A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

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.
The world record for sex murder is still held by a German, Bruno Liidke, who confessed to eightyfive
murders between 1927 (when he was eighteen) and 1944, when he was caught. In 1936, Liidke
had been arrested for a sexual assault and castrated on the orders of Himmler; but it made no
difference to his sexual appetite. Again, because the case took place under the Hitler regime, details
are lacking, but we know that Llidke was used by the Nazis as a guinea pig in experiments, and
died of an injection.
Let us pause to ask the question: what do such crimes indicate about the nature of the society in
which they take place? It is tempting to see the crimes of Kurten, Matushka, Ludke, Seefeld, as a
reflection of the violence of Nazi Germany. That would be a mistake; all were born in the ‘sunset
world’ of pre-1914 Europe, and all committed murders long before Hitler came to power. In any
case, periods of violence do not necessarily spawn crimes of violence. Violence is a reflection of
social tension, and this actually diminishes in times of upheaval and chaos - such as wars - because
chaos is at least not conducive to boredom.
There is usually an evolutionary explanation for violence, and it is this factor that we need to look
for. In the animal world, one of the most vicious of all creatures is the shrew, a tiny, mouse-like
animal that weighs only a fifth of an ounce. It will kill far larger creatures than itself - like mice -
and will eat its own kind. The explanation lies in its size. With a surface area so large in proportion
to its volume, the shrew loses its heat almost immediately to the surrounding air; consequently, it
has to eat continuously to stay alive. The shrew has to be savage, or it would not have survived.
Man’s surface area is so much smaller in proportion to his weight that he can at least forget food
for several hours after every meal. But during his few million years on the surface of this planet, the
climate has been wildly variable, with long ice ages, so survival has been far from easy. One
response to this challenge has been intense sexual activity; when faced with a threat to survival, he
experiences the urge to copulate; this is his equivalent of the shrew’s non-stop eating.
But we have seen that his chief mechanism for survival was the development of a formidable
apparatus that allows him to concentrate upon specific problems: a kind of mental microscope. He
hurls himself at problems with the same violence that the shrew hurls itself on food. Patience was