Wilhelm Stieber

Germany state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1818–1882 ○ Natural causes

Prussian police official who produced forged evidence at the Cologne Communist Trial of 1852 and later worked for Bismarck

Born in Merseburg in 1818, he studied law in Berlin. In 1845 he named the manufacturer Schlöffel the leader of a supposed Silesian plot on evidence so thin that Schlöffel was released. He left the judicial service in 1847 and made his name as a criminal defence lawyer. In November 1850 he returned to the Berlin police with the backing of Frederick William IV, and at the London exhibition of 1851 he spied on the German refugees. At the Cologne Communist Trial of 1852 he was the prosecution's chief witness, and the "original minute book" he produced was exposed as a forgery. He then headed the Berlin criminal police until a trial for abuse of office in 1860 led to his suspension. From the end of 1863 he worked for Bismarck, heading the political police of headquarters in the wars of 1866 and 1870–71. He died in Berlin in 1882.

Also known as: Wilhelm Johann Carl Eduard Stieber