Berengaria’s Reviews > Berlin - Hauptstadt des Verbrechens: Die dunkle Seite der Goldenen Zwanziger > Status Update

The Sass Brothers were talented, notorious burglars in the late 1920s. They were so confident and enjoyed so much public support, that they often spent the stolen money in very showy fashions. The police could never pin much on them.
They were caught/convicted in 1940 and executed by Höß, the NSDAP Gauleiter for Berlin, who had them tied to a tree and machine gunned.

Ernst Gennat was a genius investigator in1920s Berlin. He developed a good bit of what the police still do today, including inventing the first crime database system, the organisation of investigation teams and profiling.

He also coined the phrase "serial killer" after an unsolved series of murders in Düsseldorf in 1929.

What's really good about this book is that it gives you the social and political setting in which these crimes took place first...and then the crime... so that you can see how it fit into the larger events of the time. Really well done so far.

A true crime book about major criminal cases, esp murders, in Berlin in the 1920s. The 'real life' background to Babylon Berlin!