The leader of the separatists was Franz Josef Heinz (1884–1924) from Orbis near Kirchheimbolanden, member of the district council for the Deutsche Volkspartei (DVP). He proclaimed the “autonomous Republic of the Palatinate.” While the new government was getting itself established, resistance was already being organised on the opposite side of the Rhine. On the evening of January 9, 1924, 20 men came across the frozen Rhine, stormed the “Wittelsbach Court,” a hotel-restaurant in Speyer, where Heinz was dining and shot him, an aide and an uninvolved third person. A monument still exists in the Speyer cemetery to two of the paid assassins who died in a following shoot-out with the police.
