In Europe

least, is what the police files say.
    In 1922 a list was published of recent political killings. Since 1918, the German extreme left was responsible for 22 murders, and the radical right for 354. Of the left-wing killings, seventeen culprits were punished. Of the 354 murders committed by right-wingers, 326 remained unsolved. Only two right-wing murderers were brought to trial. Of the convicted left-wing murderers, ten were executed and the remaining seven received prison sentences averaging fifteen years. The right-wing murderers received an average sentence of four months. The thin excuse ‘shot while trying to escape’ had already made its appearance. Assailants were becoming increasingly deft at ‘working over’ their political opponents.
    The great hero of Berlin's police museum is Detective Ernst Gennat. It remains a mystery why no television series has yet been based on his life, for no premise could be more perfect. Ernst Gennat weighed 135 kilos and, together with his faithful secretary Bockwurst-Trüdchen, solved almost 300 murder cases between 1918–39. His size inspired confidence and awe, and he despised all forms of physical exertion. For his work in the field he had a special car built to serve as mobile police department and forensics lab. Gennat was also the founder of ‘forensic undertaking’, by which mutilated and half-decayed corpses could be reconstructed. He was absolutely opposed to the use of force:‘Anyone who touches a suspect is out on his ear. Our weapons are our brains and strong nerves.’ Shortly before his death he married, to make use of the police department's pension benefits for widows – but Trüdchen was not the lucky girl.
    In those years, part of the Berlin underworld had organised itself under the guise of sports clubs, wrestling associations, sometimes even savings clubs. Their names reinforced the illusion of bourgeois respectability: the Ruhige Kugel, Immertreu and the Lotterie-Verein. They worked along the lines of a guild. When one of their members was arrested, his legal costs were paid. The wives of imprisoned members received a living allowance, and when one of them had to disappear from sight for a while, that was arranged as well. Reading about these
Ringvereine
, you see before you the gangs that would ultimately bring forth part of Berlin's brown-shirtedSA, the clubs of the unemployed who were given uniforms by the Nazi leaders and paid for their services in beer and sausage. Wasn't the first SA unit in Wedding, for example, called the ‘Band of Robbers’? And the one in Neukölln the ‘Scoundrel's Bond’? And wasn't the Horst Wessel case a typical underworld vendetta?
    In the course of the 1920s, former army officers moulded some of these unoffical clans into symbols of a new order, paramilitary groups that marched through the city, emanating a hitherto unknown élan with their gleaming uniforms and rigid discipline. The original handful of sympathisers with the Band of Robbers soon became thousands, then tens of thousands. In the working-class neighbourhoods, ‘SA marschiert’ became a household term. The unemployed housefather who joined the SA suddenly
became
someone, a part of a ‘powerful folk community’ and that lofty mood was raised to even greater heights with torchlight parades and other rituals. A new jargon arose in which words such as ‘pure’, ‘duty’, ‘soldierly’ and ‘fanatic’ took on a special, laudatory meaning. And there was equality. Within the SA there were no classes; that, too, was part of its attraction. ‘You had the son of the preacher, the son of the judge, the son of the doctor, the son of the lathe operator and of the unemployed man,’ a former SA member recalled years later. ‘We all marched side by side, all in the same uniform, all filled with the same ideals, shoulder to shoulder, without social distinction, without a sense of class conflict.’
    It was on 17 August, 1924 that Harry Kessler became acquainted at first hand with this ‘new order’. In Weimar he found himself in the midst of the ‘German Days’ organised by the National Socialists. The shopping streets were filled with pennants and flags with swastikas on them, but he detected little enthusiasm as yet on the part of the population. On the balcony of the national theatre, amid a score of swastika banners, General Ludendorff made his appearance. Someone launched into a tirade against Stresemann's ‘Jewish republic’. Ludendorff gave