King Ludwig II of the
German Kingdom of Bavaria was gay, wildly eccentric and built fairytale castles
that today rate as Germany's leading tourist attractions – but more than a
century ago "Mad King" Ludwig II of Bavaria was declared insane, deposed
and three days later his corpse was found floating in a lake south of Munich.
The real cause of King
Ludwig's death has been a mystery ever since his body, together with that of
his psychiatrist, was dragged from Lake Starnberg on 13 June, 1886. But the
official version, which holds that he committed suicide by drowning, has never
been completely refuted.
It has been 126 years
since the king's death and new evidence has surfaced which suggests that the
King was murdered. The details are convincing enough to increase calls for the
House of Wittelsbach, King Ludwig's family, to allow his body to be exhumed
from its tomb in St Michael's Church in Munich to enable a new and conclusive
post-mortem examination to be conducted.
The most intriguing new
material to support the murder theory has come from a 60-year-old Munich banker
called Detlev Utermöhle. In a sworn affidavit issued earlier this month, Mr
Utermöhle recalled a scene from his childhood which he insists he remembers
vividly.
As a 10-year-old, he and
his mother were invited for afternoon coffee and cakes by a Countess Josephine
von Wrba-Kaunitz, who looked after some of the Wittelsbach family's assets. Mr
Utermöhle recalled how the countess gathered her guests, telling them in a
hushed tone: "Now you will find out the truth about Ludwig's death without
his family knowing. I will show you all the coat he wore on the day he
died." The countess opened a chest and pulled out a grey coat. Mr
Utermöhle insists in his statement that he saw "two bullet holes in its
back" and says his mother, who has since died, left him a written account
of what they saw.
Unfortunately the king's coat was lost in a fire at
Countess Wrba-Kaunitz's home in 1973 in which both she and her husband
perished. However his claims were supported by Siegfried Wichmann, a Bavarian
art historian and specialist in 19th-century painting, who published a hitherto
unseen photograph of a portrait of the king painted only hours after his death.
The portrait shows what
Mr Wichmann says is blood oozing from the corner of Ludwig's mouth. "King
Ludwig cannot have drowned. This is blood from the lungs and there is no water
in it," Mr Wichmann insisted.
The official version
holds that the Bavarian government was driven to depose the reclusive Ludwig
because he was squandering vast sums of money on bizarre building projects that
were driving his kingdom to ruin.
Bernhard von Gudden, his
psychiatrist, diagnosed him as suffering from "paranoia" – a
condition which today would be classified as schizophrenia. Ludwig was deprived
of his crown and, according to the official version, he reacted by drowning
himself in Lake Starnberg in a fit of paranoid hystaria.
Murder theorists counter
with recent medical evidence which suggests that the king was, in fact,
suffering from a form of meningitis and was far from insane. They say fishermen
reported hearing shots at the time of Ludwig's death and claim that his
opponents in the Bavarian government hired assassins to kill him as he was
trying to flee across the lake. They say that Von Gudden, who was also found
dead in the lake, was shot because he was a witness.
To date, the Wittelsbach
family has dismissed all murder theories and refused point blank to have the
king's body exhumed. The latest attempt to persuade them to change their minds
comes from the Berlin historian and author, Peter Glowasz, who wants to employ
Swiss scientists to examine the corpse by giving it a computer tomography. He
insists that while the procedure would not touch the body, it would show up any
gunshot wounds.
The site where the King's body was discovered int he lake.
