A Criminal History of Mankind (95 page)

With Mussolini now a firm ally - a Berlin-Rome-Tokyo ‘axis’ was formed in 1937 - Hitler turned all his energies to the problem of union with Austria. The Austrian chancellor Schuschnigg was bullied into giving the Nazi party of Austria more freedom. In March 1938, political manoeuvring forced Schuschnigg to resign, and the new Nazi chancellor, Seyss-Inquart, invited Hitler to send troops into Austria.

At the end of the First World War, Austria had lost part of its territory - the Sudeten mountains - to Czechoslovakia. Three million Germans lived there, and they wanted to rejoin the new Germany. Hitler made threatening noises, but he had to proceed cautiously - France, Britain and the Soviet Union had promised to aid Czechoslovakia in the event of an invasion. Then, to Hitler’s astonishment, the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, proposed to come and see him to find a ‘peaceful solution’. This meant that Britain was anxious to avoid war.

And after speaking to Hitler, Chamberlain joined with the French premier Daladier to notify the Czechs that they would have to hand over the Sudeten territory. The Czechs were enraged at the betrayal, but could do nothing. In Munich, Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain, Daladier and Roosevelt met to discuss the problem, and the Sudetenland was returned to Germany. Chamberlain returned to England and uttered the famous phrase about ‘peace for our time’.

In the British parliament, Winston Churchill warned that this policy of appeasement would lead to disaster; he was proved right sooner than even he expected. The Slovakian premier, Tiso, was deposed in a government crisis, and appealed to Hitler for aid for Slovak independence. Hitler responded by taking over most of Czechoslovakia, as well as a slice of Poland that the Czechs had always claimed. At the same time, Mussolini took over Albania. Now the only chance of stopping Hitler was for Britain and France to combine with the Soviet Union. And at this point, in August 1939, the Nazis staggered the world by announcing that they had signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin.

Now all that remained for Hitler was to take back the Polish corridor. Since the Poles would object to losing their link with the sea, this obviously involved invading Poland. On 1 September 1939, his troops marched across the border and his planes bombed Warsaw. Two days later, England and France declared war against Germany.

How had it all come about? Marx would undoubtedly have blamed capitalism - as Marxist historians continue to do; but this crisis had nothing to do with market forces or free enterprise. Tolstoy would have insisted that the ‘natural laws’ of history are responsible, unknown forces which are as unpredictable as the weather. But we have seen again and again that it is the will of individuals that changes the course of history. A ‘great man’ - a Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Peter the Great, Napoleon, Bismarck - sets out to achieve certain aims, and succeeds to a greater or lesser degree. Lesser men have less of an impact. But the essential clue always lies in the personality of the individual.

The crises of the post-1920s period were the direct result of the First World War. Without that there would have been no Russian revolution, no Italian and Spanish fascism, no German Nazism. And the First World War can be blamed almost entirely on the personality of one man: the Kaiser. And after the Kaiser came Hitler, another hysterical egoist. But if the Kaiser reminds us of Nero, Hitler is more like the adventurous ‘loner’ Lacenaire or the anarchist Ravachol. There is the same lonely individualism, the same hungry intelligence, the same sense of being an outcast and a misfit. But while Lacenaire and Ravachol blamed the bourgeoisie for all their misfortunes, Hitler found another scapegoat: the Jews. ‘Was there any shady undertaking, any form of foulness, especially in cultural life, in which at least one Jew did not participate? On putting the probing knife carefully to that kind of abscess one immediately discovered, like a maggot in a putrescent body, a little Jew who was often blinded by the sudden light’ (
Mein Kampf
, p. 60 of the English edition). He had already acquired a profound distaste for Marxism. When he worked as a builder’s labourer and listened to his fellow workers using Marxist arguments to disparage patriotism, religion and the law, his dislike of Marxism and his refusal to join a trade union led to threats to throw him from the scaffolding. So when he learned that most of the leading socialists and Marxists were Jews, it was like a revelation. ‘My long inner struggle was at an end.’ Now he had his scapegoat.

