The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (31 page)

At first Kaspar seemed to be an imbecile; he lived in a daze. Like an animal, he was terrified of thunderstorms. But the notion that he was mentally retarded soon had to be abandoned. The attention of his visitors obviously gave him pleasure, and he became visibly more alert day by day – exactly like a baby learning from experience. His vocabulary increased from day to day, and his physical clumsiness vanished – he learned to use scissors, quill pens and matches. And as his intelligence increased, his features altered. He had struck most people as a typical idiot, coarse, lumpish, clumsy and oddly repulsive; now his facial characteristics seemed to change and become more refined. But he continued to walk rather clumsily: in the place at the back of the knees where most of us have a hollow he had protrusions, so that when he sat with outstretched legs, the whole leg was in contact with the ground.

As he learned to speak he was gradually able to tell something of his own story. But it seemed to make the mystery even more baffling. A bulletin issued by Burgomeister Binder and the town council of Nuremberg stated that for as long as Kaspar could remember he had lived in a small room, about seven feet long by four feet wide, and its windows were boarded up. There was no bed, only a bundle of straw on the bare earth. The ceiling was so low that he could not stand upright. He saw no one. When he woke up he would find bread and water in his cell. Sometimes his water had a bitter taste, and he would go into a deep sleep; when he woke his straw would have been changed and his hair and nails cut. The only toys were three wooden horses. One day a man had entered his room and taught him to write his name, Kaspar Hauser, and to repeat phrases like “I want to be a soldier” and “Don’t know”. One day he woke up to find himself wearing the baggy garments in which he had been found, and the man came and led him into the open air. As they trudged along the man promised him a big, live horse when he was a soldier. Then he was abandoned somewhere near the gates of Nuremberg.

Suddenly Kaspar was famous; his case was discussed all over Germany. This must doubtless have worried whoever was responsible for turning him loose; his captor, or captors, had hoped that he would vanish quietly into the army and be forgotten; now he was a national celebrity, and everyone was asking questions.

The Burgomaster and town council decided to take Kaspar under their protection; he would be fed and clothed at the municipal expense. In the rather dull town of Nuremberg he was an object of endless interest, and everyone wanted to solve the mystery. The town paid for thousands of handbills appealing for clues to his identity, and even offering a reward. The police made a careful search of the local countryside for his place of imprisonment, which was obviously within walking distance; but they found nothing.

The town council also appointed a guardian for its celebrity, a lecturer and scientist named Georg Friedrich Daumer. He was interested in “animal magnetism”, and it was he who conducted the tests that revealed that Kaspar could distinguish the poles of a magnet and read in the dark. Under Daumer’s tutelage Kaspar finally developed into a young man of normal intelligence. Like any teenager, he enjoyed being the centre of attention. His appearance became almost foppish, and in the last months of his life he looked not unlike Roman busts of Nero, with his plump face and little curls.

One of the many learned men who examined him was the lawyer and criminologist Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach, distinguished author of the Bavarian penal code; and he reached the interesting conclusion that Kaspar must be of royal blood. There could be no other explanation for the boy’s long imprisonment; he must be
somebody
’s heir. Kaspar was obviously not displeased at this notion.

Then, a mere seventeen months after he had been “found”, someone tried to kill him. It happened on the afternoon of 7 October 1829, when Kaspar was found lying on the floor of the cellar of Daumer’s house, bleeding from a head-wound, with his shirt torn to the waist. Later he described being attacked by a man wearing a silken mask, who had struck him either with a club or a knife. The police immediately made a search of Nuremberg, but had no success in finding anyone who fitted Kaspar’s description of his assailant. There were those in Nuremberg who muttered that there had never been an assailant, and that Kaspar had invented the whole episode to attract attention. Not everyone believed, as Daumer did, that Kaspar was some sort of angel. But most people took the view that his life was in danger. He was moved to a new address, and two policemen were appointed to look after him; Ritter von Feuerbach was appointed his guardian. And for the next two years Kaspar vanished from the public eye. But not from the public mind. Now the novelty had worn off, there were many in Nuremberg who objected to supporting Kaspar on the rates.

