti
was subjected to public scrutiny it vanished like a ghost. The complaint
of the indictment board that there was “no indictable
offence” remained valid and the “Marx party” was
spiteful enough to refrain from providing one single iota for the
indictment during the whole year and a half of the preliminary
investigation.

Such an embarrassing situation had to be remedied. The Willich-Schapper
party, in conjunction with the police, remedied it.

Let us see how Herr Stieber, the midwife of this party, introduces it into
the trial in Cologne. (See Stieber’s testimony in the sitting of October
18, 1852.)

While Stieber was in London in the spring of 1851, allegedly to protect the
visitors to the Great Exhibition from pilferers and thieves, the Berlin police
headquarters sent him a copy of the papers found in Nothjung’s home.

“In particular,” Stieber swore,
“my attention was directed to the conspirators’ archive which
according to papers found in Nothjung’s home were in the possession
of a certain Oswald Dietz in London and which would undoubtedly contain the
whole correspondence of the League’s members.”

The conspirators’ archive? The whole correspondence of the
League’s members? But Dietz was the secretary of the Willich-Schapper
Central Authority. If the archive of a conspiracy was in his possession it was
the archive of the Willich-Schapper conspiracy. If Dietz had correspondence
belonging to the League it could only be the correspondence of the separate
league that was hostile to the accused in Cologne. But even more became clear
from the scrutiny of the documents found in Nothjung’s home, namely that
nothing in them points to the fact of Oswald Dietz being the keeper of an
archive. Moreover, how should Nothjung, who was in Leipzig, know what was not
even known to the “Marx party” in London?

Stieber could not say outright: Now note this, Gentlemen of the jury! I have
made amazing discoveries in London. Unfortunately they refer to a conspiracy
with which the accused in Cologne have nothing to do and which it is not the
task of the Cologne jury to judge, but which provided a pretext for keeping the
accused in solitary confinement for one and a half years. Stieber could not say
this. The intervention of Nothjung was indispensable to create even the
semblance of a connection between the revelations and documents from London and
the trial in Cologne.

Stieber then swore on oath that a man offered to buy the archive for cash
from Oswald Dietz. The plain fact is that a certain Reuter, a Prussian police
spy who has never belonged to a communist society, lived in the same house as
Dietz and, during the latter’s absence, broke into his desk and stole his
papers. That Herr Stieber paid him for the theft is quite credible, but this
would hardly have protected Stieber from a journey to Van Diemen’s Land
[i.e., Tasmania, to which British convicts were
transported] if the manoeuvre had become public knowledge while he was
in London.

On August 5, 1851, Stieber, who was in Berlin, received from London the
Dietz archive, “in a bulky parcel wrapped in stout oil-cloth”,
which turned out to be a heap of documents consisting of “60 separate
items”. To this Stieber could swear, and at the same time he swore that
the parcel he received on August 5, 1851 contained also letters from
the leading district in Berlin dated August 20, 1851. If someone were
to assert that Stieber was perjuring himself when he claimed that he received
on August 5, 1851 letters dated August 20, 1851, Stieber would justly retort
that a royal Prussian counsellor, like the Evangelist Matthew, has the right to
perform chronological miracles.

En passant. From the list of documents stolen from the
Willich-Schapper party and from the dates of these documents it follows that
although the party had been warned by Reuter’s burglary, it still
constantly found ways and means of having its documents stolen and allowing
them to fall into the hands of the Prussian police.

When Stieber found himself in possession of the treasure wrapped in stout
oil-cloth he was beside himself with joy. “The whole network,” he
swore, “lay revealed before my eyes.” And what did the
treasure-trove contain about the “Marx party” and the accused in
Cologne? According to Stieber’s own testimony, nothing at all except
for

“the original of a declaration by several members of
the Central Authority, who obviously formed the nucleus of the ‘Marx
party’; it was dated London, September 17, 1850, and concerned their
resignation from the communist society consequent on the well-known breach of
September 15, 1850”.

Stieber says so himself but even in this simple statement he is unable
simply to confine himself to the facts. He is compelled to raise them to a
higher plane in order to make them truly worthy of the police. For the original
declaration contained nothing more than a statement of three lines to the
effect that the majority members of the former Central Authority and their
friends were resigning from the public Workers’ Society of Great
Windmill Street[269];
but they did not resign from a “communist society”.

Stieber could have spared his correspondents the oil-cloth and his
authorities the postal dues. He had only to ‘rummage’ [a pun on Stieber's name] through the various German
papers of September 1850 and he would have found in black and white the
declaration of the “nucleus of the Marx party” announcing their
resignation from the Refugee Committee and also from the Workers’ Society
of Great Windmill Street.

The immediate product of Stieber’s researches was then the amazing
discovery that the “nucleus of the Marx party” had resigned from
the public Society of Great Windmill Street on September 17, 1850. “The
whole network of the Cologne plot lay revealed before his eyes.” But the
public couldn’t believe their eyes.

III. The Cherval Plot

Stieber, however, was able to make the most of his stolen
treasure-trove. The papers that had come into his possession on August 5, 1851,
led to the discovery of the so-called “Franco-German plot in
Paris”. They contained six reports sent from Paris by Adolph Majer,
an emissary of Willich-Schapper, as well as five reports from the leading
district in Paris to the Willich-Schapper Central Authority. (Stieber’s
testimony in the sitting of October 15). Stieber then went on a diplomatic
pleasure trip to Paris and there he made the personal acquaintance of the great
Carlier who in the recent notorious affair of the Gold Bullion Lottery had just
delivered proof that though a great enemy of the Communists, he was an even
greater friend of other people’s private property.

“Accordingly I went to Paris in September 1851.
Carlier, the Prefect of Police there at the time, was most eager and ready to
lend me his support.... With the aid of French police agents the threads laid
bare in the London letters were speedily and surely traced; we were able to
track down the addresses of the various leaders of the conspiracy and to keep
all their movements, and especially all their meetings and correspondence,
under observation. Some very sinister things came to light.... I was compelled
to yield to Prefect Carlier’s demands and measures were taken during the
night of September 4, 1851.” (Stieber’s testimony of October
18.)

Stieber left Berlin in September. Let us assume it was September 1. At best
he could have arrived in Paris on the evening of the 2nd. On the night of the
4th measures were taken. Thirty-six hours remain then for the conference with
Carlier and for the necessary steps to be taken. In these thirty-six hours not
only were the addresses of the various leaders “tracked down”; but
all their movements, all their meetings and all
their correspondence were “kept under observation”, that is of
course after their “addresses had been tracked down”.
Stieber’s arrival not only inspires the “French police
agents” with a miraculous “speed and sureness”, it also makes
the conspiratorial leaders “eager and ready” to perpetrate so many
movements, meetings and so much correspondence within twenty-four hours that
already the following evening measures can be taken against them.

But it is not enough that on September 3 the addresses of the individual
leaders should have been traced and all their movements, meetings and
correspondence put under observation:

“French police agents,” Stieber swears,
“found an opportunity to be present at the meetings of the conspirators
and to hear their decisions about the plan of campaign for the next
revolution.”

No sooner have the police agents observed the meetings than the
observation gives them an opportunity to be present, and no sooner have they
been present at one meeting than it becomes several meetings, and no sooner has
it become several meetings than decisions are adopted about the plan of
campaign during the next revolution — and all this on the same day. On
that very same day when Stieber first meets Carlier, Carlier’s police
discover the addresses of the various leaders, the various leaders meet
Carlier’s police, invite them to their meetings that very day, hold a
whole series of meetings on the same day for their benefit and cannot part from
them without hastily adopting decisions on the plan of campaign for the next
revolution.

However eager and ready Carlier might be — and no one will doubt his
readiness to uncover a communist plot three months before the coup d'état
— Stieber ascribes more to him than he could achieve. Stieber asks
miracles of the police; he does not merely ask for them, he believes them; he
does not merely believe them, he swears to them on oath.

“At the beginning of this venture, i.e. the taking of
measures, first of all a French police inspector and I personally arrested the
dangerous Cherval, the ringleader of the French Communists. He resisted
vigorously and a stubborn struggle ensued.”

Thus Stieber’s testimony of October 18.

“Cherval made an attempt on my life in Paris, in my own
home where he had broken in during the night. In the course of the ensuing
struggle my wife, who came to my aid, was wounded.”

Thus Stieber’s further testimony of October 27.

On the night of the 4th, Stieber intervenes at Cherval’s dwelling and
it comes to fisticuffs in which Cherval resists. On the night of the 3rd,
Cherval intervenes at Stieber’s dwelling and it comes to fisticuffs in
which Stieber resists. But it was precisely on the 3rd that a veritable
entente cordiale obtained between conspirators and police agents as a
result of which so many great deeds were performed in one day. It is now
alleged that not only the conspirators were found out by Stieber on the 3rd,
but Stieber too was found out on the 3rd by the conspirators. While
Carlier’s agents discovered the addresses of the conspirators, the
conspirators discovered Stieber’s address. While he played the role of an
“observer” towards them, they pursued an active role towards him.
While he was dreaming about their plot against the government, they were
engaged in an assault on his person.

Stieber’s testimony of October 18 continues:

“In the course of the struggle” (this is Stieber
on the attack) “I observed that Cherval was endeavouring to put a piece
of paper into his mouth and swallow it. Only with great difficulty was it
possible to retrieve one half of the paper, the other half being already
devoured.”

So the paper was situated in Cherval’s mouth, between his
teeth in fact, for only one half was retrieved, the other half having already
been devoured. Stieber and his henchman, a police inspector or whoever, could
only retrieve the other half by placing their hands in the jaws of the
“dangerous Cherval”. Against such an onslaught biting was the most
obvious method of defence that Cherval could adopt, and the Paris papers
actually reported that Cherval had bitten Frau Stieber; in that scene however
Stieber was assisted not by his wife but by the police inspector. On the other
hand, Stieber declares that when Cherval assaulted him in his own home, it was
Frau Stieber who had been wounded while coming to his aid. If one compares
Stieber’s statements with the reports of the Paris papers it would appear
that on the night of the 3rd Cherval bit Frau Stieber in an attempt to save the
papers that Herr Stieber tore from between his teeth on the night of the 4th.
Stieber will retort that Paris is a city of miracles and that long before him
La Rochefoucauld had said that in France everything is possible.

Putting the belief in miracles to one side for a moment it seems that the
first miracles arose because Stieber compressed into one day, September 3, a
whole series of events that were in reality spread over a long period of time,
while the latter miracles arose when he claimed of different events that
happened in one place and on one evening that they occurred in two places on
two evenings. Let us confront his tale from A Thousand and One Nights
with the actual facts. But first one very strange fact, though by no means a
miracle. Stieber tore from Cherval one half of the paper that had been
swallowed. What was in the retrieved half? The whole that Stieber wanted.

“This paper,” he swears, “contained a vital
instruction for Gipperich, the emissary in Strasbourg, together with his
complete address.”

Now for the facts of the matter.

We know from Stieber that he received the Dietz archive in a stout oil-cloth
wrapping on August 5, 1851. On August 8 or 9, 1851, a certain Schmidt arrived
in Paris. Schmidt, it seems, is the name inevitably assumed by Prussian police
agents travelling incognito. In 1845-46 Stieber travelled through the Silesian
Mountains under the name of Schmidt. Fleury, his London agent, went as
Schmidt to Paris in 1851. Here he searched for the various leaders of the
Willich-Schapper conspiracy and lit upon Cherval. He pretended that he had fled
from Cologne rescuing the League’s cash-box with 500 talers. He produced
credentials from Dresden and various other places and spoke about reorganising
the League, uniting the different parties, as the schisms were caused solely by
personal disagreements (the police preached unity and union even then), and
promised to use the 500 talers to inject fresh life into the League. Schmidt
gradually made the acquaintance of various leaders of the Willich-Schapper
communities in Paris. He not only learned their addresses, but visited them,
watched their post, observed their movements, found his way into their meetings
and, as an agent provocateur, egged them on. Cherval in particular
became more boastful than ever as Schmidt lavished more and more admiration on
him, hailing him as the League’s great unknown, as the “Great
Chief” who was only unaware of his own importance, a fate that had
befallen many a great man. One evening when Schmidt went with Cherval to a
meeting of the League, the latter read out his famous letter to Gipperich
before sending it off. In this way Schmidt learned of Gipperich’s
existence. “As soon as Gipperich returns to Strasbourg,” Schmidt
observed, “we can give him an order for the 500 talers lying in
Strasbourg. Here is the address of the man who is holding the money. Give me in
exchange Gipperich’s address to send it as a credential to the man to
whom Gipperich will present himself.” In this way Schmidt obtained
Gipperich’s address. On the same evening a quarter of an hour after
Cherval posted the letter to Gipperich, a message was sent by electric
telegraph and Gipperich was arrested, his house was searched and the famous
letter was intercepted. Gipperich was arrested before Cherval.

