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Crime, Clairvoyance and the Weimar Police

Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland, Australia

During the Weimar years, Germany’s police experimented with a wide range of new technologies and forensic techniques. Among the more unusual of these was so-called criminal telepathy (Kriminaltelepathie): the practice of using a telepath or clairvoyant to shed light on unsolved crimes. Placing the emergence of the criminal telepath in the context of interwar crime and occultism, and the police interest in these occult practitioners in the context of professionalization, this article maintains that the Weimar police’s brief flirtation with the occult was consistent with, rather than antagonistic to, their efforts to professionalize through science. This article also explores contemporary critiques of this practice, arguing that the bitter polemics against criminal telepathy by men such as Albert Hellwig and Albert Moll resulted from their belief that the activities of clairvoyants endangered the claims of criminalists, jurists and psychiatrists to expertise in the nascent fields of criminology and criminalistics.

Key Words: crime • criminology • Germany • hypnosis • occultism • police

Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 44, No. 4, 581-601 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0022009409339436


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