Willich, August (19 November 1810–22 January 1878), military leader and socialist writer, was born Johann August Ernst von Willich in Braunsberg, East Prussia, the son of Johann G. N. W. von Willich, an army officer and civil official, and Fredericka Lisette Michalowska. (Some prominent Cincinnatians, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Willich himself on one occasion supported the claim that he was an illegitimate Hohenzollern.) After his father’s death in 1813, August went to live with Friedrich Schleiermacher, a philosophy professor in Berlin, who had married the widow of Willich’s uncle. At the age of twelve he attended cadet school and then the Royal Military Academy in Berlin, directed by Carl von Clausewitz, from which he was commissioned lieutenant and stationed in Westphalia....