Some little while after this Schmidt informed Cherval that a man called
Stieber who was a member of the Prussian police had arrived in Paris. He had
not only learned his address but had also heard from a waiter in a café
opposite that Stieber had conferred about having him (Schmidt) arrested.
Cherval was the man who could give this wretched Prussian policeman a lesson he
would not easily forget. “We'll throw him in the Seine” was
Cherval’s answer. They agreed to gain entry into Stieber’s house
the next day under some pretext or other in order to confirm that he was there
and to make a mental note of his personal appearance. The next evening our
heroes really set out on their expedition. As they approached their goal
Schmidt expressed the opinion that it would be better if Cherval were to enter
the house while he patrolled in front of it. “Just ask the porter for
Stieber,” he went on, “and when Stieber lets you in tell him that
you want to speak to Herr Sperling and ask him whether he has brought the
expected bill of exchange from Cologne. Oh, and one thing more. Your white hat
is too conspicuous, it is too democratic. There, take my black one.” They
exchanged hats, Schmidt prepared to stand guard, Cherval pulled the bell-rope
and found himself in Stieber’s house. The porter doubted whether Stieber
was at home and Cherval was about to withdraw when a woman’s voice called
from upstairs: “Yes, Stieber is at home.” Cherval followed the
voice and the trail led to an individual wearing green spectacles who
identified himself as Stieber. Cherval then produced the formula agreed on
about Sperling and the bill of exchange. “That won’t do,”
Stieber interrupted him quickly. “You come into my house, ask for me, are
shown up, then you try to withdraw, etc. I find that is extremely
suspicious.” Cherval answered brusquely. Stieber pulled the bell, several
men appeared immediately, they surrounded Cherval, Stieber reached for his coat
pocket from where a letter was visible. It did not in fact contain
Cherval’s instructions to Gipperich, but it was a letter from Gipperich
to Cherval. Cherval tried to eat the letter, Stieber attempted to take it from
his mouth, Cherval hit out and bit and lashed out. Husband Stieber tried to
save one half, wife Stieber the other half and an injury was all the reward she
had for her zeal. The noise of the scene brought all the other tenants from
their apartments. Meanwhile one of Stieber’s types had thrown a gold
watch downstairs and while Cherval was shouting: “Spy!” Stieber and
Co. screamed: “Stop thief!” The porter recovered the gold watch and
the cry of “Stop thief!” became general. Cherval was arrested and
on his way out he was met at the door not by his friend Schmidt but by four or
five soldiers.

When confronted with the facts, all the miracles invoked by Stieber
disappear. His agent Fleury had been at work for over three weeks, he not only
laid bare the threads of the plot, he also helped to weave them. Stieber had
only to arrive from Berlin and he could exclaim: Veni, vidi, vici! He
could present Carlier with a ready-made plot and Carlier needed only to be
“willing” to intervene. There was no need for Frau Stieber to be
bitten by Cherval on the 3rd because Herr Stieber put his hand into
Cherval’s mouth on the 4th. There was no need for Gipperich’s
address and the appropriate instructions to be salvaged whole from the jaws of
the “dangerous Cherval”, like Jonah from the whale’s belly,
after they have been half eaten. The only miracle that remains is the
miraculous faith of the jurymen to whom Stieber dares to serve up seriously
such fairy tales. Genuine representatives of the obtuse thinking of loyal
subjects!

“In prison, after I had shown Cherval to his great
astonishment,” Stieber swears (in the sitting of October 18), “all
his original reports which he had sent to London, he realised that I knew all
and made a frank confession to me.”

The papers that Stieber showed Cherval at first were by no means
his original reports to London. Only afterwards were these together with other
documents from the Dietz archive sent to Stieber from Berlin. He first showed
Cherval a circular signed by Oswald Dietz that Cherval had just received and a
few of the most recent letters from Willich. How did Stieber get possession of
these? While Cherval was occupied biting and fighting Herr and Frau Stieber the
valiant Schmidt-Fleury hurried to Mme Cherval, an Englishwoman (Fleury being a
German businessman in London naturally speaks English) and told her that her
husband had been arrested, that the danger was great, that she should hand over
his papers so that he might be compromised no further, and that Cherval had
instructed him to give them to a third person. As proof that he came as a
genuine emissary he showed her the white hat he had taken from Cherval because
it looked too democratic. Thus Fleury obtained the letters from Mme Cherval and
Stieber obtained them from Fleury.

At any rate he now had a more favourable base from which to operate than
previously in London. He could simply steal the Dietz archive, but he could
concoct Cherval’s evidence. Accordingly (in the sitting on October 18) he
makes his Cherval expatiate about “contacts in Germany” as
follows:

“He had lived in the Rhineland for a considerable time
and more particularly he had been in Cologne in 1848. There he made the
acquaintance of Marx and the latter admitted him to the League, which he then
zealously propagated in Paris on the basis of elements already existing
there.”

In 1846 Cherval was nominated and admitted to the League in
London by Schapper at a time when Marx was in Brussels and was himself not yet
a member of the League. [274] So Cherval could not be admitted to the
same League by Marx in Cologne in 1848.

On the outbreak of the March revolution Cherval went to Rhenish Prussia for
a few weeks but from there returned to London where he remained without
interruption from the end of spring 1848 until the summer of 1850. He cannot
therefore at the same time “have zealously propagated the League in
Paris” unless Stieber, who performs chronological miracles, also finds
spatial miracles within his powers and can even confer the quality of ubiquity
on third persons.

Only after his expulsion from Paris did Marx come to know Cherval
superficially along with a hundred other workers when he joined the
Workers’ Society in Great Windmill Street in London in September 1849. So
he cannot have met him in Cologne in 1848.

At first Cherval told Stieber the truth on all these points. Stieber tried
to compel him to make false statements. Did he succeed? We have only
Stieber’s testimony that he did, and that is a shortcoming.
Stieber’s prime concern was, of course, to establish a fictitious
connection between Cherval and Marx so as to establish an artificial connection
between the accused in Cologne and the Paris plot.

Whenever Stieber is required to go into details about the connections and
correspondence of Cherval and his colleagues with Germany, he takes good care
not even to mention Cologne and instead speaks complacently and at length of
Heck in Brunswick, Laube in Berlin, Reininger in Mainz, Tietz in Hamburg, etc.,
etc., in short of the Willich-Schapper party. This party, says Stieber, had
“the League’s archive in its hands”. — Through a
misunderstanding it changed from their hands to his. In the archive he found
not one single line written by Cherval to anyone in London, let alone
to Marx in person, before September 15, 1850, before the split of the
London Central Authority.

With the help of Schmidt-Fleury he swindled Frau Cherval out of her
husband’s papers. But again, he could not find a single line written by
Marx to Cherval. To remedy this awkward state of affairs he makes Cherval write
in his statement that

“he had fallen out with Marx because the latter had
demanded that correspondence should still be sent to him even though the
Central Authority was now situated in Cologne.”

If Stieber found no Marx-Cherval correspondence before September
15, 1850, this must be due to the fact that Cherval ceased all correspondence
with Marx after September 15, 1850. Pends-toi, Figaro, tu n'aurais
pas inventé cela!

The documents against the accused that had been laboriously brought together
by the Prussian government and, in part, by Stieber himself during the year and
a half that the investigation lasted refuted every suggestion of a connection
between the accused and the Paris community or the Franco-German plot.

The Address from the London Central Authority of June 1850 proved that the
Paris community was dissolved even before the split in the Central Authority.
Six letters from the Dietz archive showed that after the Central Authority was
transferred to Cologne the Paris communities were set up afresh by A. Majer, an
emissary of the Willich-Schapper party. The letters of the leading district in
Paris that were found in the archive proved that it was decidedly hostile
towards the Cologne Central Authority. Finally, the French bill of indictment
proved that all the acts Cherval and his associates were accused of did not
occur until the year 1851. In the sitting of November 8 Saedt, despite the
Stieberian revelations, found himself therefore reduced to the bare supposition
that it was surely not impossible that the Marx party had at some time somehow
been involved in some plot or other in Paris but that nothing was known of this
plot or the time when it took place other than the fact that Saedt, acting on
official instructions, deemed it possible. How dull-witted the German press
must be to go on inventing stories of Saedt’s incisive intelligence.

De longue main the Prussian police had sought to persuade the
public that Marx and, through Marx, the accused in Cologne were involved in the
Franco-German plot. During the Cherval trial Beckmann, the police spy, sent the
following notice from Paris to the Kölnische Zeitung on February 25,
1852:

“Several of the accused have fled, among them a certain
A. Majer, who is described as an agent of Marx and Co.”

Whereupon the Kölnische Zeitung printed a statement by
Marx that “A. Majer is one of the most intimate friends of Herr Schapper
and the former Prussian lieutenant Willich, and that he is a complete stranger
to Marx”. Then, in his testimony of October 18, 1852, Stieber himself
admitted:

“The members of the Central Authority expelled by the
Marx party in London on September 15, 1850, sent A.Majer to France,
etc.”

and he even divulged the contents of the correspondence between
A. Majer and Willich-Schapper.

In September 1851 during the police campaign against aliens in Paris a
member of the “Marx party”, Konrad Schramm, was arrested, together
with 50 or 60 other people sitting in a café, and was detained for almost two
months on the charge of being implicated in the plot instigated by the Irishman
Cherval. On October 16 while still in the depot of the Prefecture of Police he
received a visit from a German who addressed him as follows:

“I am a Prussian official. You are aware that all over
Germany and especially in Cologne there have been many arrests following the
discovery of a communist society. The mere mention of a person’s name in
a letter is enough to bring about his arrest. The government is somewhat
embarrassed by the large number of prisoners of whom it is uncertain whether or
not they are really implicated. We know that you had no part in the
complot franco-allemand but on the other hand you are very closely
acquainted with Marx and Engels and are doubtless very well informed about all
the details of the German communist connections. We would be greatly
indebted to you if you could help us in this respect and give us more detailed
information as to who is guilty and who innocent. In this way you could bring
about the release of a large number of people. If you wish we can draw up an
official document about your statement. You will have nothing to fear from such
a statement,” etc., etc.

Schramm naturally showed this gentle Prussian official the door,
protested to the French Ministry about such visits and was expelled from France
at the end of October.

That Schramm was a member of the “Marx party” was known to the
Prussian police from the official resignation found in the Dietz archive. That
the “Marx party” had no connection with the Cherval plot, they
themselves admitted to Schramm. If it was possible to establish a connection
between the “Marx party” and the Cherval plot this could not be
done in Cologne but only in Paris where a member of that party sat in gaol at
the same time as Cherval. But the Prussian government feared nothing more than
a confrontation of Cherval and Schramm, which was bound to nullify in advance
the successful outcome they expected from the Paris trial with regard to the
accused in Cologne. By his acquittal of Schramm the French examining magistrate
ruled that the trial in Cologne was in no way connected with the Paris plot.

Stieber then made a last attempt:

“With reference to the above-mentioned leader of the
French Communists, Cherval, we endeavoured, for a long time in vain, to
discover Cherval’s true identity. It finally became clear from a remark
made in confidence to a police agent by Marx that he had escaped from gaol in
Aachen in 1845, where he was serving a sentence for forgery of bills, that he
was then granted admittance to the League by Marx during the troubles of 1848
and that he went as an emissary from there to Paris.”

Just as Marx was unable to inform Stieber’s spiritus
familiaris, the police agent, that he had admitted Cherval into the League
in Cologne in 1848, for Schapper had admitted him into the League in London as
early as 1846, or that he had induced him to live in London and at the same
time to hawk propaganda around in Paris, so too, he was unable to inform
Stieber’s alter ego, the police agent as such, that
Cherval served a sentence in Aachen in 1845 and that he had forged bills, facts
that he learnt only from Stieber’s testimony. Only a Stieber can allow
himself such a hysteron proteron. Antiquity has bequeathed to us its
dying warrior; the Prussian state will leave us its swearing
Stieber.

Thus for a long, long time they had vainly endeavoured to discover
Cherval’s true identity. On the evening of September 2 Stieber arrived in
Paris. On the evening of the 4th Cherval was arrested, on the evening of the
5th he was taken from his cell to a dimly lit room. Stieber was there but in
addition there was also a French police official present, an Alsatian who spoke
broken German but understood it perfectly, had a policeman’s memory and
was not favourably impressed by the arrogantly servile Police Superintendent
from Berlin. In the presence of this French official the following conversation
took place:

Stieber in German: “Now look here, Herr
Cherval, we know what’s at the bottom of this business with the French
name and the Irish passport. We know who you are, you are a Rhenish Prussian.
Your name is K. and it is entirely in your own hands to escape the consequences
by making a full confession,” etc., etc.

Cherval denied this.

Stieber: “Certain people who forged bills and
escaped from Prussian gaols were extradited to Prussia by the French
authorities. So I would again urge you to think carefully; the penalty is
twelve years solitary confinement.”

The French police official: “We must give the
man time to think it over in his cell.”

Cherval was led back to his cell.

Naturally enough Stieber could not afford to blurt out the truth, he could
not admit publicly that he was trying to force false admissions from Cherval by
conjuring up the spectre of extradition and twelve years solitary
imprisonment.

And even now Stieber had still not been able to discover Cherval’s
true identity. He still referred to him in front of the jury as Cherval and not
as K. And that was not all. He did not know where Cherval really was. In the
sitting of October 23 he had him still locked up in Paris. When in the sitting
on October 27 Schneider II, counsel for the defence, pressed him to say
“whether the afore-mentioned Cherval was at present in London?”
Stieber answered that “he could not give any precise information on this
point; and could only inform them of the rumour that Cherval had escaped in
Paris”.

