Posted on 07/23/2023 6:13:18 PM PDT by CheshireTheCat
Marie Margarethe (Grete) Beier, the daughter of the late Mayor of Brand-Erbisdorf, was beheaded on the fallbeil on this date in 1908 for murdering her fiance. While her crime was banal, the consequent spectacle lit up newswires all the globe ’round.
Secretly carrying on with a lover named Johannes Merker, Beier (German Wikipedia link) was forced by her parents — a working-class couple made good — into pledging her troth to a respectable engineer named Heinrich Pressler.
With “the face of an angel and the heart of a fiend”* the charming Beier contrived a plan to truly have it all: on May 13, 1907, she visited her would-be husband and spiked his drink with potassium cyanide — then to be sure of her project, had him close his eyes and open his mouth on her flirty promise of a sweet surprise. Then she shoved his own revolver between his lips and fired, abandoning at the scene of her crime a forged will to her benefit, a forged suicide note lamenting a purported affair with a vengeful Italian woman, and forged love letters corroborating the latter, fictional, relationship....
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
In German, the guillotine was renamed “Fallbeil”,
literally translated as “Drop-Axe”.
That’s practically a French-style guillotine. Eventually the Germans used a much shorter machine that had a far heavier blade: basically an all-metal frame holding the knife that would come crashing down on the victim’s neck, with the force of the weight doing the cutting more than downward momentum.
F=MA. Gallic or Teutonic do the math.
I had no idea beheadings were going on in Europe at this time.
We don’t behead persons here in the USA, do we? Any idea why not?
I can imagine because our rejection of all things British.
“I can imagine because our rejection of all things British.”
Could be. I think we are the only English speaking nation that does NOT get Boxing Day as a Holiday, for one thing.
The English and Scots were centuries ahead of the French when it camd to beheading devices. Witness the Halifax Gibbet circa 1260 AD and the Edinburgh Maiden built in 1564 AD.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.