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Sex Murder and Volksgemeinschaft: Justice and Injustice in the Third Reich
| Johann Eichhorn was arrested in January 1939 after a failed attempt to rape a twelve-year-old girl. An intensive criminal investigation ensued during which the five unsolved murders and the sexual assaults were incorporated into the charges against him. The investigation lasted until October that year, followed by a two-day trial at the Munich Special Court (Sondergericht) at the end of November that ended in his execution in the early hours of the following morning (1 December). Like many sexual miscreants before (and after) him, Eichhorn was in reality a pathetic figure from a culturally poor and brutalised background with limited education and horizons. Even a cursory reading of the mass of evidence contained in the hundreds of files related to this and other cases shows that there was little to distinguish Eichhorn from his milieu. My study shows how the different agencies consciously distorted this ‘ordinary’ Eichhorn to create the sexual deviant who stalked and therefore endangered the Volksgemeinschaft. The authorities, to fit the received trope of the ‘sex murderer’- even where this led to contradicting the earlier forensic and medical findings - manipulated the evidence. The sources not only offer an insight into how forensics and law actively constructed the ‘sex murderer’ as a social phenomenon, they also show how this particular case was utilised for personal advancement by ambitious professionals, and by the Nazi state itself as it took the country into war in 1939. All those involved in pursuing Eichhorn to the death chamber, from the police officers and forensic experts to the ambitious young prosecutor and the judge, had an interest in his transfiguration into a ‘sex murderer’. The case ultimately furthered their careers. Furthermore, Eichhorn’s arrest, subsequent trial and execution provided a public display by the regime of its ruthless determination to exterminate from its midst enemies of the Volksgemeinschaft. Placed in a regional context (although the case found a national echo), the Nazi state also became a beneficiary of Eichhorn’s fate. It offered the Nazi Party in Bavaria an opportunity to cement the Volksgemeinschaft by mobilizing the population into a Wehrgemeinschaft (defence community) in the early weeks of the war.
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