The Prussian government suffered its customary fate of being duped. The
French government had allowed it to pull the chestnuts of the Franco-German
plot out of the fire but not to eat them. Cherval had managed to gain the
sympathy of the French government and a few days after the Paris Assizes it let
him and Gipperich flee to London. The Prussian government had hoped that in
Cherval it would have a tool for the trial in Cologne, whereas in fact it only
provided the French government with yet another agent.[276]

One day before Cherval’s pretended flight he received a visit from a
Prussian faquin dressed in a black tail-coat and cuffs, with a
bristling black moustache, and sparse grey hair cut short, in a word, a very
pretty fellow who, he was told later, was Police Lieutenant Greif and who
indeed afterwards introduced himself as Greif. Greif had obtained access to him
by means of an entrance ticket he had obtained (having by-passed the prefect of
police) directly from the Minister of Police. The Minister of Police thought it
great fun to deceive the dear Prussians.

Greif: “I am a Prussian official. I have been
sent here to negotiate with you. You will never get out of here without our
aid. I have a proposal to make to you. We need you as a witness in Cologne. If
you submit a request to the French government to hand you over to Prussia they
have agreed to grant permission. After you have fulfilled your obligations and
the case is over we shall release you on your word of honour.”

Cherval: “I'll get out without your
help.”

Greif (emphatically): “That is impossible!”

Greif also had Gipperich brought to him and proposed that he
should spend five days in Hanover as a communist emissary. Likewise without
success. The next day Cherval and Gipperich escaped. The French authorities
smirked, the telegraph brought the bad news to Berlin and as late as October 23
Stieber swore in court that Cherval was locked up in Paris, and as late as
October 27 he could not give any information and had merely heard the rumour
that Cherval had escaped “in Paris”. Meanwhile, Police Lieutenant
Greif had visited Cherval in London three times during the Cologne proceedings
in order to discover, among other things, Nette’s address in Paris in the
belief that he could be bribed to testify against the defendants in Cologne.
This plan misfired.

Stieber had his reasons for casting a veil of obscurity over his relations
with Cherval. K. therefore remained Cherval, the Prussian remained Irish and
Stieber does not know to this day where Cherval is and what is “his true
identity”.*

* Even in the Black Book [277] Stieber still does not know who Cherval
really is. It is written there, Part II, p. 38, under No. 111, Cherval: see
Crämer; and under No. 116 Crämer: “as stated in No. 111, he has been very
active in the Communist League under the name of Cherval. In the League he is
also known as Frank. Under the name of Cherval he was sentenced to 8 years
imprisonment by the Paris Assizes in February 1853” (this should read
1852) “but he soon escaped and fled to London.” So ignorant is
Stieber in Part II where he provides an alphabetical, numbered list of suspects
with their particulars. He has already forgotten that in Part I, p. 81 he has
let slip the admission: “Cherval is the son of a Rhenish official called
Joseph Krümer who” (who? the father or the son?) “abused his craft
of lithography to forge bills, and was arrested for this but escaped from
prison in Cologne” (false, it was Aachen!) “in 1844 and fled to
England and later to Paris.” — Compare this with Stieber’s
evidence before the jury quoted above. The plain fact is that the police are
absolutely incapable of telling the truth. [Note by Engels to the edition
of 1885]

In Cherval’s correspondence with Gipperich the trifolium
Seckendorf-Saedt-Stieber had at last found what it was looking for:

Schinderhannes, Karlo Moor

Whom I took as model sure.

In order that Cherval’s letter to Gipperich might be deeply engraved
upon the lethargic cerebral matter of the 300 top tax-payers whom the jury
represented, it received the honour of being read aloud three times. Behind
this harmless gipsy pathos no experienced person could fail to see the figure
of the buffoon who tries to appear terrifying both to himself and others.

Cherval & Co., moreover, shared the general expectation of the democrats
that the second [Sunday] of May 1852 would work miracles and so they decided to
join the revolution on that day. Schmidt-Fleury had helped to bestow upon this
fixed idea the form of a plan and so the activities of Cherval and Co. now came
within the legal definition of a plot. Thus through them proof was provided
that the plot that had not been perpetrated by the accused in Cologne against
the Prussian government had at any rate been perpetrated by the Cherval party
against France.

With the help of Schmidt-Fleury the Prussian government had sought to
fabricate the semblance of a connection between the plot in Paris and the
accused in Cologne, a connection to the reality of which Stieber then swore on
oath. This trinity of Stieber, Greif, Fleury played the chief role in the
Cherval plot. We shall see them at work again.

Let us then sum up:

A is a republican, B also calls himself a republican. A and B are enemies. B
is commissioned by the police to construct an infernal machine. Whereupon A is
dragged before the courts. If B rather than A has built the machine this is due
to the enmity between A and B. In order to find proof of A’s guilt B is
called as a witness against him. This was the comedy of the Cherval plot.

It will be readily understood that as far as the general public was
concerned the logic of this was a flop. Stieber’s “factual”
revelations dissolved amidst malodorous vapours; the complaint of the
indictment board that “there was no factual evidence of an indictable
offence” was as valid as ever. New police miracles had become
necessary.

IV. The Original Minute-Book

During the sitting on October 23, the Presiding judge announced:
“Police Superintendent Stieber has indicated to me that he has to make
important new depositions” and for that purpose he called this witness
back into the box. Up jumped Stieber and the performance began.

Hitherto Stieber had described the activities of the Willich-Schapper party,
or more briefly, the Cherval party, activities that took place both
before and after the arrest of the accused in Cologne. He
said nothing about the accused themselves either before or
after their arrest. The Cherval plot took place after their arrest and
Stieber now declared:

“In my earlier testimony I described the development of
the Communist League and the activities of its members only up to the
time when the men now accused were arrested.”

Thus he admitted that the Cherval plot had nothing to do with
“the development of the Communist League and the activities of its
members”. He confessed to the nullity of his previous testimony. Indeed,
he was so complacent about his statements on October 18 that he regarded it as
quite superfluous to continue to identify Cherval with the “Marx
party”.

“Firstly,” he said, “the Willich group
still exists and of its members hitherto only Cherval in Paris has been seized,
etc.”

Aha! So the ringleader Cherval is a leader of the Willich
group.

But now Stieber wished to make some most important announcements,
not merely the very latest announcements that is, but the most
important ones. The very latest and most important ones! These most
important announcements would lose some of their significance if the
insignificance of his earlier announcements were not emphasised. Up to now,
Stieber declared, I have not really said anything, but now the time has come.
Pay attention! Hitherto I have talked about the Cherval party, which is hostile
to the accused, and strictly speaking, none of that has been in place here. But
now I shall discuss the “Marx party”, and this trial is concerned
exclusively with the Marx party. But Stieber could not put the matter as
plainly as this. So he says:

“Up to now I have described the Communist League
before the arrest of the accused; I shall now describe the League
after their arrest.”

With characteristic virtuosity he manages to convert even mere
rhetorical phrases into perjury.

After the arrest of the accused in Cologne Marx formed a new
central authority.

“This emerges from the statement of a police agent whom
the late Chief of Police Schulz had managed to smuggle unrecognised into the
London League and into the immediate proximity of Marx.”

The new central authority kept a minute-book and this, the
“original minute-book”, was now in Stieber’s possession.
Horrifying machinations in the Rhine provinces, in Cologne and even in the
courtroom itself, all this is proved by the original minute-book. It contains,
proof that the accused had maintained an uninterrupted correspondence with Marx
through the very walls of the prison. In a word, if the Dietz archive was the
Old Testament, the original minute-book is the New Testament. The Old Testament
was wrapped in stout oil-cloth, but the New Testament is bound in a sinister
red morocco leather. Now the red morocco is indeed a demonstratio ad
oculos, but people today are even more sceptical than in Thomas’
time; they do not even believe what they see with their own eyes. Who still
believes in Testaments, let them be Old or New, now that the religion of the
Mormons has been invented? But Stieber, who is not wholly unsympathetic to
Mormonism, has foreseen even this.

“It might be objected,” Stieber the Mormon
observed, “that these are nothing but the tales of contemptible police
agents but,” Stieber swore, “I have complete proofs of the veracity
and reliability of their reports.”

Just listen to that! Proofs of their veracity and proofs of
their reliability? and complete proofs at that. Complete proofs! And what are
these proofs?

Stieber had long known

“that a secret correspondence existed between Marx and
the accused men in the gaol, but had been unable to track it down. Then on
the previous Sunday a special courier from London arrived bringing me the
news that we had finally managed to discover the secret address from which the
correspondence had been conducted. It was the address of D. Kothes, a
businessman in the Old Market here. The same courier brought me the original
minute-book used by the London Central Authority which had been procured from a
member of the League for money.”

Stieber then communicated with Chief of Police Geiger and the
postal authorities.

“The necessary precautionary measures were taken and
after no more than two days the evening post from London brought with
it a letter addressed to Kothes. On the instructions of the Chief Public
Prosecutor the letter was detained and opened and in it was found a
seven-page-long briefing for Schneider II, the Counsel for the Defence, in
Marx’s own handwriting. It indicated the method of defence that Counsel
should adopt.... On the reverse side of the letter there was a large Latin B.
The letter was copied and an easily detachable piece of the original was
retained together with the original envelope. The letter was then put
into a new envelope, sealed and given to a police officer from another town
with the order that he should go to Kothes, and introduce himself as an
emissary from Marx,” etc.

Stieber then narrated the rest of the disgusting farce enacted
by the police, about how the police officer from another town had pretended to
be an emissary from Marx, etc. Kothes was arrested on October 18 and after 24
hours he declared that the B on the inside of the letter stood for Bermbach. On
October 19 Bermbach was arrested and his house searched. On October 21 Kothes
and Bermbach were released.

Stieber gave this evidence on Saturday, October 23. “The previous
Sunday”, that is Sunday, October 17, was allegedly the day the
special courier arrived with Kothes’ address and the original minute-book
and two days after the courier, the letter arrived for Kothes, that is on
October 19. But Kothes had already been arrested on October 18 because of the
letter the police officer from another town had brought him on October 17. The
letter to Kothes, therefore, arrived two days before the courier with
Kothes’ address, that is Kothes was arrested on October 18 for a letter
that he did not receive until October 19. A chronological miracle?

Later, having been worried by Counsel, Stieber declared that the courier
with Kothes’ address and the original minute-book arrived on October 10.
Why on October 10? Because October 10 happened to be likewise a Sunday and on
October 23 it too would be a “previous” Sunday and in this way the
original statement about the previous Sunday could be sustained and to this
extent the perjury could be concealed. In that event, however, the letter did
not arrive two days but a whole week after the courier. The perjury now fell on
the letter rather than on the courier. Stieber’s oath is like
Luther’s peasant. If you help him to mount the horse from one side he
falls down on the other.

And finally during the sitting of November 3 Police Lieutenant Goldheim of
Berlin declared that Police Lieutenant Greif of London had delivered the
minute-book to Stieber on October 11, that is to say on a Monday, in his
presence and that of Chief of Police Wermuth. Goldheim’s statement
therefore makes Stieber guilty of perjury twice over.

As the original envelope with the London postmark shows, Marx posted the
letter to Kothes on Thursday, October 14. So the letter should have arrived on
Friday evening, October 15. For a courier to deliver Kothes’ address and
the original minute-book two days before the letter arrived, he must have come
on Wednesday, October 13. He could not arrive on October 17th, nor on the 10th
nor on the 11th.

Greif, in his role of courier, did indeed bring Stieber his original
minute-book from London. Stieber was as well aware as his crony Greif of the
real significance of this book. He hesitated therefore to produce it in court
for this time it was not a matter of statements taken behind prison bars in
Mazas. Then came the letter from Marx. It was a godsend for Stieber. Kothes is
a mere address, for the contents of the letter were not intended for Kothes but
for the Latin B on the back of the enclosed sealed letter. Kothes is therefore
nothing but an address. Let us suppose he is a secret address. Let us
suppose further he is the secret address through which Marx communicates with
the accused in Cologne. Let us suppose lastly that our London agents had sent
by the same courier at the same time both the original minute-book and this
secret address but that the letter arrived two days after the courier, the
address and the minute-book. In this way we kill two birds with one stone.
Firstly we have proof of the secret correspondence with Marx and secondly we
prove that the original minute-book is authentic. The authenticity of the
minute-book is shown by the correctness of the address, the correctness of the
address is shown by the letter. The veracity and reliability of our agents is
shown by the address and the letter, the authenticity of the minute-book is
shown by the veracity and reliability of our agents. Quod erat
demonstrandum. Then comes the merry comedy with the police official from
another town and then come the mysterious arrests. Public, jurymen and even the
accused, all stand thunderstruck.

But why did not Stieber let his special courier arrive on October
13, which would have been quite easy for him? Because in that case he would not
have been special, because, as we have seen, chronology was not his strong
point and the common calendar is beneath the dignity of a Prussian police
superintendent. Moreover, he kept the original envelope; so who would be able
to unravel the affair?