Hitler’s problem was the problem of all criminals: lack of self-control. Criticism or opposition drove him to hysteria. His old friend Kubizek wrote in a book about Hitler’s youth: ‘Adolf was exceedingly violent and highly strung. Quite trivial things, such as a few thoughtless words, could produce in him outbursts of temper which I thought quite out of proportion.’ And these rages, so characteristic of the Right Man, did not grow less frequent as he grew older. On both occasions when Neville Chamberlain went to see him, Hitler lost his temper and began to rant and scream. Close associates say that, when this happened, his face became suffused with blood and he seemed like a madman. Wartime cartoons of Hitler on all fours eating the carpet are not far from the truth. A Jewish youth shoots a German diplomat in Paris: Hitler orders a pogrom. An assassination squad kills his SS chief Heydrich; he orders the destruction of a whole village, although it had nothing to do with the killing. Some of his officers attempt to kill him with a bomb; he has dozens of the plotters garrotted with piano wire from meat-hooks, and orders the whole procedure to be filmed so he can watch it repeatedly.

This insane egoism brought about Hitler’s downfall. Two errors were crucial. On 23 August 1940, some German bombers lost their way and dropped their bombs in the centre of London. The British sent their planes to make a token retaliatory attack on Berlin. Hitler flew into one of his blind rages. In a speech he declared: ‘When the British Air Force drops two or three or four thousand kilograms of bombs, then we will in one night drop 150, 250, 300, 400,000 kilograms of bombs.’ So the Luftwaffe was ordered to destroy London. And the British could hardly believe their luck. The real target should have been the airfields in the south of England and the pathetically small British Air Force. While the Luftwaffe wasted its bombs on civilian targets, British Spitfires fought and won the Battle of Britain, and Hitler had to abandon the invasion he had planned. One error cost him the war in the west.

Another cost him the war in the east. In March 1941, the Yugoslavs agreed to support Hitler; but when the ministers returned to Belgrade, there was a popular rising, and the government was overthrown. The coup threw Hitler into ‘one of the wildest rages of his entire life’. He screamed about revenge, and ordered that Yugoslavia should be crushed with ‘merciless harshness’. Goering was told to destroy Belgrade with a non-stop
Blitzkrieg
. He obeyed; but four weeks spent reducing Belgrade to rubble - ‘Operation Punishment’, Hitler called it - and smashing the Yugoslav army, delayed the invasion of Russia by four weeks. Those four weeks cost Hitler the war. Like Napoleon, he was caught by the Russian winter before his troops had achieved the shelter of Moscow.

In May 1945, as the Russians fought their way into Berlin, Hitler ordered the flooding of the Berlin underground railway, in which thousands of people had taken shelter. Germany deserved to perish, said Hitler. ‘The German people are not worthy of me.’ Like the frog in the fairy tale, his ego had swelled until it exploded.

Two weeks later, he committed suicide.

THE CRIME EXPLOSION

At the end of the Second World War, there was the usual sharp rise in crime that has followed every major war in history. By 1946, Britain’s crime figures had doubled since pre-war days: twice as many robberies, burglaries, rapes and crimes of violence. Even in America, which had been relatively insulated from the war by distance, crime had risen by two-thirds.

In the early 1950s, the figures began to show a reassuring fall; by 1954, they were actually lower than in 1945. It looked as if the crisis was over and things had returned to normal. But closer examination of the statistics showed a frightening trend. Robbery and burglary
had
fallen dramatically - due to the rise in prosperity - but crimes of violence and sex crimes continued their steady rise; in fact, they had doubled since 1945.

Now crimes are, as we have seen, the most accurate barometer of the stability of a society. Criminals are like the rats who die first in a plague. The criminal is a person in whom the ‘T force’ - explosive tension - is higher than usual, and tends to sweep away ‘force C’, the inhibitory function. So when there is underlying social frustration, it is the criminal who provides a measure of that tension. If a new and horrifying type of crime occurs, a type that has never been known before, it should not be regarded as some freak occurrence any more than the outbreak of a new disease should be dismissed as a medical oddity. For the criminologist, it provides an insight into the total state of the society.

Two crimes from the post-war period provide an example. On 7 September 1949, a French Canadian, Albert Quay, saw his wife on to a plane; twenty minutes later, it exploded in mid-air, killing all twenty-three people on board. Examination of the wreckage revealed the cause of the explosion as dynamite, and investigation showed that Guay had sent his wife on the trip with a bomb disguised as a religious statue; the motive was the $10,000 he had insured her for. Guay and two accomplices were executed. On 1 November 1955, John Graham escorted his mother to a plane at Denver airport; it also exploded in mid-air, killing forty-four people. Again, investigation revealed dynamite as the cause of the disaster, and Graham proved to have detonators concealed in his house; he was sent to the gas chamber. Many men have killed wives or mothers for money, but until 1949 there was no case of the killer destroying so many other human lives to achieve his aim. It demonstrates a peculiar degree of ‘alienation’ - the kind of alienation that C. R. Carpenter observed in his rhesus monkeys who were deprived of ‘territory’, or that Colin Turnbull observed in the Ik.

