The Wolf Who Looked Like A Man


Lieutenant General Baron Roman Fyodorvitch Von Ungern-Sternberg, the Mad Baron.

As a boy, Ungern-Sternberg was noted for being such a ferocious bully that even the other bullies feared him and several parents forbade their children from playing with him as he was a "terror". Ungern was well known for his love of torturing animals, and at the age of 12 he tried to strangle to death his cousin's pet owl for no particularly good reason other than his cruelty toward animals.  Ungern-Sternberg had extreme pride in his ancient, aristocratic family and later wrote that his family had over the centuries "never taken orders from the working classes" and it was outrageous that "dirty workers who've never had any servants of their own, but still think they can command" should have any say in the ruling of the vast Russian Empire.  A highly decorated soldier, the baron was extremely brave but regarded as unstable, whatever that meant in the context of the Tsarist army.  Despite his many awards, he was eventually discharged from one of his command positions for attacking another officer and a hall porter during a drunken rage in October 1916, which led to his being court-martialed and sentenced to two months in prison.
After the revolution he joined up with the Cossack general Semyonov where he distinguished himself as one of the effective White Russian commanders, killing his opponents left, right and center.
He attacked Mongolia on his own and seized towns, killing the Jewish colonists there and everyone else who he thought needed elimination.  He was mystical and took counsel from shamans as to when to attack the Bolsheviks, on their advice he delayed his offensive allowing the Reds to reinforce and slaughter his small army.  His men mutinied and he was captured by the Reds, after a 6 hour show trial he was executed by firing squad on 15 September 1921 in Novosibirsk.

Ungern as a character in Hugo Pratt's marvelous adventure comic, Corto Maltese.  

(We're beautiful, Semenoff, beautiful).

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-i/von-sternberg.html 


The flag of his Mongolian empire.  The writing reads God Help Us.  

'Captives were buried alive, burned at the stake, and thrown into the boilers of trains. One witness asserted that in Ulaanbaatar, the baron sentenced a baker’s dishonest apprentice to be baked to death in his own oven. Another claimed that the baron hung three men accused of stealing brandy over the door of the shop they robbed until the shopkeeper, worried about losing business, begged him to remove the bodies'.
Before he was killed he said, “My time has come … I will die …but the world has never seen terror and a sea of blood like the one that is coming now"
 
 
Roman von Ungern-Sternberg - Wikipedia

Cute kid.

As the twig is bent...Hell, I outta know.

Comments

  1. He was a Lutheran who became a Buddhist of the Tibetan variety, which is somewhat okay with the severities listed above....

    ReplyDelete

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