But giving his evidence, Stieber compromised himself from the outset by the
omission of one fact. If his agents knew of Kothes’ address they would
also know to whom the mysterious B referred on the reverse of the inside
letter. Stieber was so little initiated into the mysteries of the Latin B that
on October 17 he had Becker searched in gaol in the hope of finding the letter
from Marx on him. He only learnt from Kothes’ statement that the B stood
for Bermbach.

But how did Marx’s letter fall into the hands of the Prussian
government? Very simply. The Prussian government regularly opens the letters
entrusted to its postal service and during the trial in Cologne it did this
with particular assiduity. In Aachen and Frankfurt am Main they could tell some
pretty stories about it. It was a pure chance whether a letter would slip
through or not.

When the story about the original courier collapsed, the one about the
original minute-book had to share its fate. Naturally, Stieber did not yet
suspect this in the sitting on October 23 when he triumphantly revealed the
contents of the New Testament, that is the red book. The immediate effect of
his statement was the re-arrest of Bermbach, who was present at the trial as a
witness.

Why was Bermbach re-arrested?

Because of the papers found on him? No, for after his house had been
searched he was released again. He was arrested 24 hours after Kothes.
Therefore if he had had incriminating documents they would certainly have
disappeared by then. Why then was witness Bermbach arrested, when the witnesses
Hentze, Hätzel, Steingens, who had been shown to be accomplices or members of
the league, still sat unmolested on the witness bench?

Bermbach had received a letter from Marx which contained a mere criticism of
the indictment and nothing else besides. This Stieber admitted since the letter
was there for the jury to see. But he couched the admission in his hyperbolic
policeman’s manner thus: “Marx himself exercises an uninterrupted
influence on the present case from London.” And the jury might well ask
themselves, as Guizot asked his voters: Est-ce que vous vous sentez
corrompus? What then was the reason for Bermbach’s arrest? From the
beginning of the inquiry the Prussian Government as a matter of
principle strove consistently to deprive the accused of all means
of defence. In direct contradiction to the law, defence counsel, as they
announced in open court, were refused access to the accused even after
presentation of the bill of indictment. On his own testimony Stieber had been
in possession of the Dietz archive ever since August 5, 1851. But the Dietz
archive was not appended to the indictment. Not until October 18, 1852, was it
produced in the middle of a public hearing — and only so much of it was
produced as Stieber thought politic. The jury, the accused and the public were
all to be caught off their guard and taken by surprise; defence counsel were to
stand by helplessly in the face of the surprise prepared by the police.

And even more so after the presentation of the original minute-book! The
Prussian Government trembled at the thought of revelations. Bermbach however
had received material for the defence from Marx and it could be foreseen that
he would receive information about the minute-book. His arrest denoted the
proclamation of a new crime, that of corresponding with Marx, and the
punishment for this crime was imprisonment. That was intended to deter every
Prussian citizen from permitting his address to be used. A bon entendeur
demi mot. Bermbach was locked up so that evidence for
the defence might be locked out. And Bermbach remained in gaol for
five weeks. For if they had released him immediately after the case was
concluded the Prussian courts would have publicly proclaimed their docile
subservience to the Prussian police. So Bermbach remained in gaol, ad
majorem gloriam of the Prussian judiciary.

Stieber swore on oath that

“after the arrest of the accused in Cologne, Marx
joined together the ruins of his party in London and formed a new central
authority with about eighteen people,” etc.

The ruins had never come apart for they were so joined together
that they had formed a private society ever since September 1850. But at a word
from Stieber they promptly vanished only to be revived by another command from
Stieber after the arrest of the accused in Cologne and this time they appear in
the form of a new central authority.

On Monday, October 25, the Kölnische Zeitung arrived in London with
an account of Stieber’s testimony of October 23.

The “Marx party” had neither formed a new central authority nor
kept minutes of its meetings. They guessed at once who had been the chief
manufacturer of the New Testament — Wilhelm Hirsch from
Hamburg.

Early in December 1851 Hirsch appeared at the “Marx society”
saying he was a communist refugee. Simultaneously, letters arrived from Hamburg
denouncing him as a spy. But it was decided to allow him to remain in the
society for the time being and watch him with a view to procuring proof of his
innocence or guilt. At the meeting on January 15, 1852, a letter from Cologne
was read aloud in which a friend of Marx referred to another postponement of
the trial and to the difficulty experienced even by relatives in gaining access
to the accused. On this occasion mention was made of Frau Dr. Daniels. People
were struck by the fact that Hirsch was not seen again after this meeting
either in anyone’s “immediate proximity” or at a distance. On
February 2, 1852, Marx was notified from Cologne that Frau Dr. Daniels’
house had been searched as the result of a police denunciation which claimed
that a letter from Frau Daniels to Marx had been read out in the communist
society in London and that Marx had been instructed to write back to her
telling her that he was busy reorganising the League in Germany, etc. This
denunciation literally fills the first page of the original minute-book.

Marx replied by return of post that as Frau Daniels had never written to him
he could not possibly have read out a letter from her; the whole denunciation
had been invented by a certain Hirsch, a dissolute young man who had no
objection to supplying the Prussian police with as many lies as they had a mind
to pay for in cash.

Since January 15 Hirsch had disappeared from the meetings; he was now
formally expelled from the society. At the same time it was resolved to change
the time and place of the meetings. Hitherto, meetings had taken place on
Thursdays on premises belonging to J. W. Masters, Markethouse, in
Farringdon Street, City. From now on it was agreed that the society would meet
on Wednesdays in the Rose and Crown Tavern, Crown Street, Soho.
Hirsch, whom “Chief of Police Schulz had managed to smuggle unrecognised
into the immediate proximity of Marx”, despite his
“proximity” was unaware even eight months later of the place and
day of the meetings. Both before and after February he persisted in
manufacturing his “original minute-book” on a Thursday and
dating the meetings on Thursdays. If the Kölnische Zeitung is
consulted the following can be found: Minutes of January 15 (Thursday),
likewise January 29 (Thursday), and March 4 (Thursday), and May 13 (Thursday),
and May 20 (Thursday), and July 22 (Thursday), and July 29 (Thursday), and
September 23 (Thursday), and September 30 (Thursday).

The landlord of the Rose and Crown Tavern made a declaration before the
magistrate in Marlborough Street to the effect that “Dr. Marx’s
circle” had met in his tavern every Wednesday since February 1852.
Liebknecht and Rings, whom Hirsch had named as the secretaries for his original
minute-book, had their signatures witnessed by the same magistrate. And
finally, the minutes Hirsch had kept in Stechan’s Workers’
Society[281] were
obtained so that his handwriting might be compared with that in the original
minute-book.

In this way the spurious nature of the original minute-book was demonstrated
without it being necessary to embark upon a criticism of the contents which
their own contradictions caused to disintegrate.

The real difficulty was how to send these documents to Counsel. The Prussian
Post was merely an outpost, situated between the Prussian frontier and Cologne,
and designed to frustrate the passage of munitions to the defence.

It was necessary to use roundabout ways and so the first documents,
despatched on October 25, arrived in Cologne only on October 30.

Counsel were at first forced to make do with the very meagre resources that
lay at hand in Cologne. The first blow against Stieber came from a direction he
had not foreseen. Frau Dr. Daniels’ father Müller, a King’s Counsel
and a man in high repute as a legal expert and well known for his conservative
views, declared in the Könische Zeitung on October 26 that
his daughter had never corresponded with Marx and that Stieber’s original
book was a piece of “mystification”. The letter Marx had sent to
Cologne on February 3, 1852, in which Hirsch was alluded to as a spy and a
manufacturer of false police notices, was found by chance and put at the
disposal of the defence. In the “Marx party’s” notice of
resignation from the Great Windmill Street Society which was included in the
Dietz archive, a genuine specimen of W. Liebknecht’s handwriting was
discovered. Lastly, Schneider II, Counsel for the Defence, obtained some
genuine letters by Liebknecht from Birnbaum, the secretary of the Council for
Poor-Relief in Cologne, and genuine letters by Rings from a private secretary
called Schmitz. At the offices of the court Counsel compared the minute-book
with Liebknecht’s handwriting in the notice of resignation and also with
letters by Rings and Liebknecht.

Stieber, who was already alarmed by the declaration of Müller, King’s
Counsel, now heard of these ominous handwriting investigations. To forestall
the imminent blow he again leaped up in court during the sitting on October 27,
and declared that

“the fact that Liebknecht’s signature in the
minute-book differed greatly from a signature that already was in the dossier
had seemed very suspicious to him. He had therefore made further inquiries and
had learnt that the signatory in the minute-book in question was H.
Liebknecht whereas the name in the dossier was preceded by the initial
W.”

When Counsel, Schneider II, asked him: “Who informed you
that an H. Liebknecht also exists?”, Stieber refused to answer.
Schneider II then asked for further information about Rings and Ulmer who
appear together with Liebknecht as secretaries in the minute-book. Stieber
smelt a new trap. He ignored the question three times, and tried to conceal his
embarrassment and to regain his composure by recounting three times and for no
reason how the minute-book had come into his possession. At last he stammered:
The names Rings and Ulmer are probably not real names at all but only
“League names”. Stieber explained the frequent mention in
the minute-book of Frau Dr. Daniels as a correspondent of Marx by surmising
that perhaps the young notary Bermbach was really meant, when the book
said Frau Dr. Daniels. Counsel, von Hontheim, questioned him about
Hirsch.

“He did not know this man Hirsch
either,” Stieber swore. “Contrary to rumour however it is obvious
that he is not a Prussian agent if only because the Prussian police are on the
lookout for him.”

At a signal from Stieber Goldheim buzzed into view and said
that

“in October 1851 he was sent to Hamburg in order to
apprehend Hirsch”.

We shall see how the very same Goldheim was sent to London on
the following day to apprehend the very same Hirsch. So the very same Stieber
who claimed that he had bought the Dietz archive and the original minute-book
from refugees for cash, that same Stieber now asserts that Hirsch cannot be a
Prussian agent because he is a refugee! You have only to be a refugee and
Stieber will guarantee your absolute venality or absolute incorruptibility,
just as it suits his book. And is not Fleury likewise a political refugee, the
same Fleury whom Stieber denounced as a police agent in the sitting on November
3?

When the defences of his original minute-book had been breached on every
side, Stieber summed up the situation on October 27 with a classical display of
impudence, stating that

“his belief in the authenticity of the minute-book
is firmer than ever”.

At the sitting of October 29 an expert compared the letters of Liebknecht
and Rings, which had been submitted by Birnbaum and Schmitz, with the
minute-book and declared the signatures in the latter to be false.

The Chief Public Prosecutor, Seckendorf, said in his speech:

“The information contained in the minute-book coincides
with facts derived from other sources. But the prosecution is quite unable to
prove the book’s authenticity.”

The book is authentic, but its authenticity cannot be proved.
The New Testament! Seckendorf continued:

“But the defence has itself shown that at least the
book contains much that is true, for example it gives us information about the
activities of Rings, who is mentioned there, activities about which no one knew
anything before.”

If no one knew anything about Rings’ activities before, the
minute-book does not provide any information about it either. Therefore the
statements about Rings’ activities could not confirm the truth of the
minute-book’s contents and as regards its form they demonstrated that the
signature of a member of the “Marx party” was in truth
false, and had been forged. They proved then, according to Seckendorf, that
“at least the book contains much that is true” — i.e.
a true forgery. The Chief Public Prosecutors
(Saedt-Seckendorf) and the postal authorities had together with Stieber opened
the letter to Kothes. Therefore they knew the date of its arrival. Therefore
they knew that Stieber committed perjury when he caused the courier to arrive
at first on October 17 and, later, on the 10th, and the letter first on October
19 and then on the 12th. They were his accomplices.

At the sitting on October 27 Stieber tried in vain to preserve a calm
appearance. He feared that any day the incriminating documents might arrive
from London. Stieber felt ill at ease and the Prussian state, incarnate in him,
felt ill at ease too. The public exposure had reached a dangerous stage. So
Police Lieutenant Goldheim was sent to London on October 28 to save the
fatherland. What did Goldheim do in London? Aided by Greif and Fleury, he
attempted to persuade Hirsch to go to Cologne and, under the name of H.
Liebknecht, to swear to the authenticity of the minute-book. Hirsch was
offered a real state pension, but Hirsch’s policeman’s instincts
were as good as Goldheim’s. Hirsch knew that he was neither Public
Prosecutor nor Police Lieutenant, nor Police Superintendent, and therefore had
not the privilege of committing perjury with impunity. His instincts told him
that he would be dropped as soon as things began to go wrong. Hirsch did not
want to become a goat, and least of all a scapegoat. Hirsch flatly refused. But
the Christian-Germanic government of Prussia won lasting fame for having
attempted to bribe a man to bear false witness in the course of criminal
proceedings in which the heads of its own citizens were at stake.

Goldheim thus returned to Cologne without having achieved his object.

In the sitting on November 3, when the prosecutor had concluded his address
and before Counsel for the defence could commence his, Stieber, caught between
the two, leaped once again into the breach swearing that

“he had now ordered further research into the
minute-book. He had sent Police Lieutenant Goldheim from Cologne to London to
pursue the inquiry there. Goldheim left on October 28 and returned on November
2. Here is Goldheim.”