The same alienation is revealed in the steady rise of sex crime after the Second World War. We have seen that, in Calhoun’s ‘behavioural sink’, the rats responded to overcrowding with cannibalism and rape. Studies of the rising crime rate in America in the 1950s showed that the steepest rise occurred in cities with more than a quarter of a million inhabitants; in the largest cities, the homicide rate was three times higher than in small towns, and rape and violence against the person four times higher. By 1956 it was clear that even the improvement in the larceny figures was only a temporary phenomenon; they also began to rise again. And homicide and rape have continued their steady increase. By 1960 there were approximately ten thousand murders a year in America (mostly by guns). By 1970, the figure had risen to fifteen thousand - that is to say, approximately one every half hour. At the time of this writing (1983) the murder rate is well over twenty thousand per year - about one every quarter of an hour. Rape has risen even more steeply. The ‘overcrowded rat syndrome’ continues to operate.

Rape has remained the most typical crime of the twentieth century: that is to say, in any list of major crimes, there would be a high proportion of sex murders. We have seen that sex crime began to occupy this prominent position in the second half of the nineteenth century, and that one of the major causes was Victorian prudery, the notion of sex as something wicked and ‘forbidden’ (although the population increase in big cities undoubtedly played its part). After 1900, this prudery gave way to a healthier sexual realism, and sex crime suddenly became less prominent. But this was deceptive. Sex continued to be the great underlying preoccupation of society - as shown in the case of Mary Phagan (1913), which became a national obsession in America and continued to sell newspapers for years. In England, the most sensational murder trial of the First World War was that of George Joseph Smith, a commonplace swindler who graduated to murder - drowning his newly-married brides in the bath after acquiring their savings. Smith was described by the newspapers as a Don Juan whose basilisk gaze made him irresistible to women; this was enough to keep the courtroom crowded with morbid females. The same was true of the trial of Henri Desire Landru in 1921; Landru had murdered ten women - whom he first seduced - for their savings, burning their bodies piecemeal in a stove; again, the majority of spectators in the crowded courtroom were women. (When one of them came in late and was unable to find a seat, Landru raised a smile by offering her his own.) It may have been the Landru case that inspired the painter Kokoschka to write a satirical play called
Murderer, Hope of Women
.

Yet not all sex crimes aroused the same morbid interest. In 1916, soldiers looking for petrol at a farm near Czinkota, Hungary, discovered more than twenty petrol drums, each containing the garrotted corpse of a woman preserved in alcohol. The former tenant, Bela Kiss, had apparently advertised periodically for female companions. Prostitutes from the red light district of Budapest described Kiss as sexually insatiable. Like Smith and Landru, Kiss had apparently stolen the belongings of his victims. Then why did the case fail to arouse the same intense curiosity as those of the other ‘bluebeards’? It was not simply because it happened in the middle of a war, or because he was never caught. (It was reported that he had been killed in the army, but later discovered that he had stolen the papers of a dead soldier.) This crime was simply a little too ‘nasty’, with its hints of necrophilia. A masochistic woman might conceivably enjoy imagining herself being seduced by Smith or Landru; but being trussed up and preserved in alcohol was too nauseating to be incorporated in anybody’s daydream.

The Austrian novelist Robert Musil, writing in the 1920s, made a multiple sex-killer called Moosbrugger one of the central characters in his masterpiece
The Man Without Qualities
. When he remarked: ‘If mankind could dream collectively, it would dream Moosbrugger’, he was expressing the recognition that figures like Moosbrugger and Bela Kiss are ‘plague rats’, expressions of the underlying sickness of a society. In post-war Germany, Musil could have found many models for his ‘collective nightmare’. Fritz Haarmann, a homosexual butcher of Hanover, made use of the post-war chaos to kill about fifty young male vagrants, whose bodies he sold for meat; Haarmann claimed that he killed them by biting them through the windpipe. During the same period Karl Denke, landlord of a house in Miinsterberg, killed more than a dozen vagrants - male and female - who called at his door, and ate portions of their bodies, which he kept pickled in brine. Georg Grossmann, a sadistic sexual degenerate, lived from 1914 to 1921 on the flesh of victims he lured to his room in Berlin; police investigating sounds of a struggle found the trussed-up carcase of a girl on the bed, the cords tightened as if for butchering into neat sections. Peter Kiirten, the Diisseldorf ‘Ripper’, killed nine victims - including a man, women and children - in 1929; he admitted that he could only achieve sexual orgasm through strangling or stabbing, and that he had committed his first murder as a child.

