The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

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.