At a signal from his master Goldheim buzzed into view and swore
that

“on arriving in London he went first to Police
Lieutenant Greif who took him to police agent Fleury in the borough of
Kensington for it was Fleury from whom Greif had obtained the book. Fleury
admitted as much to him, the witness Goldheim, and asserted that he had really
received the book from a member of the Marx party called H. Liebknecht.
Fleury definitely recognised the receipt H. Liebknecht had given him for
the money he had received for the book. Goldheim was not able to catch hold of
Liebknecht himself in London because he was, according to Fleury, afraid to
appear in public. During his stay in London witness became convinced that, a
few errors apart, the content of the book was entirely genuine. Reliable agents
who had been present at Marx’s meetings had confirmed this to him. The
book itself however was not the original minute-book but only a notebook
on the proceedings at Marx’s meetings. There are only two possible
explanations for the admittedly still rather obscure origin of the book.
Either, as the agent insists, it really emanates from Liebknecht, who has
refused to give a specimen of his handwriting in order that there should be no
proof of his treachery; or the agent Fleury obtained the notes for the book
from Dronke and Imandt, two other émigré friends of Marx, and put them in the
form of an original minute-book in order to increase the value of his
commodity. Police Lieutenant Greif has officially stated that Dronke and Imandt
frequently consorted with Fleury.... The witness Goldheim asserts his stay in
London has convinced him that everything that had been said previously about
secret meetings in Marx’s home, about the contacts between London and
Cologne and about the secret correspondence, etc., was true in every
particular. As evidence of how well informed the Prussian agents in London were
even today, he would inform the Court that a completely secret meeting took
place in Marx’s house on October 27 to discuss what steps should be taken
to counteract the minute-book and above all the activities of Police
Superintendent Stieber, who was a thorn in the side of the London Party. The
relevant decisions and documents were sent in complete secrecy to the lawyer,
Schneider II. In particular, among the papers sent to Schneider II was a
private letter that Stieber himself wrote to Marx in Cologne in 1848 and that
Marx had hitherto kept very secret in the hope that it might be used to
compromise the witness Stieber.”

Witness Stieber leaped up and declared that he had
written to Marx about an infamous slander, and had threatened to sue him,
etc.

“No one but Marx and he could know this and this was
indeed the strongest proof of the accuracy of the information from
London.”

So according to Goldheim the original minute-book is
“entirely genuine”, apart from the false parts. What
convinced him of its authenticity is in particular the circumstance that the
original minute-book is no original minute-book but only a
“notebook”. And Stieber? Stieber was by no means
thunderstruck; on the contrary a great weight had been lifted from his mind. At
the very last moment, when the sound of the prosecutor’s last words had
hardly faded away and before the first word of the defence had been uttered,
Stieber managed with the aid of his Goldheim quickly to transform the original
minute-book into a notebook. When two policemen accuse each other of lying,
does that not prove that they are both addicted to telling the truth? Through
Goldheim Stieber was able to cover his retreat.

Goldheim testified that “on arriving in London he went first to Police
Lieutenant Greif,who took him to police agent Fleury in the borough of
Kensington”. Now who would not swear on oath that poor Goldheim and
Police Lieutenant Greif must have worn themselves out walking or driving to
Fleury’s house in the remote borough of Kensington? But Police Lieutenant
Greif lives in the same house as police agent Fleury, in fact he lives on the
top floor of Fleury’s house, so that in reality it was not Greif who took
Goldheim to Fleury, but Fleury who took Goldheim to Greif.

“Police agent Fleury in the borough of Kensington!” What
precision! Can you still doubt the truthfulness of a Prussian government that
denounces its own spies, gives their name and address and every detail, body
and soul? If the minute-book is false you can still rely on “police agent
Fleury in Kensington”. Yes, indeed. On private secretary Pierre in the
13th arrondissement. If you wish to specify a person you must give his
Christian name as well as his surname. Not Fleury but Charles
Fleury. And you must also name the profession that he practises in public, and
not his clandestine activities. So it is Charles Fleury, a
businessman not Fleury, the police agent. And when you state his
address you do not merely name a London borough, a town in itself, but you give
the borough, the street and the number of the house. So it is not police agent
Fleury in Kensington but Charles Fleury, a businessman, 17 Victoria Road,
Kensington.

But “Police Lieutenant Greif”, that at any rate is
frankly spoken! But when Police Lieutenant Greif attaches himself to the
embassy in London and the Lieutenant turns into an attaché that of course is an
attachment of no concern to the courts. The heart’s desire is the voice
of fate.

So Police Lieutenant Goldheim asserts that police agent Fleury asserted that
he had the book from a man who really asserted that he was H. Liebknecht
and who had even given a receipt to Fleury. The only drawback is that Goldheim
was unable “to catch hold of” the said H. Liebknecht in
London. So Goldheim could have stayed quietly in Cologne for Police
Superintendent Stieber’s assertion does not look any healthier for the
fact that it appears as an assertion of Police Lieutenant Goldheim’s,
which had been asserted by Police Lieutenant Greif, for whom in his turn police
agent Fleury had done the favour of agreeing to assert his assertion.

Goldheim’s London experiences were hardly encouraging but, undeterred
and with the aid of his considerable faculty for convincing himself (which in
his case must do duty for the faculty of reasoning), he convinced himself
“completely” that “everything” that
Stieber had affirmed on oath concerning the “Marx party”, about its
contacts in Cologne, etc., was “all true in every
particular”. And now that Goldheim, his junior official, has issued
him with a testimonium paupertatis, surely Police Superintendent
Stieber is fully covered now? Stieber’s method of swearing has at least
one achievement to its credit: he has turned the whole Prussian hierarchy
upside down. You don’t believe the Police Superintendent? Very well. He
has compromised himself. But surely you will believe the Police Lieutenant? You
don’t believe him either? Better still. Then you have no other choice
than to believe at least the police agent alias mouchardus vulgaris.
Such is the heretical conceptual confusion that our swearing
Stieber has created.

Goldheim proved that in London he had established the non-existence of the
original minute-book, and as for the existence of H. Liebknecht that he was
unable “to catch hold” of it in London, and it was precisely this
that convinced him that “all” Stieber’s statements
about the “Marx party” “were true in every
particular”. In addition to these negative proofs, which in
Seckendorf’s view contained “much that was true”, he had in
the end to produce the positive proof of “how well informed the Prussian
agents in London were even today”. As evidence of this he mentions that
on October 27 there had been a “completely secret meeting in Marx’s
house”. In this completely secret meeting steps were discussed to
counteract the minute-book and Police Superintendent Stieber, that “thorn
in their side”. The relevant orders and decisions were “sent in
complete secrecy to the lawyer, Schneider II”.

Although the Prussian agents were present at these meetings the route taken
by these letters remained so “completely secret” that all the
efforts of the postal authorities to intercept them were in vain. Listen to the
cricket chirping sadly from among the ageing and venerable ruins: “The
relevant letters and documents were sent in complete secrecy to the lawyer,
Schneider II.” Completely secret for Goldheim’s secret agents.

The imaginary decisions about the minute-book cannot have been made at the
completely secret meeting in Marx’s house on October 27 for already on
October 25 Marx had sent the chief reports about the spurious nature of the
minute-book not indeed to Schneider II, but to Herr von Hontheim.

It was not merely the bad conscience of the police that gave them the idea
that documents had been sent to Cologne. On October 29 Goldheim arrived in
London. On October 30 Goldheim found a statement signed by Engels, Freiligrath,
Marx and Wolff in The Morning Advertiser, The Spectator, The Examiner,
The Leader and The People’s Paper in which the
attention of the English public was drawn to the revelations that the defence
would make of forgery, perjury, the falsification of documents in short of all
the infamies perpetrated by the Prussian police. The sending of the documents
was veiled in such “complete secrecy” that the “Marx
party” openly informed the English public about this, though not until
October 30 by which time Goldheim had arrived in London and the documents in
Cologne.

However, on October 27 documents were also sent to Cologne. How did the
omniscient Prussian police learn of this?

The Prussian police did not pursue their activities with quite such
“complete secrecy” as the “Marx party”. On the
contrary, for weeks they had openly posted two of their spies in front of
Marx’s house and from the street they watched him du soir jusqu'au
matin and du matin jusqu'au soir and dogged his every step. Now
the absolutely secret documents, containing the genuine specimens of
Liebknecht’s and Rings’ handwriting together with the statement of
the landlord of the Crown Tavern concerning the days of the society’s
meetings, these absolutely secret documents Marx had officially witnessed in
the absolutely public police court in Marlborough Street in the presence of
reporters from the English daily press on October 27. His Prussian guardian
angels followed him from his house to Marlborough Street and from Marlhorough
Street back to his house and from his house to the post office. They did not in
fact disappear until Marx had gone in absolute secrecy to the local magistrate
in order to obtain a warrant for the arrest of his two
“followers”.

Moreover, yet another way lay open to the Prussian government. For Marx sent
the documents that were dated October 27 and had been witnessed on October 27
directly to Cologne through the post in order to ensure that the talons of the
Prussian eagle would not seize the duplicates that had been sent in
absolute secrecy. Both postal authorities and the police in
Cologne knew then that documents dated October 27 had been forwarded by Marx
and there was no need for Goldheim to make the journey to London in order to
unravel the mystery.

Goldheim felt that after all he ought “in particular”
to reveal something “particular” that the “absolutely secret
meeting on October 27” had resolved to send to Schneider II, he therefore
mentioned the letter written by Stieber to Marx. Unfortunately Marx
had sent this letter not on October 27 but on October 25 and it was sent not to
Schneider II but to Herr von Hontheim. But how did the police know that Marx
still had Stieber’s letter in his possession and that he intended to send
it to the defence? Let us however permit Stieber to leap up once more.

Stieber hoped to forestall Schneider II and thus prevent him from reading
aloud in court what was for him a very “unpleasant letter”. Stieber
calculated: If Goldheim says that Schneider II has my letter and that he has it
thanks to his “criminal contact with Marx”, then Schneider II will
suppress the letter so as to prove that Goldheim’s agents were
misinformed and that he himself does not maintain any criminal contact with
Marx. So Stieber leaped up, gave a false account of the content of the letter
and concluded with the astonishing declaration that “no one but himself
and Marx could know this and this was indeed the strongest proof of the
reliability of the information from London”.

Stieber has a strange method of keeping secret facts that he finds
unpalatable. If he remains silent, the whole world must keep silence. Hence
“no one can know” apart from him and a certain elderly lady that he
once lived near Weimar as an homme entretenu. But if Stieber had every
reason to make sure that no one but Marx should know of the letter, Marx had
every reason to let everyone apart from Stieber know about it. We now know the
strongest proof of the information from London. What does
Stieber’s weakest proof look like?

But once again Stieber knowingly commits perjury when he says “no one
but myself and Marx could know this”. He knew that it was not Marx but
another editor of the Rheinische Zeitung who had answered his
letter.[282] So there
had been at least “one man other than Marx and himself”. In order
that even more people may learn of it we print the letter here:

“No. 177 of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung
contains a news item from your correspondent in Frankfurt am Main dated
December 21 in which a base lie is reported to the effect that being a police
spy I went to Frankfurt to try, while pretending to hold democratic views, to
discover the murderers of Prince Lichnowski and General Auerswald. I was in
fact in Frankfurt on the 21st but stayed only one day and as you can see from
the accompanying certificate I was engaged in purely private business on behalf
of a lady from here, Frau von Schwezler. I have long since returned to Berlin
and resumed my work as defence counsel. I would refer you moreover to the
official correction in this matter that has already appeared in No. 338 of the
Frankfurter Oberpostamts-Zeitung of December 21 and in No. 248 of the
Berlin National-Zeitung. I believe that I may expect from your respect
for the truth that you will print the enclosed correction in your paper without
delay and that you will also give me the name of your slanderous informant in
accordance with your legal obligations, for I cannot possibly permit such a
libel to go unpunished, otherwise I shall regretfully be compelled to proceed
against your editorial board.

“I believe that in recent times democracy is indebted
to no one more than myself. It was I who rescued hundreds of democrats who had
been charged from the nets of the criminal courts. It was I who even while a
state of siege was proclaimed here persistently and fearlessly challenged the
authorities (and do so to this very day), while all the cowardly and
contemptible fellows (the so-called democrats) had long since fled the field.
When democratic organs treat me in this fashion it is scarcely an encouragement
to me to make further efforts.

“The real joke, however, in the present case lies in
the clumsiness of the organs of democracy. The rumour that I went to Frankfurt
as a police agent was spread first by that notorious organ of reaction, the
Neue Prussische Zeitung in order to undermine my activities as defence
counsel that gave that paper such offence. The other Berlin papers have long
since corrected this report. But the democratic papers are so inept that they
parrot this stupid lie. If I had wished to go to Frankfurt as a spy it would
certainly not be announced beforehand in every newspaper. And how could Prussia
send a police official to Frankfurt which has enough competent officials of its
own? Stupidity has always been the failing of the democrats and their
opponents’ cunning has always brought them to victory.

“It is likewise a contemptible lie to say that years
ago I was a police spy in Silesia. At that time I was openly employed as a
police officer and as such I did my duty. Contemptible lies have been
circulated about me. If anyone can prove that I insinuated my way into his
favour let him come forth and do so. Anyone can make assertions and tell lies.
I think of you as an honest, decent man and so I expect from you a satisfactory
answer by return of post. The democratic papers are generally in disrepute here
because of the many lies they publish. I hope that you are a man of a different
stamp.

