A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

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