In America in 1926, Earle Nelson - who had spent some time in an asylum - travelled around the northern United States and Canada on a rampage of sex murder, killing twenty-two women. Nelson would go to houses with a To Let’ notice in the window and, if the landlady was alone, strangle and rape her. Newspapers dubbed him the ‘Gorilla murderer’, and the trail of violated landladies continued to make headlines until he was caught in Canada. Nelson was hanged in 1927. There can be no doubt that this kind of sensational publicity helped to make everyone more conscious of sex crime, and therefore increased the number of such crimes. In England, on the other hand, the press still observed a rule of gentlemanly restraint. In 1921, a chauffeur named Thomas Allaway answered the advertisement of thirty-one-year-old Irene Wilkins, who wanted a job as a cook; he met her by car at Bournemouth, knocked her unconscious, and attempted rape (which he did not complete). Traced through witnesses who had seen the car, he was tried for her murder and hanged. But although the judge mentioned that Allaway had lured Irene to Bournemouth ‘for an immoral purpose’, the rape motive was played down. This approach may help to explain why sex crime remained rare in England until the Second World War.

In 1922, the Allaway trial was eclipsed by the enormous publicity given to the trial of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters. The two were lovers, and Bywaters had stabbed Edith’s husband to death. Mrs Thompson was accused of inciting the murder, but the evidence was slender; nevertheless, she was also sentenced to death and hanged. The case leaves the impression that she was sentenced as much for adultery as for incitement to murder. In America, the parallel case of the 1920s involved the murder of Albert Snyder by Judd Gray, the lover of Snyder’s wife Ruth. Snyder was beaten unconscious with a sashweight, then strangled with picture wire. The police tricked Ruth Snyder into confessing by claiming that Gray had admitted the killing. When she was electrocuted in Sing Sing in 1928, a reporter succeeded in photographing the moment of death with a camera strapped to his leg; the grim picture was syndicated all over the world, and was felt to underline the moral that ‘the wages of sin is death’.

But real sex crime continued to increase, and the major cases displayed an increasingly strange element of perversion. In 1932, a Hungarian company director, Sylvestre Matushka, was tried for causing two train crashes and attempting to cause a third. In August 1931 the Vienna express was derailed near Berlin by an explosion, and sixteen passengers were injured; in September, the Budapest-Vienna express was derailed by an explosion and twenty-two people were killed, some literally blown to pieces. Matushka admitted that the thought of trains crashing caused him intense sexual excitement, and that he experienced orgasm when it actually happened. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he escaped and reappeared during the Korean War in 1953 as the head of a unit for blowing up trains.

In New York in 1928, a kindly-looking old man named Albert Fish persuaded the Budd family to allow him to take their ten-year-old daughter Grace to a party; she was never seen again. Six years later, Fish wrote Mrs Budd a letter describing how he had strangled Grace and eaten parts of her body in a stew. The police were able to trace him through the letter, and it became clear that Fish was what Freud called a ‘polymorphous pervert’ whose sexual oddities including eating excrement and driving needles into his scrotum and leaving them there to rust. The screams of children gave him pleasure, and during the course of a lifetime as a house painter, he had tortured and killed large numbers. Even the idea of his own electrocution excited him; he told police that it would be ‘the supreme thrill of my life’. (Peter Kurten had said he hoped to hear the sound of his own blood running into the basket after beheading.

In Germany in 1936 - the year of Fish’s trial - a sixty-three-year-old travelling watchmaker named Adolf Seefeld also admitted to having spent a lifetime murdering children - in this case, all male. Seefeld killed by persuading them to drink a poisonous concoction made of herbs, and the children - a dozen - were found in an attitude of repose, with no sign of sexual assault. By the time Seefeld was caught, Hitler was chancellor, and he recognised the role of publicity in causing imitative crimes. Seefeld was tried with a minimum of fuss and quickly executed.

In Cleveland, Ohio, a killer who became known as ‘the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run’ murdered a dozen men and women - mostly tramps and derelicts - between 1935 and 1938, and left the bodies in a small pile of dismembered pieces. The heads were usually missing, and in one case two bodies were found mixed up together. The ‘mad butcher’ was never caught.