In 1906 a disguised cobbler robbed a Prussian town hall

In 1906, Wilhelm Voigt, a 57-year-old Prussian cobbler just out of Plötzensee prison, bought a captain's uniform on installments at a second-hand shop in Berlin for 2 marks and 30 pfennigs. On 16 October he called out to the first ten soldiers he came across, drilled them into a squad and took them by train to Köpenick, a town on the outskirts. He walked into the town hall, arrested the mayor and treasurer for «dubious accounts», ordered them shipped off to Berlin and emptied the municipal safe: 4,002 marks and 37 pfennigs, with a receipt signed under his fake captain's name.

Ten hours before the operation he had run a field test: in uniform he entered a suburban barracks and asked for a lieutenant who did not exist. Nobody asked for papers, and that «nobody» was his permit for the 16th. Twelve years earlier, in the prison library, he had learned the Prussian army regulations by heart: salutes, ranks, the formulas for giving orders. Nineteen years earlier he had been convicted of stealing money from a post office, again wearing a fake uniform. In 1863, aged fourteen, a judge in Tilsit sent him to reform school for forging a postal order of fifty thalers. In 1849 he was born in East Prussia to a family of cobblers, son of a master who beat him with the last every time he caught him trying on the customers' clothes.

Arrested ten days after the raid, he pleaded guilty with a short sentence: «The uniform obeys more than papers do.» Kaiser Wilhelm II pardoned him after two years. Voigt died in 1922 in a poorhouse in Luxembourg, having spent the rest of his life repeating the trick in Berlin taverns for a few marks a show.