“Berlin, December 26, 1848

“Respectfully yours,

Stieber, Doctor at Law, etc.,

Berlin, Ritterstrasse 65.”

How then did Stieber know that on October 27 Marx had sent this letter to
Schneider II? But it was not sent on October 27 but on October 25, and it was
not sent to Schneider II but to von Hontheim. Stieber therefore knew only that
the letter still existed and he suspected that Marx would put it in the hands
of some defence counsel or other. Whence this suspicion? When the Kölnische
Zeitung brought Stieber’s testimony on October 18 about Cherval,
etc., to London, Marx sent a statement dated October 21 to the Kölnische
Zeitung, the Berlin National-Zeitung and the Frankfurter
Journal and at the end of this statement Stieber was threatened with his
still existing letter. In order to keep this letter “completely
secret” Marx himself announced it in the newspapers. He failed, because
of the cowardice of the daily press in Germany, but the Prussian post was now
informed and with the Prussian post, its — Stieber.

What then was the message Goldheim chirruped back from London?

That Hirsch has not committed perjury, that H. Liebknecht has no
“tangible” existence, that the original minute-book is no original
minute-book and that the all-knowing London agents know all that the
“Marx party” has published in the London press. To save the honour
of the Prussian agents Goldheim placed in their mouths the few titbits of
information that Stieber ‘discovered’ in letters he had opened or
purloined.

In the sitting on November 4 after Schneider II had annihilated Stieber and
his minute-book and shown him to be guilty of forgery and perjury, Stieber
leaped into the breach for the last time and gave vent to his moral
indignation. They even dare, he cried out, his Soul mortally wounded, they even
dare to accuse Herr Wermuth, Chief of Police Wermuth, of perjury! Stieber
thereby returned to the orthodox hierarchy, to the rising scale. Earlier he had
moved on the heterodox, descending scale. If he, a police superintendent, could
not be trusted, well then surely his police lieutenant could be; and if not the
police lieutenant, then surely his police agent; and if not agent Fleury, then
surely subagent Hirsch. But now it is in reverse. He, the police
superintendent, can perhaps commit perjury, but Wermuth, a Chief
of Police? Unbelievable! In his rage he praised Wermuth with mounting
bitterness, he served Wermuth up to the public neat, Wermuth as a human being,
Wermuth as a lawyer, Wermuth as paterfamilias, Wermuth as a Chief of Police,
Wermuth for ever. Even now, during the public hearing, Stieber did not stop
trying to isolate the accused and to erect a barrier between the defence and
the defence materials. He accused Schneider II of “criminal
contact” with Marx. In attacking him Schneider was impugning the highest
authorities of Prussia. Even Göbel, the Presiding judge of the court, even a
Göbel felt overwhelmed by Stieber’s onslaught. He could not overlook it
and even though in a timorous and servile way he did lash Stieber with a few
rebukes. But Stieber was in the right for all that. It was not merely he as a
person that stood exposed to public view: it was the prosecution, the courts,
the postal authorities, the government, the police headquarters in Berlin, it
was the ministries and the Prussian embassy in London, in short it was the
whole Prussian state that stood in the pillory with him, original minute-book
in hand.

Herr Stieber is herewith granted permission to print the answer the Neue
Rheinische Zeitung returned to his letter.

Let us now return once more to London with Goldheim.

Just as Stieber is still ignorant of Cherval’s whereabouts and true
identity so too, according to Goldheim’s testimony (in the sitting on
November 3), the origin of the minute-book is an enigma that is still not fully
resolved. To resolve it Goldheim put forward two hypotheses.

“There are only two possible explanations,” he said, “for
the still rather obscure origin of the book. Either, as the agent insists, it
really emanates from Liebknecht, who has refused to give a specimen of his
handwriting in order that there should be no proof of his treachery.”

W. Liebknecht is well known as a member of the “Marx
party”. But it is no less well known that the signature in the
minute-book does not belong to W. Liebknecht. In the sitting on October
27 Stieber therefore swore that the signature was not that of W.
Liebknecht but of another Liebknecht, an H. Liebknecht. He had
learnt of the existence of this double without being able however to disclose
the source of his discovery. Goldheim swore: “Fleury asserted that he had
really received the book from a member of the ‘Marx party’ called
H. Liebknecht.” Goldheim swore further: “I was not able to
catch hold of the said H. Liebknecht in London.” Up to now,
therefore, what signs of life has the H. Liebknecht that
Stieber has discovered given to the world in general and to Police Lieutenant
Goldheim in particular? No sign of life other than his handwriting in the
original minute-book; but now Goldheim declares: “Liebknecht has refused
to give a specimen of his handwriting.”

Up to the present H. Liebknecht existed only as a signature. Now
nothing remains of H. Liebknecht at all, not even a signature, not even
the dot on the i. How Goldheim could possibly know that H.
Liebknecht’s handwriting differs from the handwriting in the
minute-book, when the handwriting in the minute-book is his only proof of H.
Liebknecht’s existence, that is Goldheim’s secret. If Stieber
has his miracles, why should not Goldheim have his miracles too?

Goldheim forgot that his superior, Stieber, had sworn to H.
Liebknecht’s existence before him, and that he too had just sworn to
it. In the same breath in which he swears to H. Liebknecht he recollects
that H. Liebknecht is nothing but a makeshift, invented by Stieber, a
necessary fib and necessity knows no law. He remembers that there is but one
genuine Liebknecht, W. Liebknecht, but that if W. Liebknecht is
genuine then the signature in the minute-book is a forgery. He cannot confess
that Fleury’s subagent had manufactured the false signature along with
the false minute-book. Accordingly he invents the hypothesis: “Liebknecht
has refused to give a specimen signature.” Let us likewise construct a
hypothesis. Goldheim once forged banknotes. He is brought before the courts; it
is proved that the signature on the banknote is not that of the bank director.
Don’t take offence, gentlemen, Goldheim will say, don’t take
offence. The banknote is genuine. It comes from the bank director himself. If
his name appears signed by someone other than him what does that matter?
“He merely refused to give a specimen of his handwriting.”

Or, Goldheim continues, if the hypothesis with Liebknecht turns out
to he false: “Or the agent Fleury obtained the notes for the book from
Dronke and Imandt, two other émigré friends of Marx, and then put them in the
form of an original minute-book in order to increase the value of his
commodity. Police Lieutenant Greif has officially stated that Dronke and Imandt
frequently consorted with Fleury.”

Or? How so, or? If a book like the original minute-book signed by three
people, Liebknecht, Rings and Ulmer, no deduce that “it emanates either
from Liebknecht” — or from Dronke and Imandt, but: It emanates
either from Liebknecht or from Rings and from Ulmer. Should our unfortunate
Goldheim, now that he has climbed to the dizzy heights of a disjunction —
either-or — should he now repeat: “Rings and Ulmer have refused to
give specimens of their handwriting"? Even Goldheim realises the need for new
tactics.

If the original minute-book does not emanate from Liebknecht, as the agent
Fleury claimed, then it must have been manufactured by Fleury himself, but the
notes for it were provided by Dronke and Imandt of whom Police Lieutenant Greif
has officially stated that they frequently consorted with Fleury.

“To increase the value of his commodity,” says Goldheim, Fleury
put the notes in the form of an original minute-book. He not only commits a
fraud, he also forges signatures and all this to “increase the value of
his commodity”. So scrupulous a man as this Prussian agent, who for
profit manufactures forged minutes and forged signatures, is obviously
incapable of manufacturing forged notes. Such is Goldheim’s
inference.

Dronke and Imandt did not come to London until April 1852, after they had
been expelled by the Swiss authorities. However, one-third of the original
minute-book consists of entries for the months of January, February and March
1852. Fleury therefore manufactured one-third of the original minute-book
without Dronke and Imandt although Goldheim had sworn that the minute-book was
written either by Liebknecht — or else by Fleury, following, however, the
notes of Dronke and Imandt. Goldheim swore to it, and Goldheim it is true is no
Brutus, but he is Goldheim.

But the possibility still remains that Dronke and Imandt furnished Fleury
with notes from April onwards for, Goldheim swore: “Police Lieutenant
Greif has officially stated that Dronke and Imandt frequently consorted with
Fleury.”

Let us examine this association.

As we have noted above Fleury was known in London not as a Prussian police
agent but as a businessman in the City, and indeed as a democratic businessman.
Born in Altenburg he had come to London as a political refugee, had later
married an English woman from a wealthy and respected family and apparently
enjoyed a quiet life with his wife and his father-in-law, an old Quaker
industrialist. On October 8 or 9 Imandt began to “consort
frequently” with Fleury, in the capacity, that is, of tutor. But
according to the improved version of Stieber’s evidence the original
minute-book arrived in Cologne on October 10 — according to
Goldheim’s final statement on the 11th. By the time that Imandt, whom he
had never set eyes on till then, had given him his first French lesson, Fleury
had not only had the original minute-book bound in red morocco leather, he had
already entrusted it to the special courier who brought it to Cologne. So
heavily did Fleury rely on Imandt’s notes when writing the original
minute-book. As for Dronke, Fleury only saw him once and by chance
with Imandt, and this was on October 30 by which time the original minute-book
had long since dissolved into its original nothingness.

Thus the Christian-Germanic government is not content with breaking into
desks, stealing papers, obtaining false testimony by underhand means, creating
false plots, forging false documents, swearing false oaths, and attempting to
suborn witnesses — all this to bring about the condemnation of the
Cologne defendants. The government attempts also to cast suspicion on the
London friends of the accused so as to conceal the activities of their Hirsch
now that Stieber has sworn that he does not know him and Goldheim has sworn
that he is no spy.

On Friday, November 5, the Kölnische Zeitung arrived in London with
the report of the court sitting on November 3 and Goldheim’s evidence.
Inquiries about Greif were made at once and the very same day it was learnt
that he lived in Fleury’s house. At the same time Dronke and Imandt paid
Fleury a visit taking with them a copy of the Kölnische Zeitung. They
gave him Goldheim’s testimony to read. He went pale, tried to regain his
composure, pretended to be utterly astonished and declared himself perfectly
willing to make a statement against Goldheim before an English magistrate. But
he said he must consult his solicitor first. They agreed to meet the following
afternoon, Saturday, November 6. Fleury promised to have his statement
officially witnessed and said he would bring it to the meeting. Of course, he
did not appear. Imandt and Dronke then went to his house on Saturday evening
and found there the following note addressed to Imandt:

“With the solicitor’s help everything has been
arranged; further steps can be taken as soon as the person in question has been
found. The solicitor sent the relevant documents off today. Business
commitments have made it imperative for me to go to the City. If you would like
to visit me tomorrow I shall be at home the whole afternoon until 5 o'clock.
Fl.”

On the other side of the note there was the following
postscript:

“I have just arrived home but had to go out again with
Herr Werner and my wife- I can prove this to you tomorrow, Leave me a
note saying when you would like to come.”

Imandt left the following reply:

“I am extremely surprised not to find you at home now,
especially as you did not come to meet us this afternoon as arranged. I must
confess that in the circumstances my opinion of you is already fixed. If you
wish me to revise it you will visit me by tomorrow morning at the latest for I
cannot guarantee that your activities as a Prussian police spy might not find
their way into the English newspapers. Imandt.”

Fleury did not appear on Sunday morning either, so in the
evening Dronke and Imandt went to his house once again in order to obtain his
statement by making it appear as if their confidence in him had only at first
been shaken. Finally, after all sorts of procrastinations and doubts the
statement was formulated. Fleury hesitated most when it was pointed out to him
that he must sign with his Christian name as well as his surname. The statement
went literally as follows:

“To the editors of the Kölnische Zeitung

“The undersigned declares that he has known Herr Imandt
for about a month during which time the latter gave him tuition in the French
language and that he met Herr Dronke for the first time on Saturday, October 30
of this year.

“He declares further that neither of them gave him any
information in connection with the minute-book mentioned in the Cologne
trial.

“That he does not know of any person by the name of
Liebknecht nor has he ever been in contact with anyone of that name.

“Kensington, London, November 8, 1852.

Charles Fleury”

Dronke and Imandt were, of course, quite sure that Fleury would
instruct the Kölnische Zeitung not to print any statement signed by
him. Accordingly they sent his statement not to the Kölnische Zeitung
but to Schneider II, the lawyer, who however received it when the case was too
far advanced for him to make use of it.

Fleury is not indeed the Fleur de Marie of the police prostitutes, but he is
a flower and he will bear blossom, albeit only fleurs-de-lys.* But the
story of the minute-book is not yet finished.

Fleurs-de-lys [lilies] is the French colloquial name
of the letters T. F. (travaux forcés [forced labour]), the brand-mark of
criminals. The accuracy of Marx’s judgment is demonstrated in the
Postscript (VIII, 1). [283][Note by Engels to
the edition of 1885]

On Saturday, November 6, W. Hirsch of Hamburg made an affidavit before the
magistrate at Bow Street, London, to the effect that under the direction of
Greif and Fleury he himself had fabricated the original minute-book that
figured in the Cologne communist trial.

