Garden of Beasts

words: Please send a telegram to all police precincts in the area. Have them query gun shops and see if any have sold a new or little-used Star Modelo A in the past several months, or ammunition for such a gun. No, make that the past year. I want names and addresses of all purchasers.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    The young inspector candidate took down the information and started for the Teletype room.
    “Wait, add as a postscript to your message a description of our suspect. And that he is armed.” The inspector gathered up the clearest photographs of the suspect’s fingerprints and the inked card of the victim’s. Sighing, he said, “And now I must try to be diplomatic. Ach, how I hate doing that.”

Chapter Ten
    “I am sorry, Inspector Kohl, the department is engaged.”
    “Entirely?”
    “Yes, sir,” said the prim bald man in a tight suit, buttoned high on his chest. “Several hours ago we were ordered to stop all other investigations and compile a list of everyone in the files with a Russian background or pronounced appearance.”
    They were in the ante-office of the Kripo’s large identification division, where fingerprint analysis and anthropometry were performed.
    “ Everyone in Berlin?”
    “Yes. There is some alert going on.”
    Ah, the security matter again, the one that Krauss had deemed too insignificant to mention to the Kripo.
    “They’re using fingerprint examiners to check personal files? And our fingerprint examiners, no less?”
    “Drop everything,” the buttoned-up little man replied. “Those were my orders. From Sipo headquarters.”
    Himmler again, Kohl thought. “Please, Gerhard, these are vital.” He showed him the fingerprint card and the photos.
    “They are good pictures.” Gerhard examined them. “Very clear.”
    “Put three or four examiners on it, please. That’s all I’m asking.”
    A pinched-face laugh crossed the administrator’s face. “I cannot, Inspector. Three? Impossible.”
    Kohl felt the frustration. A student of foreign criminal science, he looked with envy at America and England, where forensic identification was now done almost exclusively by fingerprint analysis. Here, yes, fingerprints were used for identification but, unlike in the United States, the Germans had no uniform system of analyzing prints; each area of the country was different. A policeman in Westphalia might analyze a print in one way; a Berlin Kripo officer would analyze it differently. By posting the samples back and forth it was possible to achieve an identification but the process could take weeks. Kohl had long advocated standardizing fingerprint analysis throughout the country but had met with considerable resistance and lethargy. He’d also urged his supervisor to buy some American wire-photo machines, remarkable devices that could transmit clear facsimile photographs and pictures, such as of fingerprints, over telephone lines in minutes. They were, however, quite expensive and his boss had turned down the request without even taking the matter up with the police president.
    More troubling to Kohl, though, was that once the National Socialists came to power fingerprints took on less importance than the antiquated system of Bertillon anthropometry, in which measurements of the body, face and head were used to identify criminals. Kohl, like most modern detectives, rejected Bertillon analysis as unwieldy; yes, each person’s body structure was largely different from another’s, but dozens of precise measurements were needed to categorize someone. And, unlike fingerprints, criminals rarely left sufficient bodily impressions at the scene to link any individual to the site of the crime through Bertillon data.
    But the National Socialists’ interest in anthropometrywent beyond merely identifying someone; it was the key to what they termed the “science” of criminobiology: categorizing people as criminal irrespective of their behavior, solely on their physical characteristics. Hundreds of Gestapo and SS labored full-time to correlate size of nose and shade of skin, for instance, to proclivity to commit a crime. Himmler’s goal was not to bring criminals to justice but to eliminate crime before it occurred.
    To Kohl this was as frightening as it was foolish.
    Looking out over the huge room of long tables, filled with men and women hunched over documents, Kohl now decided that the diplomacy he’d summoned up on the way here would have no effect. A different tactic was required: