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chiseler · 7 years ago

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NIHILISTIC DOPPELGÄNGERS: Carl Panzram and Peter Kurten

Carl Panzram

Carl Panzram, who referred to himself as “Rage Personified,” was born in Grand Forks, Minnesota in 1891. Peter Kurten, whom the press would label “The Vampire of Dusseldorf” and who would go on to become one of the inspirations for Fritz Lang’s M, was born in Mülheim am Rhein, Germany. in 1883. They were executed less than a year apart, with Panzram sent to the gallows in Leavenworth, Kansas on September 5th, 1930, while Kurten was sent to the guillotine in Cologne, Germany on July 2nd, 1931. The two men did not know one another and in all likelihood had never even heard of one another. They had very different personalities, were in fact very different sorts of criminals with different motivations, yet from the start their lives ran eerily parallel courses.

Peter Kurten

Both men were born into large, extremely poor and extremely abusive families. Kurten was one of thirteen children who lived with their mother and unbalanced alcoholic father in a one room apartment. Being the oldest boy, he found himself receiving the brunt of his father’s drunken beatings, and soon took to running away from home on a regular basis. While on the street, he hung around with assorted penny-ante ne’er-do-wells who taught him the fundamentals of thievery, skills he would use to steal clothes and food for himself. While still quite young, Kurten also began riding around town with a neighbor, the local dog catcher, a man who regularly tortured and killed the animals he rounded up, encouraging the boy to do the same.

Panzram, meanwhile, was one of six children living on an arid and desolate farm. His alcoholic father abandoned the family when Carl was seven, and his older brothers took up the slack, reportedly savagely beating and sexually assaulting the young boy whenever the mood struck them. Panzram was arrested for the first time at age eight, after breaking into a neighbor’s house and stealing an apple, some cake, and a gun. When his mother told the police and courts he was incorrigible, Panzram was shipped off to a brutal reform school, where the guards and other inmates likewise beat and raped him regularly.

In later years, both Kurten and Panzram would claim they committed their first murders at age nine. Although he was never charged with the crimes, Panzram insists he killed a twelve-year-old fellow student at the reform school shortly before setting his first building on fire. And though German authorities at the time concluded the deaths were accidental, Kurten insisted he’d pushed a schoolmate he knew couldn’t swim off a makeshift raft. When another friend jumped in to save him, Kurten held the would-be rescuer’s head under water until both boys drowned.

At fourteen, Panzram ran away from the reform school with boyish dreams of riding the rails West to become a cowboy. Instead, he was gang raped by a group of drunken hobos In a boxcar. He abandoned his dreams of becoming a cowboy, replacing them with dreams of robbing, raping, burning and killing everyone and everything he encountered. After a childhood that consisted of little more than brutality and torture, it was time to exact a little revenge.

At fourteen Kurten dropped out of school. After two years as a tradesman’s apprentice, he stole all the money he could find in his family’s apartment as well as the tradesman’s and ran away. Combining puberty with the lessons he’d learned from that dogcatcher, he turned to bestiality, fucking whatever kind of farm animal he might happen across. He soon discovered that if he slit the animal’s throat just before orgasm, the sight of the spurting blood made the experience that much more intense. He also began setting a lot of fires, mostly in barns, just to watch everyone run around in a panic. He was arrested for the first time at age sixteen for burglary, but was only sentenced to a few months in jail.

Although he would later claim there were a few prior to this, Kurten’s first confirmed murder occurred in 1913 when he was 20. Stumling across a sleeping young girl on the ground floor of a tavern he intended to rob, he strangled her and cut her throat. He also allegedly returned to the scene the following day, drinking in a tavern across the street from the site of the murder in order to eavesdrop on the locals.

Over the early decades of the twentieth century, Kurten and Panzram moved randomly around Germany and America respectively, setting fire to hundreds of buildings, while robbing, raping and killing dozens of people. Both men acquired long rap sheets, though only for petty crimes like arson, burglary and assault. The seemingly random and scattered murders, savage as they often were, went mostly unnoticed. Still, both men spent long stretches in prison—usually in solitary—where they were beaten and tortured regularly. While in prison, both men began to weave detailed fantasies about large-scale atrocities involving the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of people.

Panzram and Kurten had very different m.o.s, and while their fantasies were quite similar, they served two different purposes.

