The city that was ‘Chicago of Europe’ with mafia like Al Capone’s mob | World | News

America was in the grip of the “golden age for gangsters”. Bugsy Siegel’s mob Murder, Incorporated was up and running in New York and Al Capone and Lucky Luciano were at the height of their nefarious powers. Meanwhile Berlin, the third largest city in the world and known as the “Chicago of Europe”, was afflicted with its own very particular brand of mob rule similar to that executed by Birmingham’s Peaky Blinders.

It was 1928 and within five years Germany’s gangsters would be eclipsed by the rise to power of the biggest mob boss of them all – Adolf Hitler. But the crime that had been rife under Germany’s Weimar Republic was not about to end. Criminal activity was supposedly incompatible with the Nazi ideals of a superior race and from 1933 the party would apparently crack down on it. But a more corrupt bunch of Mafiosi than the Nazis themselves it was hard to imagine, and over the coming years they were happy to tolerate criminals who fitted into their amoral regime, while rivals were made to disappear.

Bestselling author Simon Scarrow’s latest thriller, A Death in Berlin, lifts the lid on the sordid underworld that thrived under the Nazis as his fictional hero, Criminal Investigator Horst Schenke, delves into the seedy 1940 nightclub scene and gets embroiled in the gang world behind it.

But back to 1928, where the seeds of lawlessness had already been sown and were bearing fruit. The economic crisis that beset Germany’s post-First World War Weimar Republic was the perfect breeding ground for criminal gangs. Chief amongst them were the “Ringvereine” or “Wrestling Clubs” – organisations set up to supposedly rehabilitate convicts leaving jail but which were perfect vehicles for organised crime.

Only young men were allowed to join the rings, and candidates had to be vouched for by fellow criminals convicted of involvement in the likes of theft, prostitution, extortion, illegal gambling, drug trafficking, burglary and currency counterfeiting. Murderers and sex offenders could not join and members were officially registered under the Reich Association Law so that all was above board. Ostensibly the ring brothers, who were said to identify one another through their identical-looking signet bands, were all about loyalty and comradeship with ties to police officers, judges and politicians.

They would provide each other with legal representation in the event of trouble as well as fake alibis and a form of social security if they fell on hard times. The groups’ own laws forbade members from crime but, of course, being criminals they were perfectly positioned to control drug trafficking, extortion and prostitution on their own territory. And since social and criminal activities often revolved around the hedonistic lifestyle of the time, nightclubs were a prime source of customers.

Discussing his latest novel, in which his police hero’s investigation into forged ration coupons leads him to one such nightclub, Scarrow explains: “Crime is something that is endemic. It’s part of human nature and regardless of what regime you are under, there is always going to be some sort of criminal activity.”

The Ringvereine’s strict code of behaviour meant transgressors within their number were rapidly and violently dealt with but, generally, no civilians were harmed. At their peak, before the Nazis came to power, there were 70 different rings in Berlin alone, with more than 5,000 members. Typical of them was a notorious gangster called Adolf Lieb, the leader of the “Immertreu” (“Always Loyal”) wrestling ring and known as Muscle Adolf. On the night of December 29, 1928, he was at the head of a well-heeled group of Immertreu members who entered the Naubar pub in the dodgy Friedrichshain district of Berlin.

Muscle Adolf demanded money from the joiner to cover the cost of Malchin’s medical treatment, and a fight broke out that spilled on to the streets. Police moved the builders on to another bar but more Ringvereine members arrived and a battle involving more than 200 gangsters and workmen armed with snooker cues, hammers, knives, clubs and guns soon erupted on Breslauer Strasse. By the time it finished, one Hamburg bricklayer had been fatally injured. Police found more than 150 spent shell casings.

Muscle Adolf and his associates went on trial but no one would testify against them and they walked free. The public and the authorities were horrified by the extent of the gangs’ brazen behaviour, and the future Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, then editor of Nazi newspaper Der Angriff, demanded harsh measures against “insolent gangs of pimps and criminals”. The police, however, saw the Ringvereine as a necessary evil, self-policing no-go areas of Berlin beyond the reach of law and order. And to the poor the Ringvereine were like Robin Hood. The city at the time was plagued by a series of attempted bank robberies that were becoming more and more sophisticated.

Their target was a crew of builders from Hamburg who were working on a nearby underground railway installation and, in particular, a carpenter who’d knifed one of the Immertreu – Emil Malchin – earlier that day.