Then a solution was proposed that satisfied everyone. A wealthy and
eccentric Englishman, Lord Stanhope – nephew of the former prime minister Pitt – became interested in Kaspar and came to interview him. The two seemed to take an instant liking to one another; they began to dine out in restaurants, and Kaspar was often to be seen in Lord Stanhope’s carriage. Stanhope was convinced that Kaspar was of royal blood, and was evidently fascinated by the mystery. When he offered to take Kaspar off on a tour of Europe the town council was delighted. And from 1831 until 1833 Kaspar was exhibited at many minor courts of Europe, where he never failed to arouse interest. But various members of the Bavarian royal houses, particularly that of Baden, threatened lawsuits if their names were publicly linked with Kaspar’s . . .

It seems that all this attention and good living was not good for Kaspar’s character; predictably, he became vain, difficult and conceited. Stanhope became disillusioned with him. In 1833, back in Nuremberg, Stanhope asked permission to lodge him in the town of Ansbach, twenty-five miles away, where he would be tutored by Stanhope’s friend Dr Meyer, and guarded by a certain Captain Hickel, a security officer. Then, feeling that he had done his duty, Stanhope disappeared back to England.

Kaspar was not happy in Ansbach. It was even more of a backwater than Nuremberg – in fact, Nuremberg was a glittering metropolis by comparison. Kaspar resented being made to do lessons, particularly Latin, and longed for the old life of courts and dinner parties. His homesickness became stronger after a brief visit to Nuremberg. He seems to have felt that Ansbach was hardly better than the cell in which he had spent his early years.

Then, only a few days before Christmas, he died. On 14 December 1833, on a snowy afternoon, he staggered into Mayer’s house gasping: “Man stabbed . . . knife . . . Hofgarten . . . gave purse . . . Go look quickly”. A hastily summoned doctor discovered that Kaspar had been stabbed in the side, just below the ribs. The blow had damaged his lung and liver. Hickel rushed to the park where Kaspar had been walking, and found a silk purse containing a note, written in mirror-writing. It said: “Hauser will be able to tell you how I look, whence I came and who I am. To spare him from that task I will tell you myself. I am from . . . on the Bavarian border . . . On the River . . . My name is M.L.O”.

But Kaspar could not tell them anything about the man’s identity. He could only explain that he had received a message through a labourer, asking him to go to the Hofgarten. A tall, bewhiskered man wearing a black cloak had asked him, “Are you Kaspar Hauser”? and when he
nodded handed him the purse. As Kaspar took it the man stabbed him, then ran off.

Hickel revealed a fact that threw doubt on this story; there had only been one set of footprints – Kaspar’s – in the snow. But when two days later, on 17 December, Kaspar slipped into a coma his last words were: “I didn’t do it myself”.

His death was a signal for a flood of books and pamphlets, each with its own theory about the mystery. Feuerbach published a book called
Example of a Crime Against the Soul of a Man
, arguing that Kaspar must be of royal blood. To avoid libel, he avoided naming any suspects, but his readers had no difficulty supplying their own names. The favourite candidates were the Grand Dukes of Baden. The old Duke Karl Frederick had contracted a morganatic marriage with a pretty eighteen-year-old, Caroline Geyer, who was rumoured to have poisoned his sons by an earlier marriage to make sure her own children became the future Grand Dukes. Kaspar Hauser was supposed to have been one of these children. The story was obviously absurd, for it would have meant stealing him away as a baby and handing him over to a “minder”. One suggestion was that this “minder” was a man named Franz Richter, and that Kaspar’s childhood home was Castle Pilsach, near Nuremberg. (The castle is in fact merely a large farmhouse.) It was suggested that Richter had decided to send Kaspar Hauser to Nuremberg when his wife died. But there is no conclusive evidence for this view, or for any other theory of Kaspar’s origin.

