Major Ferdinand Baptista von Schill (6 January 1776 – 31 May 1809) was a Prussian Army officer who revolted unsuccessfully against France's occupation of the Kingdom of Prussia in May 1809. Von Schill's uprising ended at the Battle of Stralsund, a battle which also saw von Schill's own death in action. Outnumbered 3 to 1, Schill's Prussian Freikorps succumbed to a Napoleonic force supported by Dutch and Danish auxiliaries.
Life
Ferdinand von Schill was born at Wilmsdorf (now a part of Bannewitz, Saxony) and entered the Prussian Army's cavalry at the age of twelve or fourteen (sources differ). His father, Johann-Georg Schill, had been an ambitious commoner from Bohemia, who attained the aristocratic "von" for his services to Austria and Saxony during the Seven Years' War. J.-G. von Schill had raised a "Freikorps", a small raiding party of cavalry and mounted infantry, operating behind enemy lines, and acquired some measure of fame and success. Many of Ferdinand von Schill's later biographers assumed that his father's example was an important influence on his subsequent career.
Ferdinand von Schill was a second-lieutenant in the Prussian 5th "Bayreuth" dragoons, re-designated the Queen's Dragoons in 1806, in honor of the popular Queen Louise. When Prussia and France went to war in October of 1806, he was wounded at the battle of Auerstadt. From that field he escaped to Kolberg, where he played a very prominent part in the celebrated siege of 1806–07, as the commander of a Freikorps, raiding behind the French lines. After the Treaty of Tilsit, he was promoted to major, awarded the Pour le Mérite, and given the command of a hussar regiment formed primarily from his Kolberg men.
Schill's revolution
In 1809 the political situation in Europe appeared to Schill to favor an attempt to liberate Germany from the French domination of Napoleon Bonaparte. He was an active member of the Tugendbund, the quasi-Masonic "League of Virtue" founded in June 1808, and including many notable Prussian reformers such as Gerhard von Scharnhorst and August Neidhardt von Gneisenau. It was banned in 1809. Many Tugendbund leaders believed that the new Kingdom of Westphalia, created by Napoleon from many smaller German states, and ruled by Napoleon's youngest brother Jérôme Bonaparte, was ripe for revolution. Schill planned to create an uprising in Westphalia that would topple the Bonaparte regime there, and – coupled with the efforts of Austria, Spain, and Britain – would bring about the fall of Napoleonic dominance in Germany.
Leading out his regiment from Berlin under pretext of manoeuvres, he raised the standard of revolt, and, joined by many officers and a company of light infantry, marched first south through Saxony, and then north-west into Westphalia. At the village of Dodendorf on 5 May 1809, he had a brush with the Magdeburg garrison and won a small victory. Schill had no difficulty defeating, or even recruiting, the unreliable Westphalian troops sent against him, and his rebellion swelled to over 2,000 men.
He had less success, however, with the gathering Danish and Dutch forces, which gradually drove him in a north-east direction toward the Baltic Sea. His most serious difficulty was the condemnation of Prussia's king Frederick William III, who feared that the revolt would drag a weakened and unprepared Prussia into another disastrous war against Napoleon. By the end of May, although he had left garrisons and raiding parties in various places, Schill's main force was trapped at Stralsund. He had between 1,500 and 2,000 men, against a force of 8,000 Danish and Dutch troops under French command.