Vincenz Weitz

Vincenz Weitz
Fictional Character
1632 series POD: May, 1631
Appearance(s):	1635: The Dreeson Incident
Nationality:	Germany
Date of Death:	Killed during Operation Krystalnacht

Vincenz Weitz was a teamster who spent most of his time going back and forth from Frankfurt. He was also a virulent anti-Semite, who had been one of the people who blamed the Jews for the October 1634 explosion at a redoubt in Sachsenhausen, which had been caused by someone taking a lit candle into an explosives bunker.

Weitz was recruited by Guillaume Locquifier, and put forth the idea of destroying Grantville's new synagogue, arguing that this would demonstrate that, even in Grantville, the up-timers were either unable or unwilling to effectively maintain the religious freedom that they advocated putting into the proposed constitution for the entire United States of Europe. For his part in this plan, Weitz gathered anti-Semitic followers from various Franconian and Thuringian towns, and talked them into protesting the synagogue, an event which he insisted should take place on March 4, 1635.

Weitz did not appear to know that the attack on the synagogue was cover for an assassination, and he himself was not in Grantville when it happened. He arrived in Grantville about a week later, and was directed to Jacques-Pierre Dumais. He believed that some advantage could be gotten from the deaths of Henry Dreeson and Enoch Wiley by accusing Veronica Dreeson of harboring anti-Semitic beliefs, on the grounds that she, unlike Inez Wiley, had not been standing on the steps of the synagogue during the attack. Dumais agreed to duplicate a flyer Weitz had made, but only because he wanted Weitz to leave as soon as possible.

During Operation Krystalnacht, Weitz managed to escape from the State of Thuringia-Franconia, and headed for Bavaria. However, he was caught up in the CoC's sweep of the Upper Palatinate. He and a dozen or so of his followers and associates tried to find refuge in Nürnberg, as Nürnberg was an independent city-state, but the authorities in Nürnberg did not allow them into the city. In the end, they died at a crossroads just north of Amberg, having been hunted down by a detachment from a CoC column. Weitz and his people died after a short, though fierce, fight, and their bodies were shoved into a shallow mass grave in a nearby meadow. While he had been identified by then, the mass grave was left unmarked, and was apparently forgotten until the bones started weathering through decades later.

Since Weitz and his men had been carrying antique weapons, they were placed, at least in local village legends, as a lost unit of mercenaries from a much earlier period.