display
The “Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung” was the news on May 7, 1866 worth an extra sheet: “When Prime Minister Count Bismarck was walking down the middle of Linden-Allee this afternoon at 5 1/2 o'clock, he heard that Russian was near Embassy hotels arrived, shoot twice behind you.
He looked around and saw a small, about 24-year-old person standing in front of him, who was pointing a revolver at him for the third time. "
Bismarck, 51 years old, tall and in good shape, reacted quickly, according to the report: “The Prime Minister jumped at the criminal who shot the third time and was missing again.
But when he saw himself gripped by the count's chest and right wrist joint at the same time, he managed to take the revolver in his left hand and fire two more shots at Count Bismarck. "
This illustration was created three decades after the attack
Source: picture alliance / akg-images
Prussia's head of government was lucky: he wore a particularly thick frock coat because he had just recovered from an illness.
The fabric stopped the last two shots fired from close range.
Then passers-by and the soldiers of a guard battalion that happened to be marching past brought the attacker under control.
Bismarck, who had only a few bruises on his chest apart from his ruined clothes from the attack, continued on foot to Wilhelmstrasse, where his office was.
display
The assassin was searched and interrogated for the first time;
as his name he gave Ferdinand Cohen-Blind.
Yes, he had come to Berlin to kill Count Bismarck, he confessed.
But at the first opportunity he cut his carotid artery with a pocket knife hidden in his vest that evening and died a few hours later.
The only known portrait of Ferdinand Cohen-Blind
Source: Wikimedia / Public Domain
Ferdinand Cohen-Blind left a letter to his maternal friend Mathilde Weber in Tübingen, in which he explained his attempted murder on Bismarck. "The only solution to the current complicated situation in Germany", he wrote in it, was "the elimination of Bismarck". Because, so further in the letter: “An ordinary person, if he had committed the hundredth part of what Bismarck was guilty of, would have fallen into the law long ago. Bismarck, who is highly placed, cannot be prosecuted by the laws and does not respect them. "
Born on March 25, 1844 as the son of the businessman Jacob Abraham Cohen and his second wife Friederike, Ferdinand grew up with his mother's second husband after the death of his biological father.
Karl Blind was an activist of the revolutionary movement in Heidelberg.
After the uprising in Baden was suppressed in 1849, the family had to flee Germany and only found a home in London in 1852.
display
Ferdinand returned to Germany in 1862 and studied at the Hohenheim Agricultural University near Stuttgart until March 1866 - with exquisite results, by the way.
Then, as was customary at the time, he went on a hike to gain experience.
In the process, Cohen-Blind became a political assassin for pacifist motives: “If you have wandered, as I have done, through the flourishing regions of Germany, which will soon be devastated under the hard kicks of the war, the thought comes naturally To punish the originator of this evil. "
The 22-year-old analyzed the political situation quite correctly: just seven weeks after his failed assassination attempt, around 50,000 soldiers of the Prussian-North German army and the Austro-South German contingent died on the battlefield of Königgrätz.
display
Otto von Bismarck was primarily responsible for this, primarily for domestic political reasons.
Had Cohen-Blind killed the Prime Minister, the German War of 1866 would very likely have failed.
You can also find “World History” on Facebook. We look forward to a like.