execution myself, and I take no pleasure in mentioning that he did not die well. Incidentally, if you’re so inclined, you can see the death mask they made of his severed head in our police museum at Alexanderplatz.
“The exact number of Gormann’s victims cannot be easily calculated. He himself could not actually remember how many he’d killed. He had destroyed much of his film library after the studio was sold. Also the Weimar decade was a time when so-called lust murders were common, and it was a time when bizarre serial murders regularly occupied the front pages of German newspapers. These cases both engrossed and appalled the German public, and it was this collapse in the moral fiber of the country that led many to call for the restoration of law and order in the form of a National Socialist government. Murder of this kind is much less common today. Indeed, it can honestly be said that it seldom ever occurs; Paul Ogorzow, the S-Bahn murderer whose crimes horrified this city last year, wasn’t even a German, he was a Pole, from Masuren.”
There was a lot more about Paul Ogorzow’s racial inferiority as the reason for his criminality—a simplistically eugenic explanation provided by the state secretary of the kind to which I had no intention of lending my voice; besides, Masuren was part of East Prussia, and Ogorzow, who had grown up speaking German, was no more a Slav than I was. Instead I’d decided to end on a more personal, insightful note—something which, like a tree cake from the famous Café Buchwald, had layers of meaning that were not immediately obvious. I spoke off the cuff, of course, which would certainly have alarmed Gutterer; then again, no one, not even the state secretary of Propaganda, was about to interrupt me now in front of all our distinguished foreign guests.
“Gentlemen, as a detective I can’t claim to have learned very much in my twenty years of service. Frankly, the older I get, the less I seem to know and the more I’m aware of it.”
A little to my surprise, Himmler started to nod, although I knew for a fact that he wasn’t yet forty-two and he didn’t look like the type to admit his ignorance about anything. Nebe had told me that in Himmler’s briefcase there was always a copy of a Hindu verse scripture called the Bhagavad Gita. I don’t read much of that kind of thing myself and I didn’t know if I thought this made him a wise man; but I expect he thought so.
“But what I’m sure of is this: that it’s the ordinary people like Fritz Gormann who commit the most extraordinary crimes. It’s the ladies who play a Schubert impromptu on the piano who poison your tea, the devoted mothers who smother all of their children, the bank clerks and insurance salesmen who rape and strangle their customers, and the scoutmasters who butcher their whole families with an ax. Dockworkers, truck drivers, machine operators, waiters, pharmacists, teachers. Reliable men. Quiet types. Loving fathers and husbands. Pillars of the community. Respectable citizens. These are your modern murderers. If I had five marks for every killer who was a regular Fritz who wouldn’t harm a fly, then I’d be a rich man.
“Evil doesn’t come wearing evening dress and speaking with a foreign accent. It doesn’t have a scar on its face and a sinister smile. It rarely ever owns a castle with a laboratory in the attic, and it doesn’t have joined-up eyebrows and gap teeth. The fact is, it’s easy to recognize an evil man when you see him: he looks just like you or me. Killers are never monsters, seldom inhuman, and, in my own experience, nearly always commonplace, dull, boring, banal. It’s the human factor that’s important here. As Adolf Hitler has himself pointed out, we should recognize that Man is as cruel as Nature itself. And so perhaps it’s the Man next door who is the beast of whom we had better beware. For that reason it is perhaps also the Man next door who is best equipped to catch him. A
“The exact number of Gormann’s victims cannot be easily calculated. He himself could not actually remember how many he’d killed. He had destroyed much of his film library after the studio was sold. Also the Weimar decade was a time when so-called lust murders were common, and it was a time when bizarre serial murders regularly occupied the front pages of German newspapers. These cases both engrossed and appalled the German public, and it was this collapse in the moral fiber of the country that led many to call for the restoration of law and order in the form of a National Socialist government. Murder of this kind is much less common today. Indeed, it can honestly be said that it seldom ever occurs; Paul Ogorzow, the S-Bahn murderer whose crimes horrified this city last year, wasn’t even a German, he was a Pole, from Masuren.”
There was a lot more about Paul Ogorzow’s racial inferiority as the reason for his criminality—a simplistically eugenic explanation provided by the state secretary of the kind to which I had no intention of lending my voice; besides, Masuren was part of East Prussia, and Ogorzow, who had grown up speaking German, was no more a Slav than I was. Instead I’d decided to end on a more personal, insightful note—something which, like a tree cake from the famous Café Buchwald, had layers of meaning that were not immediately obvious. I spoke off the cuff, of course, which would certainly have alarmed Gutterer; then again, no one, not even the state secretary of Propaganda, was about to interrupt me now in front of all our distinguished foreign guests.
“Gentlemen, as a detective I can’t claim to have learned very much in my twenty years of service. Frankly, the older I get, the less I seem to know and the more I’m aware of it.”
A little to my surprise, Himmler started to nod, although I knew for a fact that he wasn’t yet forty-two and he didn’t look like the type to admit his ignorance about anything. Nebe had told me that in Himmler’s briefcase there was always a copy of a Hindu verse scripture called the Bhagavad Gita. I don’t read much of that kind of thing myself and I didn’t know if I thought this made him a wise man; but I expect he thought so.
“But what I’m sure of is this: that it’s the ordinary people like Fritz Gormann who commit the most extraordinary crimes. It’s the ladies who play a Schubert impromptu on the piano who poison your tea, the devoted mothers who smother all of their children, the bank clerks and insurance salesmen who rape and strangle their customers, and the scoutmasters who butcher their whole families with an ax. Dockworkers, truck drivers, machine operators, waiters, pharmacists, teachers. Reliable men. Quiet types. Loving fathers and husbands. Pillars of the community. Respectable citizens. These are your modern murderers. If I had five marks for every killer who was a regular Fritz who wouldn’t harm a fly, then I’d be a rich man.
“Evil doesn’t come wearing evening dress and speaking with a foreign accent. It doesn’t have a scar on its face and a sinister smile. It rarely ever owns a castle with a laboratory in the attic, and it doesn’t have joined-up eyebrows and gap teeth. The fact is, it’s easy to recognize an evil man when you see him: he looks just like you or me. Killers are never monsters, seldom inhuman, and, in my own experience, nearly always commonplace, dull, boring, banal. It’s the human factor that’s important here. As Adolf Hitler has himself pointed out, we should recognize that Man is as cruel as Nature itself. And so perhaps it’s the Man next door who is the beast of whom we had better beware. For that reason it is perhaps also the Man next door who is best equipped to catch him. A
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