Death of an Assassin: The True Story of the German Murderer Who Died Defending Robert E. Lee by Ann Marie Ackermann (review)

This is the investigation of two stories separated by time and space. The first story is an unsolved murder case set in Germany in 1835. The second story occurs twelve years later in Mexico during the U.S.-Mexican War. Through the use of primary evidence, Ann Marie Ackermann spins a narrative that weaves these two seemingly disparate stories into a singular conclusion: that the unknown assassin of a small-town German mayor was later an illegal immigrant to America who died at the feet of Robert E. Lee during the battle of Veracruz.

The first story is the stronger of the two. In it Ackermann relies on the original 1835 investigation documents to tell the story of the unsolved murder of Johann Heinrich Rieber, mayor of Bönnigheim. Her recreation of nineteenth-century Bönnigheim and its residents reads like a Jane Austen novel filled with mischievous youths, a beautiful maiden, a dutiful doctor, and even a couple of lovable sots. The true hero of the unsolved whodunit is Eduard Hammer, the district magistrate investigating the crime. Hammer never discovered the identity of the mayor's assassin, and the case went cold. However, Ackermann argues, Hammer's examination of the striations on lead recovered from the crime scene and the victim to determine the type of weapon used was the first successful use of forensic ballistics, more than thirty years before it was credited to the French pathologist Alexandre Lacassagne in 1889.

Ackermann's second story, from the U.S.-Mexican War, is grander in scope but lacks the intimate narrative of the first. Nevertheless, she once again succeeds in bringing to light an equally fascinating story, that of the German immigrant soldiers who fought in the American army during the U.S.-Mexican War. Our assassin is found here, dying at the feet of Robert E. Lee during an American battery assault on the city of Veracruz. We know his name, Gottlob Rueb, because of U.S. Army records and a strange twist of events in 1872 that led authorities in Bönnigheim to conclude that he was the assassin of Mayor Rieber.

Some might call Death of an Assassin: The True Story of the German Murderer Who Died Defending Robert E. Lee a story of redemption. After all, Lee's description of the dying soldier's stoicism is literally and figuratively worlds apart from the German descriptions of a disgruntled unemployed Rueb, accused of battery and disowned by his father. But more than a story of redemption, Death of an Assassin is an immigrant's story, an illegal immigrant to be exact. Like many "debtors and criminals," Ackermann surmises, Rueb traveled to the United States under a "false name" with "forged documents," resurfacing later in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, under his legal name as a member of a German militia company (p. 88). In December 1846 Rueb and his fellow German immigrant soldiers were mustered into the U.S. Army as Company E of the First Regiment of the Pennsylvania Volunteers; its commander, Captain Frederick William Binder, was also an illegal immigrant from Württemberg.

Ackermann's intention is to examine a true crime story. But in these days of increasing attacks against immigrants, Ackermann's estimate that "[b]etween 40 and 47 percent of the regular army's recruits" during the U.S.-Mexican War "were foreign-born, mostly Irish and Germans," lifts the study to something higher (p. 100). The story of Gottlob Rueb and the German immigrant soldiers of the First Regiment of the Pennsylvania Volunteers is a much-needed reminder of those who served this country in a time of war.