Police who found a cutting torch at the scene of an attempted bank break-in traced it to two brothers, Franz and Erich Sass, but could not prove their involvement and, in the meantime, a similar method was used to successfully raid the Discount Bank on Wittenberg Square in one of the most spectacular crimes in German history. The thieves ransacked a vault with almost 200 safety deposit boxes and stole an estimated two million Reichsmarks (equivalent to £12million today), although it could have been more because victims hiding assets from the tax authorities under-reported their losses.

Poor families in the brothers’ neighbourhood soon found wads of cash posted through their letter boxes, and though the brothers were later arrested, prosecutors could not find enough evidence to bring charges and they were released in April 1929. Twice more they were arrested while preparing to rob banks but on each occasion police had to let them go, complaining that the law stymied their attempts to catch the growing class of professional criminals.

That changed instantly when the Nazis came to power in 1933 and introduced their Law Against Dangerous Habitual Criminals, which did not require evidence linking suspected criminals to a specific crime. The Ringvereine were banned and members were easy to round up because their names were on official membership lists. In September 1933, Hermann Goring, in charge of the Prussian police, said in a speech: “The Ringvereine must not appear in public any longer and will be further repressed until the underworld is annihilated.”

Some 2,000 ex-convicts and alleged criminals were arrested, with many ending up in concentration camps, wearing a green triangle on their prison clothing to identify them as “professional criminals”. Others, however, carried on their crimes, and police cases investigating rings were still popping up at the beginning of the Second World War.

Muscle Adolf was arrested by the Gestapo in January 1934 as a “professional criminal” but was released and, perhaps wisely, went to ground, marrying his partner Charlotte Kozlowski in 1940 and listing his civilian occupation as “waiter in a café”. The Sass brothers moved to Copenhagen, Denmark, as soon as the Nazis came to power but in 1934 were arrested there after being linked to a series of bank robberies.

A Danish court sentenced them to four years in prison and, because German investigators had found new evidence to link them to the Berlin bank robberies, the brothers were handed over to the Nazis at the end of their sentences in March 1938. They were tried for robbery and sentenced to 13 and 11 years in prison but, instead, the State Secret Police (Gestapo) took them to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin, where they were immediately executed.

A report said they were “shot while attempting to escape” but an official register of the deaths said they were “shot by order of the Fuhrer”.

It was 1940, the year in which Simon Scarrow’s third Horst Schenke novel is set – a time when, as he explains, gangsters still operated, often with the connivance of senior Nazis. From his home in Mauritius, Scarrow says: “It is always interesting to take a character and put them in a situation where you test their integrity and their ability and you test how they respond to things by putting them into really difficult circumstances – and, of course, being a police officer working for a kleptomaniac regime is going to be the ultimate test.”

He adds: “The Nazi party was a criminal enterprise and they were not the brightest people in the world… It was horrifically corrupt. The reality is these are just a bunch of criminals, and one of the first things that Hitler did when he came to power was to pardon 8,000 criminals who had been involved in pushing the Nazi agenda in the years before they came to power. These people were murderers, thugs, criminals of the worst kind, so that’s the nature of the regime.

“The Nazis had ties with criminal organisations from the very early days and then, of course, when they came to power there were certain attempts to push down on this sort of activity. But the reality is they knew that a number of their own people were interested in nightclubs and having a good time and these criminals had access to the black market.

“Of course, once the war began and there were certain things in short supply, you needed these types of people if you wanted to continue to live in the style to which you had become accustomed, so they served a kind of function for the Nazi party but they also served a kind of function for wider society because, in an oppressive regime, people look for such activities.

“It continues as it did before, to a lesser degree than it did during the Weimar era, but certainly it was there and it is well-documented.”

With Germany’s defeat imminent towards the end of the war, the criminality would explode once more and descend into debauchery, with parts of Berlin like the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah, says Scarrow. But that might be for a future book in the series. Meanwhile, following the defeat of Hitler’s regime, Muscle Adolf re-emerged as if his criminal activities had never stopped, which, indeed, they might not have.

In June 1946 he was arrested in a bar in north Berlin and charged with illegal gambling. Police confiscated more than 11,000 Reichsmarks (£66,000 today) and sent him for trial. But, just as before, nobody would testify against him and Muscle Adolf walked free.

• A Death in Berlin by Simon Scarrow (Headline, £22) is published on Thursday. Simon will be doing a book tour from March 11 to 27, including Bath Festival, Farnham Book Festival, Cambridge and Norwich. For the full dates visit https://geni.us/uDNx