STRUGGLE IN HOTEL.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19221, 9 January 1926, Page 2 (Supplement)

STRUGGLE IN HOTEL.

A BURGLAR'S WATERLOO. THROWN THROUGH WINDOW. REMARKABLE BERLIN EPISODE. The Kaiserhof Hotel, at tho official centre of this city, where the Earl of Beaconsfield and the Marquis of Salisbury stayed during the Berlin Conference, has been the scene of an adventure quite up to the level of the climax of a Wild West film, writes tho Berlin correspondent of a London paper. Once more truth holds its own with fiction.

About 11 p.m. a prominent Zurich business man named Hollinger was set down at tho hotel with his wife. They were allotted a room on the first, floor. The lady retired to bed without delay, and the husband, having opened the window, went into the bath room attached to the apartment in order to wash his hands. Hardly had he closed the door of the bath room when he heard a torrified shriek from his wife. Hastily reopening the door, he found a man, well dressed but shoeless and wearing grey silk gloves and with a partially masked face, standing in the middle "of the room, covering his wife with a revolver. Before the intruder could

change his aim Hollinger, who is a man of powerful physique, rushed at him and grappled with him. A life-and-death struggle followed. The intruder tried desperately to turn the barrel of the revolver on the Swiss, but, failing to do so, struck him a nasty blow on the head with it. Hollinger, however, was not put out of action, and, forcing the intruder backwards, ever nearer and nearer to the window, finally picked him up bodily and flung him out into the street. As it happened, the man made his exit through the same aperture as his entrance, for, when he was picked up bleeding profusely from the head and with a broken thigh, he was recognised as the most skilful and daring of the German ""facadeas this type of thief is called here. His name is Willi Kassner. Many visitors to the chief hotels of Berlin and other big German towns who were incautious enough to leave their windows open during absence from their room 3 have suffered from the depredations of Kassner and his brother.

Some months ago they were run to earth by thei police, and after a sharp revolver skirmiiih, in which several persons were wounded, they were overcome and taken into custody. They were sentenced to 15 years' hard labour, but on the way to gaol where he was to serve his term Willi accomplished the feat which Charles Peace attempted without success, and, taking advantage of a heedless moment of his warders, leapt through, the railway carriage window while the train was in motion and managed to make good his escape.