On Friday, June 20, 1913, death came to the Marienschule in Bremen. But that day was not just a multiple murder. There was the first documented school rage in history.
It was just before 11 o'clock when the teacher Maria Pohl had the students of her first class lined up in front of the classroom to leave the school building for the big break. As the girls started to move, a man stormed up the stairs and opened the fire: the then 29-year-old non-teaching teacher Heinz Jacob Friedrich Ernst Schmidt, who lived in Bremen since December 1912.
Panic broke out as Schmidt continued to shoot. Two girls were fatally hit. In an attempt to escape by the stairs, a student rushed into the crowd and broke her neck. Several other girls ran back to the classroom, followed by the gunman. The five- and six-year-old children pleaded for their lives: "Uncle, do not shoot us!"
Meanwhile, Maria Pohl fled into the room opposite the boys' class. The teacher teaching there responded in spirit and barricaded the door of his classroom. He opened the window and told his students to jump down from the room on the mezzanine floor into the schoolyard.
Knock-out with the pitchfork
The janitor of the school was about to run into the building after hearing the shots. He threw himself from behind at the gunman, who had previously tried in vain to get into the locked classroom. In the duel with the gunman hit him a bullet, which pierced his jaw and exited the cheek again. He lay unconscious while Schmidt hurried up a flight of stairs.
From the open window of the landing he attacked the fleeing boys in the schoolyard. Five of them were hit. Individual shots also hit the surrounding homes and a nearby construction site where a roofer was hit on his arm. When Schmidt wanted to go further up, the teacher Hubert Möllmann confronted him. The gunman fired at him and hit him in the chest. Nevertheless, Möllmann could still plunge on the assassin and wrestled him to the ground, where he was hit by a second shot in the abdomen and remained lying.
photo gallery
10 pictures
The rampage of Bremen: As cured cured from the sanatoriumMeanwhile, worried mothers and fathers ran to school. Neighboring streets filled with onlookers, some of whom tried to catch a glimpse of the action from the surrounding rooftops. Some passersby entered the school building to overpower the gunman, who was now fighting several people. Finally, a driver who had joined the truck knocked Schmidt down with a pitchfork, as the Bremen correspondent of the "Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger" reported at the time.
Naked saber against lynching
After just under fifteen minutes, the killing spree ended, which was to claim a total of five casualties. In addition to the three girls, who were dead immediately, two other students suffered their gunshot wounds during the following four weeks. Schmidt was arrested and taken to the nearest police station. The police had trouble keeping the assassin from lynching by the rushing crowd. At gunpoint and with their sabers drawn, they drove the raging masses apart, including many parents whose children attended Mary's School.
The German Reich just celebrated the 25th anniversary of the reign of his Majesty the King and Emperor Wilhelm II with glittering military parades, as the news from Bremen was distributed via correspondents and agencies. Newspapers appeared in extra editions to cover the "bloodbath at school." Even the "New York Times" published an eyewitness account from Bremen.
In the following public debate, demands for a tightening of arms law in the German Reich quickly became loud. After all, Schmidt had been able to obtain several Browning brand revolvers and almost a thousand cartridges without hindrance, although he had been suffering from mental illness for a long time, which had hindered him from practicing his teaching career.
Hatred of the Jesuits
As early as March and April 1913, two Bremen arms dealers had contacted the police for suspicion of the amount of weapons and ammunition Schmidt had bought from them and the buyer himself. The investigation, however, fizzled out. In addition, it became known after the rampage that Schmidt's mother had come to Bremen just months before the killing spree to have her son sent to a mental hospital - but unsuccessful. In May 1911, Schmidt had already been admitted to a sanatorium, but a short time later was dismissed as cured.
The gunman himself refused to testify after his arrest. But details of his previous life and his motivational position were quickly revealed. He had provided a letter from his sister on the grave illness of his father, a Protestant clergyman, with the words "The Jesuits have done that." The investigation of the Bremen Criminal Police revealed that Schmidt's father had died the day before the killing spree and he had learned by telegram in the afternoon. He also blamed the Jesuits in his paranoia, as he told a Bremen doctor in a letter.
Although branches of the Jesuit order were prohibited in the territory of the German Empire since the Jesuit Law of 1872, the conspiracy theories around the Jesuits continued. In addition to Jews and Freemasons, they were at the center of crude world domination theories that flourished in the German Empire.
Four little coffins
Four days after the bloody deed, Bremen said goodbye to the victims of the assassin in a moving funeral service. Four small coffins were placed in front of the altar in St. Mary's Church, which was filled to the last seat - covered with numerous wreaths and surrounded by a sea of candles. After the requiem, the teachers of the Marian School carried the coffins to the waiting hearse, before forming a long train that buried the girls under heavy rain clouds.
In Bremen today nothing reminds of the terrible happenings. The Marienschule, destroyed in the Second World War, was rebuilt elsewhere. The graves of the five girls, who had been buried side by side in 1913, have long been leveled. Assassin Schmidt was declared "insane" so that it did not come to trial. He spent the rest of his life in the Bremen asylum and died 20 years after his death from tuberculosis.
At his arrest, Schmidt exclaimed, "The beginning is over, the end is yet to come." He should be right. His bloodletting in Bremen was only the beginning of a worldwide series of school records in the past 100 years, which today are linked mainly to places such as Erfurt, Winnenden, Littleton and several others.