While out in the world, Panzram, an avowed nihilist, used whatever means was handy to dispatch his victims—guns, knives, his bare hands,. He didn’t care so long as it got the job done. It was that ad hoc approach that allowed his true crimes to go undetected for so long. And a vast majority of his rape victims (he would later claim over a thousand) were male, because that was what he grew up with. He would insist there was nothing sexual about it, that it was simply an exercise in power, dominance, and humiliation. His fantasies about gassing crowded trains or triggering large-scale wars were merely a form of revenge against a world and a species he despised.

Kurten was a bit more consistent in his methodology, and used the violent fantasies as waking wet dreams. His victims were almost exlusively young women, whom he strangled, then stabbed in the torso, neck and head. Although he would likewise claim the tools didn’t matter, later in his career he did switch from knives to scissors to hammers in order to convince the cops the murders were being committed by different people. In his case, however, the motive was purely sexual. There was no greater aphrodisiac for him than violence and the sight of spurting blood. In the case of most of his murders, he reported ejaculating spontaneously at the sight and sound of the blood spraying from his victim’s throats and splashing on the floor. Furthermore, when later asked by investigators and psychologists why some of his victims had been stabbed only once or twice while others had been stabbed thirty times or more, he reported it all depended on how long it took him to reach orgasm.

In 1928, Panzram was arrested for breaking into a Washington, DC home and stealing a radio. During the subsequent interrogation, and mostly out of simple pride after having been busted on such a stupid charge, he began detailing his incredibly extensive, violent, and untold criminal history, including over a thousand robberies, a thousand acts of arson, a thousand rapes and over twenty murders which had never been pinned on him. He had enough detailed information about previously unsolved murders that in the end investigators were able to confirm six, though questions remained about several others. That was enough for the press, who overnight turned Panzram into the most evil monster America had ever produced. For his part, Panzram didn’t seem to mind the attention, and in fact played into his newfound role as The Meanest Man Alive with some relish.

Although not formally educated, Panzram was extremely well-read and unexpectedly eloquent. While being held at Leavenworth, and at the urging of an understanding guard, he wrote his memoirs, in which he detailed not only his myriad crimes (many of which may have been exaggerated out of simple self-aggrandizement), but also his childhood and his experiences within the U.S. penal system. Ultimately he blamed his extremely bad attitude on his traumatic childhood, the endless tortures he experienced at the hands of prison guards, and society at large. After killing his civilian supervisor in the prison laundry in 1929, he was finally sentenced to death. He made no attempt to defend himself or avoid the hangman, even threatening those do-gooders who attempted to intervene on his behalf.

1929 was also a banner year for Kurten, who went on an uncontrolled spree around Dusseldorf, killing several women with knives and scissors and attacking dozens of other random strangers with a hammer. Unlike Panzram, these crimes did not go unnoticed, and the press had a field day, dubbing him “The Vampire of Dusseldorf” when it was reported the killer had apparently drank some of the blood of his victims. After several victims who’d survived the hammer attacks were able to offer police descriptions (and in one case the address) of their assailant, the net finally closed around Kurten, who was arrested in 1930.

During the interrogation after his arrest Kurten began detailing all his crimes, much like Panzram, including several which could not be verified. He also made his fundamental motivation perfectly clear in psychosexual terms. Also like Panzram, he blamed his behavior on childhood abuse, the brutal treatment he received in prison, and society at large. And again like Panzram, he expressed no regret for anything he’d done, telling the presiding judge at his trial he had no conscience. He, likewise, was sentenced to death for nine (confirmed) counts of murder and several more counts of attempted murder.

All told, over the course of their long respective careers, Panzram and Kurten were convicted for essentially the same wide array of crimes: arson, assault, attempted assault, breaking and entering, burglary, murder, attempted murder, and rape. They also both had some memorable last words to share.

While standing on the gallows waiting for the hangman to get on with it, Panzram reportedly quipped, “Hurry up you Hoosier bastard—I could hang a dozen men while you’re fooling around.”

Ten months later across the Atlantic, in the moments before placing his head in the guillotine, Kurten turned to the prison psychologist and asked, "Tell me... after my head is chopped off, will I still be able to hear, at least for a moment, the sound of my own blood gushing from the stump of my neck? That would be the pleasure to end all pleasures."

So what does it all mean, these two strangely parallel lives? Nothing, really. Just a curiosity, though maybe some smart Joe out there someday will be able to offer some brilliant insights into what the appearance of these two singular doppelgängers might have to say about American and German society in the years between World War I and the beginning of the global depression. Or maybe it’s best to just let it lay there.

by Jim Knipfel

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