How robber Hias Kneissl became a Bavarian folk hero
For centuries Bavaria was deeply rural. Until the end of the 19th century more than 80 percent of the population earned their income from farming and forestry. For many life was, if not exactly “nasty, brutish and short,” to quote Thomas Hobbes, certainly relentlessly hard—a situation exacerbated by the power wielded over peasants’ lives by the state and its attendant bureaucracy. These facts may well explain the popularity of the story surrounding the peasant robber and poacher Hias (short for Mathias) Kneissl. Born the first of six children to an innkeeper couple on August 4, 1875, in the tiny village of Unterweikertshofen near Dachau, Kneissl’s father was a quiet, hard-working man, his mother, Therese, on the other hand, was a firebrand. This daughter of Italian immigrants loved to be the center of attention and moved in a twilight world of illicit relationships and petty crime—her brother was shot dead while taking part in a robbery. The Kneissl children ran wild. Hias and his brother Alois attended school so rarely that police were sent to escort the boys to their lessons and Hias’ teacher wrote despairingly of his wayward pupil, “his laziness knows no bounds.” In 1886 the family moved to an isolated mill, perhaps to escape some kind of trouble, though in fact their problems were just beginning. In spring 1892 mother Kneissl was caught trying to sell stolen silver and when local gendarmes attempted to arrest her husband he put up such a fight that he died on the way to prison. Fatherless, and with Therese locked away in an Augsburg prison, the children were forced to sustain themselves through robbery and poaching. In no time at all the police were back at the mill, this time to apprehend Hias and Alois. Foolishly, a young constable, probably keen to impress his chief, rushed up the stairs to where the boys were hiding. Alois panicked and shot at the constable and his superior. The boys managed to flee, but their reprieve was short-lived and a few days later both were rounded up by the police. Justice in late 19th-century Bavaria was meted out harshly and in the summer of 1883 the Munich District Court sentenced fifteen-year-old Alois to fifteen years in prison—both policemen having died as the result of their injuries—while Hias received five years and eight months. For the slight and probably malnourished Alois, the unsanitary conditions and poor diet of jail proved too much and before long he succumbed to consumption. Hias, however, survived his prison term and even learned a trade. Determined to make a new start, the young man sought employment with a carpenter in the village of Nussdorf near Munich. He proved to be a skillful and diligent worker and for six months all went well. Then somebody uncovered details of the apprentice’s past. The carpenter, under pressure from other villagers, was forced to send the “dangerous criminal” packing. Now Kneissl was an outcast and crime, though perhaps not his only means of survival, was what he knew best. In the hope of raising enough money to emigrate to the New World with his sweetheart, Mathilde, he robbed a farmer, together with another convict, on October 25, 1900, but the loot was not enough and the incident served only to lengthen Kneissl’s criminal record. Living from hand to mouth, his revolver always at the ready, the young man scoured the countryside around Dachau for places to hide, seldom staying in one place for more than a night. No more than a common criminal, a certain defiant bravado and reckless contempt of the authorities turned Kneissl into a living legend, admired, discussed and sometimes protected by local peasants. The police, desperate to catch the robber, often found themselves misdirected by his sympathizers. Arriving at a farm where Kneissl had been sighted, they searched high and low, never thinking to look in the manure where the farmer had hidden him. Neither was Kneissl lacking in a certain chivalrous charm; he once accompanied an old lady on a lonely stretch of road, because she was “so afraid of being attacked by the Kneissl-Hias.” In the end it was greed—though not his own—that led to Kneissl’s capture. A month after the robbery, an innkeeper, hoping for some financial reward, alerted the police of the criminal’s whereabouts. A shoot-out ensued in which Kneissl killed a police officer. Though he was once again able to escape, a manhunt was now on and a bounty of Reichsmark 1,000 offered for his capture. In all likelihood it was poverty-stricken Mathilde who, in March of the following year, told the police of her sweetheart’s whereabouts, on a small farmstead. After a 24-hour siege, Kneissl was dragged from the farm with numerous gunshot wounds and taken to prison in Augsburg. And it was here, on February 21, 1902, he was put to death by guillotine. We are told he died bravely.