There is of course no evidence whatsoever that Kaspar was of royal blood. If he was the legitimate heir to some throne, or even to some rich estate, it is difficult to understand why he should be kept in a small room all his life; it would have been enough to hand him over to a “minder” in some distant place. Kaspar’s strange and inhuman treatment sounds more typical of ignorant peasants than of guilt-stricken aristocrats. In a Cornish case of the twentieth century, an army deserter of the First World War, William Garfield Rowe, was kept concealed in his family’s farmhouse for thirty years. It does not seem to have struck anyone that this was a kind of insanity – far worse than the few months’ imprisonment he might have suffered if he had given himself up.
⁵
The theory that Kaspar was the step-child of some wicked Grand Duke seems on the whole less likely than that he was the illegitimate child of some respectable farmer’s daughter who was engaged to a local landowner, and was terrified that her secret would become local gossip.

In that case, who was behind the attacks? It is just possible that they never happened. After the first attack, in Daumer’s cellar, Nuremberg gossip suggested that his wound was self-inflicted, and that Kaspar was trying to draw attention to himself after the failure of his recently published Autobiography. By the time the second attack occurred his fame was in decline, and he was desperately unhappy about his situation.

It is important to try to gain some insight into the psychology of a boy who has spent the first seventeen years of his life in a kind of prison cell. Most boys love being the centre of attention and will go to great lengths to achieve it. (Mark Twain shows how deeply he understands the mentality in the episode where Tom Sawyer pretends to be drowned, and attends his own funeral.) Most boys crave the approval of adults, and will tell lies to get it. In his book about Kaspar, Jacob Wassermann describes how disappointed Daumer felt when he discovered that Kaspar was not as truthful as he seemed. Kaspar emerged quite literally from obscurity, to find himself the centre of sympathetic attention – in fact a European celebrity. But although his chronological age was seventeen, he was in the most basic sense a two-year-old boy. Intellectually speaking, he grew with astonishing rapidity; emotionally speaking, he remained a child. So it
is
perfectly conceivable that he was prepared to go to desperate lengths to retain public sympathy.

In the light of this suspicion, Kaspar’s story of both attacks begins to seem implausible. Would a masked man somehow find his way into the basement of Daumer’s house, then merely hit Kaspar on the head with a club (or a knife; there seems to be some conflict about the weapon) and rush away without making sure he was dead? As to the second attack, could Hickel have been mistaken when he asserted that there were only one set of footprints in the snow? And why was the mysterious letter written in mirror writing? Was it because Kaspar wrote it with his left hand, looking in a mirror, in order to disguise his writing? (It is a well-known fact that it is easy to train the left hand to write backward, using a mirror.) Why was the message so nonsensical: “Hauser will be able to tell you how I look, whence I came and who I am . . .” etc. Why should a paid assassin write a letter at all? Is it not more likely that Kaspar, in a desperate state of unhappiness, decided to inflict a harmless wound, and stabbed himself too deeply?

If so, Kaspar at least achieved what he wanted – universal sympathy and a place in the history books.

21

Rudolf Hess

Was It Hitler’s Deputy Who Died in Spandau Prison?

On 17 August 1987, the man referred to as Prisoner Number 7 committed suicide by hanging in Berlin’s Spandau Prison. The prison records gave his real name as Rudolf Walter Richard Hess, aged ninety-three years – the last member of the Nazi high command to be held in that prison.

Hess had been Hitler’s deputy and personal secretary and was third in line to the Führership. Then, in 1941, only a few weeks before the launch of the German attack on the Soviet Union, he vanished from Berlin and flew to Scotland as a self-appointed peace ambassador. The result of that well-meant mission was a lifetime of imprisonment. At the time of his death he had been incarcerated for almost forty-six years, had been convicted of preparing and waging aggressive war, and had attempted suicide several times. Ignoring complaints by human-rights groups, the Soviet Union insisted that Hess be held in prison until he died – the real motive being to maintain that nation’s access to West Berlin, where Spandau Prison was situated.

For more than ten years before his suicide, there had been odd rumors that Prisoner Number 7 was not Hess at all but a double, planted on the British for reasons unknown. The findings of a prison doctor in 1973, in fact, seem to prove that the prisoner was not Hess. But why, if that were true, would he have kept the secret so long and at such cost? Why would the authorities have imprisoned an innocent man for nearly half a century? Close scrutiny of the facts throws up a number of bizarre anomalies that suggest that, as absurd as it sounds, Number 7 may not, after all, have been Hitler’s deputy.