rheinsberg | Wanderungen: Katte-Richtschwert

In deference to his noble lineage, Katte was executed by sword rather than some more dishonorable and/or painful method. The sword is important enough to have its own Wikipedia article. Seriously.

And what it tells me is that there are two claimants to be the original sword that decapitated Katte. One is in Berlin, the other is in a museum in Brandenburg. Or rather, was--another article tells me it was since reclaimed by the Katte family and is back among their effects. Which also apparently include a 1729 oil painting by Hans Hermann, which I desperately want to find a picture of.

Anyway! The Brandenburg sword is the more famous of the two, and the only one I could find pictures of or details on. It's also apparently extremely suspicious. It's supposed to have belonged to an executioner named Carl Kühne. Except there's no documentary evidence of an executioner by this name, apparently.

The executioner whom the archives show getting paid for the execution is someone by the name of Heyl, the executioner in Küstrin at the time. Fontane gives the name as Coblentz, and Carl Hinrichs, author of the Kronprinzenprozeß, adds that the name was Martin Coblentz and he was from Beeskow. Wikipedia tells me it was not unusual two have a local executioner and also an executioner from somewhere else who actually did the work.

This actually makes a lot of sense, especially combined with another article I found (Google translated from Polish, lol) that said that it wasn't unusual for there to be two swords at an execution, because executioners were often drunk, and not always up to the task of dispatching the accused quickly. So there'd be another one standing by just in case.

All our accounts agree that Katte's head went in one blow, but I am reminded that the guillotine was considered a humane invention in part because it removed this element of chance.

In any case, if you think about what it takes to wield a sword in cold blood, even in the name of the law (and especially if you don't agree with the law), executioners being 1) under the influence, 2) from out of town, i.e. less likely to know the person they're executing, makes perfect sense.

None of this explains why we have a third executioner whose name isn't attested, but okay. There's a good chance this sword has nothing to do with Katte.

But it's the one we know the most about. It was in the Katte family during the nineteenth century, Fontane saw it got sold, there's some story, probably apocryphal, about it being cursed on the guy who bought it (his entire family died), it ended up in the museum in Brandenburg for several decades, and then finally back to the Kattes as of the last couple of years.

In addition to a couple sayings that basically absolve the executioner from responsibility in what would otherwise be cold-blooded murder, it has the names of three victims inscribed on it: Ullrich, v. Catt, and Stelw. We apparently know nothing about the other two.

Now, I was very surprised when I learned this. Is it normal to inscribe the names of victims on the swords that execute them? Then I found Wikipedia, and Wikipedia says no, that's one of the things that makes this sword suspicious.

The final thing you'll notice about this sword is that it has no point; i.e. this is not a sword that will ever be used for stabbing, only cutting, which makes sense if it's not intended for use against anyone who will be fighting back.

At long last, these are the pictures I found, of the sword that may or may not have been used to cut off Katte's head (but the Katte family and the museum have certainly thought so for a good couple hundred years, so it has that history behind it if nothing else).

Pictures collected from the internet. If any of them are yours and you would like me to take them down, please let me know.