Crime Club

Duesseldorf is grimy, hard and real, a city of 500,000 working souls, a mechanized inferno where the Gates of Hell turn out to be only blast furnaces. Last week in this German Pittsburgh baffled detectives and frightened citizens were enacting a tense, bewildering drama, macabre and outrageous.

Twenty atrocious murders in a few weeks, ten more slashings have reduced the citizens to a state of mind in which respectable women were to be seen in Lutheran Churches screaming that Satan again walks the Earth, imploring Heaven's protection. For several weeks Dusseldorf schoolchildren have been toddling to kindergarten or walking fearfully to gymnasium (high school) accompanied by armed posses or riding in busses guarded by policemen with cocked Mauser pistols Entirely baffled, the Dusseldorf police recently sent for Berlin detectives whose methods--typical of the deepest dyed Austro-German psychiatric and psychoanalytical school--have been scaring the citizens out of what wits remained to them.

Satanism and Vampirism--two popular explanations among superstitious Duesseldorfers of what was going on--were promptly rejected by the Berlin detectives. They announced that these particular crimes are undoubtedly the work of a "Club of Sadists."

In cosmopolitan and perverse Berlin, Sadism and kindred anomalies are well known and understood. The Sadist is recognized as an individual who commits acts of cruelty upon animals or humans not in a spirit of simple violence but because he derives from them complex sexual satisfaction. As every Berlin detective knows, Sadism takes its name from a Frenchman born in the reign of dissolute Louis XV, famed Donatien Alphonse Franc,ois Comte ("Marquis") de Sade, whose incredibly voluminous and wearisomely detailed writings glorify "the philosophy of cruelty for its own sake" much as Christian writers exalt Divine Love.

In Duesseldorf the sagacious Berlin detectives had in full swing last week two amazing ruses to trap the members of a Crime Club* supposedly patterned on the notorious 18th Century Cercle des Amis du Crime described by the "Marquis" de Sade. In the first place, the detectives arranged for a Duesseldorf stock company to put on a Sadistic drama likely to appeal to members of the Crime Club. Behind concealed peepholes commanding a view of everyone who entered the theatre stood persons--mostly girls--who had recently been slashed in the vicinity of Duesseldorf but had escaped with their lives. Thus by a stratagem worthy of Dr. Sigmund Freud--said to have been consulted in this case--the police boasted that they were obtaining "important clues."

Second and most macabre of the detectives' stratagems was a scene enacted every night last week in the more popular Duesseldorf beer halls. While the clinking of mugs and the chomping of sausages were at their height three black-clad detectives entered, carrying a coffin. Perhaps the orchestra had been playing the German jazz hit of the year: Ich Kuesse Deine Hand, Madame! ("I Kiss Your Hand, Madame!")*As one of the detectives clapped his black-gloved hands, the jazz snapped off into thundrous silence.

"Meine Damen und Herren," began the detective, "Ladies and Gentlemen, attention!" And with gloating gruesomeness he would "describe one of the 20 recent murders. The girl--perhaps the detective would choose to describe Maria Hahn-- the girl was returning home at dusk when she was seized upon and subjected to such-and-such cruelty, slashed in such-and-such a way, murdered thus-and-so, finally buried in soft clay soil near a farmhouse.

"The clay must have stuck to the murderer's clothes, but he got away! He got away!" the detective'pretends to gloat, then screams as he throws back the lid of the coffin, "AND HERE IS MARIA HAHN!"--or Ida Reuter, or whoever he had been talking about. As the coffin flew open a powerful jack-in-the-box mechanism would cause the blood-stained body of the girl-victim to sit bolt upright--or such was the effect of a life-size wax dummy doing duty for the corpse.

Seemingly the Berlin detectives worked on the theory that a genuine Sadist in the audience would react with pleasure if not glee, while everyone else would be revolted or would scream or faint, as many did last week. Results from this strenuous method of crime detection were said to be "promising," and several arrests were made, though no one was actually charged with being a Crime Clubber last week.

While terrified Duesseldorf continued in acutest suspense a rumor leaked out that the supershrewd detectives were also sending out "decoy victims" -- pretty young women in suits of light, flexible armour with padded steel under their hats, alert guards in the offing.

No psychologist, Safety Director Edwin D. Barry of Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A., last week armed his police with sawed-off repeating shotguns, ordered them to hunt day and night in twelve hour shifts "until you get the Hook-Nosed Gunman dead or alive!" No slasher, the Hook-Nosed Gunman had shot three Cleveland women up to last week, had forced two more to yield to his amorous advances at pistol point, had caused Safety Director Barry to exclaim, "A woman isn't safe on the streets of Cleveland!"

*Not to be confused with the U. S. Crime Club, an aggregation of purely vicarious crime addicts who receive every 30 days a detective story chosen and published by a crime-of-the-month board.

*At the time of the Lateran Treaties a favorite German cartoon showed Signer Benito Mussolini on his knees before Pope Pius XI exclaiming, while he suited the action to the word, "I kiss your toe, Papa!"

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