Thus, it had at first been the original minute-book of the “Marx
party” — after that it was the notebook of the police spy Fleury
— and lastly it became the manufacture of the Prussian police, a simple
police manufacture, a police manufacture sans phrase.

On the same day that Hirsch revealed the secret of the original minute-book
to the English magistrate at Bow Street another representative of the Prussian
state was busy packing at Fleury’s house in Kensington, and this time the
things he was packing in stout oil-cloth were neither stolen nor forged nor
even documents at all, but his own personal belongings. And this bird was none
other than Greif whom we remember from Paris, the special courier to Cologne,
the chief of the Prussian police agents in London, the official director of
mystifications, the Police Lieutenant attached to the Prussian Embassy. Greif
had received instructions from the Prussian government to leave London at once.
There was no time to be wasted.

Just as at the end of spectacular operas the rising amphitheatrical set in
the background that had previously been obscured by curtains now suddenly
flares up in a blaze of Bengal light dazzling all eyes, so too at the end of
this Prussian police tragicomedy the hidden amphitheatrical workshop was
revealed in which the original minute-book was forged. On the lowest level
could be seen the wretched spy Hirsch working at piece rates; a little higher
up was the respectably situated spy and agent provocateur, the City businessman
Fleury; higher still the diplomatic Police Lieutenant Greif and highest of all
the Prussian Embassy itself to which he was attached. For 6-8 months Hirsch had
laboured week by week to forge the original minute-book in Fleury’s study
and under his watchful eyes. But one floor above Fleury dwelt the
Prussian Police Lieutenant Greif, who supervised and inspired him. However,
Greif himself regularly spent a part of his day in the Prussian Embassy, where
he in his turn was supervised and inspired. Thus the Prussian Embassy was the
real hothouse where the original minute-book grew and flowered. Hence Greif had
to disappear. He disappeared on November 6, 1852.

The authenticity of the original minute-book could not he sustained any
longer, not even as a notebook. The Public Prosecutor, Saedt, buried it in the
address he gave in reply to the concluding speeches by Counsel for the
Defence.

The trial had now reached the point at which the Indictment Board of the
Court of Appeal had begun when it ordered a new investigation because
“there was no factual evidence of an indictable
offence”.

V. The Letter Accompanying the Red Catechism

In his evidence during the sitting on October 27 Police Inspector Junkermann of Créfeld said that

“he confiscated a parcel containing copies of the Red Catechism [by Moses Hess]; it was
addressed to the waiter in an inn in Créfeld and bore a Düsseldorf post mark. It
contained also an accompanying letter which was unsigned. It has not been possible to
identify the sender.” “As the prosecution has pointed out, the accompanying letter
appeared to be written in Marx’s hand,”

In the sitting on October 28 the expert (???) Renard discovered that the letter was in
fact in Marx’s handwriting. This accompanying letter said:

“Citizen! As we have complete confidence in you, we herewith present you with 50 copies
of the Red. Your task is to push them under the doors of citizens — preferably workers —
who are known to sympathise with the Revolution, on Saturday, June 5, at eleven o'clock
at night. We are definitely counting on your civic virtues and accordingly expect you to
carry out this instruction. The Revolution is closer than many people think. Long live
the Revolution!

“Berlin, May 1852

With Fraternal Greetings.

The Revolutionary Committee”

Witness Junkermann declared further that “the parcels in question had been sent to the witness Chianella”.

Chief Commissioner of Police Hinckeldey of Berlin was the Supreme Commander in charge of
operations against the accused in Cologne during the preliminary investigations. The
laurels won by Maupas prevented him from sleeping.

The actors in the proceedings include two Chiefs of Police, one alive and one dead, one
superintendent (only one, but that one a Stieber), two police lieutenants one of whom
was constantly en route from London to Cologne, the other constantly journeying from
Cologne to London, myriads of police agents and subagents, named, anonymous,
heteronymous, pseudonymous, with tails and without. Lastly an Inspector of Police.

No sooner had the Kölnische Zeitung arrived in London with the evidence heard on October
27 and 28 than Marx went to the magistrate in Marlborough Street, where he copied out
from the newspaper the text of the accompanying letter and had the copy witnessed, and
at the same time the following affidavit:

1. That he had not written the letter in question;
2. that he had only learnt of its existence from the Kölnische Zeitung;
3. that he had never seen the so-called Red Catechism;
4. that he had never helped in any way at all to distribute it.

It may be pointed out in passing that if such a declaration made before a magistrate is
found to be false, then it counts as perjury in England with all the consequences
attendant thereupon.

The above document was sent to Schneider II but it appeared simultaneously in the London
Morning Advertiser as the conviction had gained ground during the trial that as regards
the observance of the secrecy of correspondence the Prussian post seems to have the
strange notion that letters entrusted to its care must be kept secret from the
addressee. The prosecution objected to the submission of the document, even for purposes
of comparison. For the prosecution was aware that a single glance from the original
accompanying letter to the officially attested copy by Marx would reveal the deception,
the deliberate imitation of his handwriting could not remain hidden even from such a
sharp-sighted jury as this. Therefore, in order to defend the morality of the Prussian
state, the prosecution denounced any attempt at comparison.

Schneider II observed

“that Chianella, the addressee who had freely given information to the police about the
supposed identity of the sender and who had even offered to act as a spy, had not in the
remotest degree thought of Marx in this connection.”

No one who has ever read a single line by Marx could possibly attribute to him the
authorship of this melodramatic accompanying letter. The midnight dream hour in summer
on June 5, and the officiously graphic procedure of pushing the Red under the doors of
the revolutionary philistines — that could perhaps point to Kinkel’s turn of mind, just
as the references to “civic virtues” and the way in which they are “definitely counting
on” this military “instruction being carried out” seem to reflect the imagination of a
Willich. But why should Kinkel-Willich write their prescriptions for revolution in
Marx’s hand?

If it is permissible to form a hypothesis about the “as yet somewhat obscure origins” of
this accompanying letter written in an imitated hand: the police found the 50 Reds in
Créfeld as well as the convenient, high sounding accompanying letter. In Cologne or in
Berlin qu'importe? they had the text copied in Marx’s handwriting. For what purpose? “So
as to increase the value of their commodity.”

However, even the Chief Public Prosecutor did not dare to revert to the accompanying
letter in his catilinarian speech. He let it drop. Hence it did not assist in
ascertaining the still missing “indictable offence”.

VI. The Willich-Schapper Group

With the defeat of the revolution of 1848-49 the party of the proletariat on the
Continent lost use of the press, freedom of speech and the right to associate, i.e. the
legal instruments of party organisation, which it had enjoyed for once during that short
interval. The social status of the classes they represented enabled both the bourgeois-
liberal and the petty-bourgeois democratic parties to remain united in one form or
another and to assert their common interests more or less effectively despite the
reaction. After 1849 just as before 1848, only one path was open to the proletarian
party — that of secret association. Consequently after 1849 a whole series of
clandestine proletarian societies sprang up on the Continent, were discovered by the
police, condemned by the courts, broken up by the gaols and continually resuscitated by
the force of circumstances.

Some of these secret societies aimed directly at the overthrow of the existing state.
This was fully justified in France where the proletariat had been defeated by the
bourgeoisie and hence attacking the existing government and attacking the bourgeoisie
were one and the same thing.. Other secret societies aimed at organising the proletariat
into a party, without concerning themselves with the existing governments. This was
necessary in countries like Germany where both bourgeoisie and proletariat had succumbed
to their semi-feudal governments and where in consequence a victorious assault on the
existing governments, instead of breaking the power of the bourgeoisie or in any case of
the so-called middle classes, would at first help them to gain power. There is no doubt
that here too the members of the proletarian party would take part once again in a
revolution against the status quo, but it was no part of their task to prepare this
revolution, to agitate, conspire or to plot for it. They could leave this preparation to
circumstances in general and to the classes directly involved. They had to leave it to
them if they were not to abandon the position of their own party and the historic tasks
that follow of themselves from the conditions governing the existence of the
proletariat. For them the contemporary governments were but ephemeral phenomena, the
status quo a brief stopping place and the task of toiling away at it could be left to
the petty narrow-minded democrats.

The “Communist League”, therefore, was no conspiratorial society, but a society which
secretly strove to create an organised proletarian party because the German proletariat
is publicly debarred, igni et aqua, from writing, speaking and meeting. Such a society
can only be said to conspire against the status quo in the sense that steam and
electricity conspire against it.

It is self-evident that a secret society of this kind which aims at forming not the
government party of the future but the opposition party of the future could have but few
attractions for individuals who on the one hand concealed their personal insignificance
by strutting around in the theatrical cloak of the conspirator, and on the other wished
to satisfy their narrow-minded ambition on the day of the next revolution, and who
wished above all to seem important at the moment, to snatch their share of the proceeds
of demagogy and to find a welcome among the quacks and charlatans of democracy.

Thus a group broke off from the Communist League, or if you like it was broken off, a
group that demanded, if not real conspiracies, at any rate the appearance of
conspiracies, and accordingly called for a direct alliance with the democratic heroes of
the hour: this was the Willich-Schapper group. It was typical of them that Willich was,
together with Kinkel, one of the entrepreneurs in the business of the German-American
revolutionary loan.

Such in short is the relation of this party to the majority of the Communist League, to
which the Cologne defendants belonged. Bürgers and Röser defined it succinctly and
exhaustively in the proceedings of the Cologne Assizes.

Let us pause before finally bringing our narrative to a close in order to take a glance
at the behaviour of the Willich-Schapper group during the Cologne trial.

As was pointed out above, the data contained in the documents purloined from the group
by Stieber make it plain that their documents contrived to find their way to the police
even after Reuter’s theft. To this day the group has failed to give an explanation of
this phenomenon.

Schapper knew the facts about Cherval’s past better than anyone. He knew that Cherval
had entered the League on his nomination in 1846 and not on that of Marx in 1848, etc.
By his silence he gives confirmation to Stieber’s lies.

The group knew that Haacke, who was their member, had written the threatening letter to
the witness, Haupt; but it allows the suspicion to remain on the heads of the party of
the accused.

Moses Hess, a member of the group and the author of the Red Catechism[284] — that
unfortunate parody of the Manifesto of the Communist Party — Moses Hess, who not only
writes but also distributes his own works, knew exactly to whom he had delivered parcels
of his Red. He knew that Marx had not deprived him of his profusion of Reds to the
extent of even a single copy. But Moses calmly let suspicion fall on the accused, as if
it were their party that had hawked his Red, together with its melodramatic accompanying
letter, in the Rhine Province.

That the group made common cause with the Prussian police is apparent not only in their
silence but also in their utterances: whenever they entered the trial it was not in the
dock with the accused, but as “witnesses for the Crown”.

Hentze, Willich’s friend and benefactor, who admitted that he knew about the activities
of the League, spent a few weeks in London with Willich and then journeyed to Cologne
where he falsely testified that Becker (against whom there was far less evidence than
against himself) had been a member of the League in 1848.

Hätzel, as the Dietz archive reveals, was a member of the group and received financial
support from it. He had already been put on trial in Berlin for his association with the
League and now he appeared as a witness for the prosecution. His testimony was false for
he invented a wholly fictitious connection between the Rules of the League and the
exceptional arming of the Berlin proletariat during the revolution.

Steingens, whose own letters proved (in the sitting on October 18) that he was the
group’s chief agent in Brussels, appeared in Cologne not as a defendant, but as a
witness.

Not long before the court action in Cologne Willich and Kinkel sent a journeyman tailor
as emissary to Germany. Kinkel is not indeed a member of the group but Willich was co-
director of the German-American revolutionary loan.

Kinkel was at that time already threatened by the danger, which was later to become a
reality, of seeing himself and Willich removed by the London guarantors from control of
the loan moneys and seeing the money itself drift back to America despite the indignant
protests of Willich and himself. Kinkel was just then in need of the pseudo-mission to
Germany and a pseudo-correspondence with Germany, partly in order to demonstrate that an
area still existed there for his revolutionary activities and the American dollars, and
partly to provide a pretext for the enormous costs of the correspondence, postal
expenses, etc., that he and Willich managed to charge to the account (see Count O.
Reichenbach’s lithographed circular). Kinkel knew he had no contacts either with the
bourgeois liberals or with the petty-bourgeois democrats in Germany. As he could not
afford to be particular he used an emissary of the group as the emissary of the German-
American Revolutionary League. [285] This emissary’s sole function was to promote
antagonism among the workers towards the party of the accused in Cologne. It must be
admitted that the moment was well chosen and it offered a new pretext in the nick of
time to reopen the investigation. The Prussian police had been fully apprised of the
emissary’s identity, of the day of his departure and of his route. Who thus apprised
them? We shall see. Their spies were present at the secret meetings he held in Magdeburg
and they reported on the debates. The friends of the Cologne accused in Germany and in
London trembled.

We have already narrated how on November 6 Hirsch went before the magistrate at Bow
Street and admitted to having forged the original minute-book under the guidance of
Greif and Fleury. It was Willich who induced him to take this step, and it was Willich
and Schärttner the innkeeper who accompanied him to the magistrate. Three copies were
made of Hirsch’s confession and these were sent through the post to various addresses in
Cologne.

It was of supreme importance to arrest Hirsch as soon as he left the court. With the aid
of the officially witnessed statement in his possession it would have been possible for
the case lost in Cologne to be won in London. If not for the accused, at any rate
against the government. However, Willich did everything in his power to make such a step
impossible. He observed the strictest silence not only towards the “Marx party”, which
was directly involved, but also towards his own people and even towards Schapper.
Schärttner alone was taken into his confidence. Schärttner declared that he and Willich
had accompanied Hirsch to the ship, for according to Willich’s scheme Hirsch was to give
evidence against himself in Cologne.

Willich informed Hirsch of the route by which the documents had been sent, Hirsch
informed the Prussian Embassy, and the Prussian Embassy informed the post. The documents
did not arrive at their destination; they disappeared. Some time after this, Hirsch, who
had also vanished, re-appeared in London and declared at a public meeting of democrats
that Willich was his accomplice.

Although it had been on a motion from Willich that Hirsch had been expelled as a spy
from the Great Windmill Street Society in 1851, Willich admitted, when questioned, that
he had resumed relations with Hirsch at the beginning of August 1852. For Hirsch had
revealed to him that Fleury was a Prussian spy and had apprised him of all of Fleury’s
incoming and outgoing correspondence. He, Willich, made use of this to keep himself
informed of the activities of the Prussian police.

It was notorious that Willich had been on terms of intimate friendship with Fleury for
about a year, and he had received assistance from him. But if Willich knew since August
1852 that he was a Prussian spy and if he was likewise familiar with his activities how
was it possible that he should have remained ignorant of the original minute-book?

That he did not intervene until the Prussian government itself disclosed that Fleury was a spy?

That he intervened in a way which at best caused the removal of his ally Hirsch from
England and of the officially witnessed proofs of Fleury’s guilt from the hands of the
“Marx party"?

That he continued to receive assistance from Fleury, who boasts that he has in his possession Willich’s receipt for £15 sterling?

That Fleury continued to he actively engaged in the German-American revolutionary loan?

That he informed Fleury of the meeting place of his own secret society so that Prussian
agents in the next room could make records of the debates?

That he revealed to Fleury the route of the above-mentioned emissary, the journeyman
tailor, and that he even received money from Fleury towards the costs of this mission?

That, lastly, he told Fleury that he had instructed Hentze, who lived with him, how he
should testify against Becker at the trial in Cologne?* It must be admitted — que tout
cela n'est pas bien clair.

*As to relations between Willich and Becker: “Willich writes me the funniest letters; I
do not reply, but this does not prevent him from describing his latest plans for a
revolution. He has appointed me to revolutionise the Cologne garrison!!! The other day
we laughed till the tears came. His idiocy will spell disaster for countless people yet;
for a single letter would suffice to guarantee the salaries of a hundred Demagogue
judges for three years. As soon as I have completed the revolution in Cologne he would
have no objection to assuming the leadership for all subsequent operations. Very kind of
him! “ (From a letter by Becker to Marx, January 27, 1851) [Note by Marx.[287]]

VII. Judgment

As the police mysteries were gradually explained, public opinion declared itself
increasingly in favour of the defendants. When it became apparent that the original
minute-book was a fraud an acquittal was generally expected. The Kölnische Zeitung felt
induced to defer to public opinion and to dissociate itself from the government. Little
items favourable to the defendants and casting suspicion on Stieber suddenly found their
way into columns that had earlier contained nothing but police insinuations. Even the
Prussian government threw in the sponge. Its correspondents in The Times and The Morning
Chronicle suddenly began to prepare public opinion abroad for an unfavourable outcome.
Monstrous and destructive as the teachings of the defendants were, horrifying as were
the documents found in their possession, conclusive evidence of a conspiracy was
nevertheless wanting and a conviction was therefore unlikely. So low-spirited and
discouraged did the Berlin correspondent of The Times write, who obsequiously echoed the
fears that were circulating in the upper circles of the city on the Spree. [i.e.,
Berlin] All the more extravagant then was the rejoicing of the Byzantine court and its
eunuchs when the electric telegraph flashed its message of the jury’s verdict of
“Guilty” from Cologne to Berlin.

With the unmasking of the minute-book the case had advanced to a new stage. The jury was
no longer free merely to find the defendants guilty or not guilty; they must either find
the defendants guilty — or the government. To acquit the accused would mean condemning
the government.

Replying to the summing-up for the defence, Public Prosecutor Saedt abandoned the
original minute-book. He was unwilling to make use of a document on which such a slur
had been cast, he himself thought that it was “unauthentic”, it was an “unfortunate”
book, it had resulted in much time being wasted, it added nothing factual to the case,
Stieber’s praiseworthy zeal had led in this instance to his being deceived, etc.

But the prosecution itself had maintained in its indictment that there was “much that
was true” in the book. Far from declaring it spurious the prosecution had regretted only
that it could not prove it to be authentic. But if the original minute-book was not
authentic though Stieber had sworn to its authenticity, Cherval’s statement in Paris was
invalidated despite Stieber’s sworn testimony, and to this statement Saedt had returned
in his summing-up; indeed all the material evidence accumulated by the most strenuous
efforts of all the authorities of the Prussian state for 1 1/2 years was invalidated at
one stroke. The court sitting set down for July 28 was postponed for three months. Why?
Because Chief of Police Schulz had been taken ill. And who was Schulz? The original
discoverer of the original minute-book. Let us go back even further. In January and
February 1852, Frau Dr. Daniels’ house had been searched. On what grounds? On the
grounds discovered in the first few pages of the original minute-book that Fleury had
sent to Schulz, that Schulz had sent to the police authorities in Cologne, that the
police authorities in Cologne had sent to the examining magistrate, that led the
examining magistrate to the house of Frau Dr. Daniels.

In October 1851, despite the Cherval conspiracy, the Indictment Board was still unable
to discover the missing indictable offence and on instructions from the Ministry it
therefore ordered a new investigation. Who was in charge of this investigation? Chief of
Police Schulz. It was therefore Schulz’s task to discover the offence. What did Schulz
discover? The original minute-book. The only new material he provided was limited to the
loose leaves of the minute-book which on Stieber’s orders were later completed and
bound. Twelve months’ solitary confinement for the accused simply to give the original
minute-book the time necessary to he born and to grow. “Bagatelles!” Saedt exclaims and
finds evidence of the guilt of the accused in the mere fact that it took them and their
counsel eight days to clean out an Augean stable that all the authorities of the
Prussian state had needed 1 1/2 years to fill while the accused had to remain 1 1/2
years in gaol. The original minute-book was no mere single item of evidence; it was the
focal point where all the threads spun by the various Prussian governmental authorities
met-embassy and police, ministry and magistracy, prosecution and postal authorities,
London, Berlin and Cologne. The original minute-book meant so much to the case that it
was invented in order that a case might be made out. Couriers, telegrams, the
intercepting of letters, arrests, perjuries to support the original minute-book,
forgeries to bring it into existence, attempted bribery to authenticate it. When the
mystery of the original minute-book was revealed the mystery of the whole monster trial
was revealed with it.

The miracles performed by the police were originally necessary to conceal the completely
political nature of the trial. “The revelations you are about to witness, Gentlemen of
the jury,” said Saedt when opening for the prosecution, “will prove to you that this
trial is not a political trial.” But now he emphasises its political character so that
the police revelations should be forgotten. After the 1 1/2-year preliminary
investigation the jury needed objective evidence in order to justify itself before
public opinion. After the five-week-long police comedy they needed “politics pure and
simple” to extricate themselves from the sheer mess. Saedt therefore did not only
confine himself to the material that had led the Indictment Board to the conclusion that
“there was no factual evidence of an indictable offence”. He went even further. He
attempted to prove that the law against conspiracy does not require any indictable
action, but is simply a law with a political purpose, and the category of conspiracy is
therefore merely a pretext for burning political heretics in a legal way. The success of
his attempt promised to be all the greater because of the decision to apply the new
Prussian Penal Code that had been promulgated after the accused had been arrested. On
the pretext that this code contained extenuating provisions the servile court was able
to permit its retroactive application.

But if it was simply a political trial why a preliminary investigation lasting 1 1/2 years? For political reasons.

As it is therefore a question of politics are we to engage in a fundamental discussion
of politics with a Saedt-Stieber-Seckendorf, with a Göbel, with a Prussian government,
with the 300 most highly taxed people in the district of Cologne, with the Royal
Chamberlain von Münch-Bellinghausen and with the Freiherr von Fürstenherg? Pas si bête.

Saedt admits (in the sitting on November 8) that

“when some few months ago, the Chief Public Prosecutor commissioned him to join him in
representing the prosecution in this affair, and when, as a result, he began to read
through the files he first hit upon the idea of making a somewhat more thorough study of
communism and socialism. He felt impelled to impart the results of his studies to the
jury, especially since he thought he might proceed on the assumption that many of them
like himself may have not greatly concerned themselves with the subject hitherto.”

So Saedt bought the well-known compendium by Stein.

And what he has learnt today,

he'll teach to others tomorrow.

But the prosecution was afflicted by a singular misfortune. It sought objective evidence
for a case against Marx and found objective evidence for the case Cherval. It went in
search of the communism propagated by the defendants and found the communism they
combated. Various sorts of communism can indeed be found in Stein’s compendium, but not
the sort Saedt was seeking. Stein had not yet recorded German, critical communism. It is
true that Saedt has in his possession a copy of the Manifesto of the Communist Party
that the defendants recognise as the manifesto of their party. This Manifesto contains a
chapter devoted to a criticism of the whole previous literature of socialism and
communism, i.e. of the whole of the wisdom recorded in Stein. From this chapter the
distinction between the kind of communism propounded by the defendants and all previous
kinds must become apparent; that is to say the specific content and the specific
political tendency of the theory against which Saedt seeks to act. But no Stein will
help him over this stumbling-block. Here understanding was essential, if only in order
to prosecute. How did Saedt manage when Stein left him in the lurch? He claimed:

“The Manifesto consists of three sections. The first section contains a historical
account of the social status of the various citizens (!) from the communist point of
view” (very fine)....... The second section expounds the communist point of view vis-à-
vis the proletariat.... Lastly, the final section treats of the position of the
Communists in different countries...... (!) (Sitting of November 6.)

Now in fact the Manifesto consists of four sections, not of three, but what the eye does
not see the heart does not grieve over. Saedt claims therefore that there are three
sections and not four. The section which for him does not exist is that same accursed
section with the critique of communism as recorded by Stein, that is to say the section
that contains the specific brand of communism advocated by the defendants. Poor Saedt!
First he cannot find an indictable offence, and now he cannot find indictable political
views.

But “grey, dear friend, is every theory”.

“In recent times,” as Saedt observed, “competent and incompetent people have been
concerned with the so-called social question and its solution.”

Saedt at any rate belongs to the “competent,” for three months ago the Chief Public
Prosecutor, Seckendorf, officially authorised him to study socialism and communism. The
Saedts of all times and all places have from time immemorial unanimously declared that
Galileo was “incompetent” to explore the movements of the heavenly bodies, but that the
inquisitor who accused him of heresy was “competent” to do so. E pur si muove.*

* Saedt was not only “competent”. He was moreover — as a reward for his performance in
this trial — appointed Chief Public Prosecutor for the Rhine Province and remained in
this post until he was pensioned, and afterwards, provided with the holy sacraments, he
passed on. [Note by Engels to the edition of 1885]

The defendants, who represented the revolutionary proletariat, stood defenceless before
the ruling classes who were represented by the jury; the defendants therefore were
condemned because they stood before this jury. What could, for a moment, move the
bourgeois conscience of the jury, just as it had deeply disturbed public opinion, was
the unmasking of the intrigues of the government, the corruption of the Prussian
government that had been laid bare before their eyes. But, the members of the jury
reasoned, if the Prussian government could risk using such infamous and at the same time
such foolhardy methods against the accused, if it could, as it were, stake its European
reputation, then the accused must be damnably dangerous, however small their party, and
their theories in any case must be a real power. The government has violated every law
in the penal code in order to protect us from these monstrous criminals. Let us for our
part sacrifice our little point d'honneur to save the government’s honour. Let us be
thankful and let us condemn.

With their verdict of Guilty the Rhenish nobility and the Rhenish bourgeoisie joined in
the cry uttered by the French bourgeoisie after December 2: “Property can be saved only
by theft, religion only by perjury, the family only by bastardy, order only by
disorder!”

In France the whole political edifice has prostituted itself. And yet no institution
prostituted itself so deeply as French courts of law and French juries. Let us surpass
the French judges and jurymen, the judge and jury exclaimed in Cologne. In the Cherval
case immediately after the coup d'état the Paris jury acquitted Nette though there was
more evidence against him than against any one of the accused [in Cologne]. Let us
surpass the jury of the coup d'état of December 2. Let us, in condemning Röser, Bürgers,
etc., also condemn Nette retrospectively.

Thus the superstitious faith in the jury, still rampant in Rhenish Prussia, was broken.
People realised that the jury was a court-martial of the privileged classes; it was
created to bridge the gaps in the law with the broad bourgeois conscience.

Jena! [Jena, site of Napoleon’s defeat of the Prussian army in 1806] That is the final
outcome of a government that requires such methods in order to survive and of a society
that needs such a government for its protection. The word that should stand at the end
of the communist trial in Cologne is ... Jena!