Hans Gross Crime Museum
The Hans Gross Kriminalmuseum was founded in 1896 by the Graz lawyer Hans Gross . At that time he was examining magistrate at the Regional Court for Criminal Matters in Graz . The crime museum is housed in the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz .
The crime museum cannot currently be visited. During the renovation work, which will last until the end of 2019, multimedia tours will be offered outside the main showroom.
General
The Gross'sche Kriminalmuseum was originally not a museum of the conventional kind, but was set up as a teaching material collection , which should serve to train students, examining magistrates and detectives. Gross obtained a decree from the ministry to get teaching material and also approached the higher regional courts himself to order the courts belonging to their district to send objects to the museum. The exact cataloging and listing of the objects served a self-written "regulation for the crime museum". This collection of the most diverse Corpora Delicti was the reflection of his passionate enthusiasm for factual evidence. This was based on his conviction that witness statements were not very reliable, and he hoped that the evidence would provide a much higher probability of the case being solved. He justified the unreliability of the witnesses with the deficiencies of sensory perception, the errors of memory and the profound diversity of people in general. The witness can be mistaken, deceitful or overlooked, and therefore an absolutely correct and unaffected testimony can only be spoken of in the rarest of cases. Therefore Gross rated the factual evidence much higher. In his opinion, a trace found or a microscopic preparation is an incorruptible, impeccable testimony, in which error and one-sided opinion are excluded.
Seven years later, in 1912, a lifelong dream came true for Gross: The "Kk Kriminalistische Institut at the University of Graz" opened. It was the first institute of its kind in the world and served as a model for later such institutions. Only now has the crime museum founded by Hans Gross 16 years ago been transferred to the university and incorporated into the new institute.
Emergence
The new criminalistic institute was housed in the basement of the north wing of the main university building. Unfortunately, the condition of these rooms was so desolate that Gross had to stop most of the scientific operations in the winter of 1913/1914 because of the health-threatening indoor climate. The room temperatures never exceeded 9 to 10 degrees, even in the hottest summer time. Gross then continued the external operations of the institute in his apartment. The collection was packed in boxes and remained on the premises of the institute. After the death of Hans Gross, his successor Adolf Lenz had the crime museum in the Meerscheinschloss in Mozartgasse set up again in the Gross system. The collection was preserved there for the duration of the Second World War . The rededication of the rooms in the Meerscheinschloss made it necessary to move the Criminological Institute in 1980, which was reintegrated into the Criminal Law Institute. It was housed in the former St. Anna Children's Hospital, also in Mozartgasse, where the collection was set up in specially adapted rooms on the ground floor. The curator of the museum, Michael Suppanz, reorganized the collection partly according to the Gross system, partly according to the classification into criminal types developed by Ernst Seelig. Suppanz continued to look after the collection until Gernot Kocher took care of the crime museum in 2000 and entrusted members of the Institute for Austrian Legal History and European Legal Development with the preparation for the reopening.
collection
Hans Gross described the collection as the real center of the Criminological Institute. To set up the museum, Hans Gross used a mixed method, ie he set up a total of 32 groups of objects, which were either systematically arranged in display cases or in the museum's magazine. The following classification, which structures the criminalistic collection and was made by Hans Gross, provides an overview of the collection items in the museum, most of which date from the time of Hans Gross:
- Forensic medicine, e.g. B. shattered bones always with the relevant tool (projectile, hammer, etc.), prepared pieces of skin with strangulation marks, bullet holes, etc.
- Preparations, e.g. B. blood, pus, semen preparations, human hair compared with animal hair, etc.
- Toxins
- Instruments used to inflict bodily harm
- Projectiles that have been found, including a description of the effect of the weapon used (e.g. round bullet, pointed bullet, projectile with sabot, cartridge with edge ignition, with pin or central ignition, shot, etc.)
- Traces of blood Samples of cloth, fabric, paper, wallpaper, types of wood, types of stone etc. that have been sprayed with ox blood to show what different traces of blood can look like depending on the surface. In addition, a collection of traces originating from substances that can simulate blood, e.g. B. rust, chewing tobacco, red ink, certain molds, etc.
- Traces of blood that have been carefully removed from walls, stones, wood, etc. and preserved
- Footprints in plaster of paris, clay, wax, cement, breadcrumbs, etc. This subheading also includes photos of footprints, drawings and measurements of the same
- Papillary lines of the fingers
- Other traces, e.g. B. Wood, streaked by a bullet, panes of glass, smashed by shotgun shots, clothing, damaged by a weapon, etc.
- Cards, marked or forged, false dice and other props from cardsharps
- Falsified certificates of documents, seals, stamps, weights and measures, including production equipment
- Thief tools for break-in, post-lockdown, pickpocketing, poaching, etc.
- fake works of art, antiques and such forgeries
- Incendiary apparatus and such tools, means for detonations, explosions, etc.
- Photographs of criminals with as precise information as possible about their generalities, previous convictions, peculiarities etc.
- Manuscripts of criminals with the same information
- Troublemaker submissions and other judicial submissions from fools
- Cipher fonts, both actually used and intentionally compiled according to various systems
- Local recordings of major crime scenes
- Copies of particularly good and exemplary recordings in the course of on-site inspections
- Restorations of torn, softened, yellowed, charred paper including information about the methods used
- Weapons of all kinds, only as demonstration objects
- Rogue language, collection of the previously known and newly known expressions
- Crook tines; Signs of communication for crooks, as can be found at crossroads, chapels, barns, etc.
- Superstition; All objects of superstition are of the greatest importance, since only through them can in many cases the nature, cause and motive of a crime, as well as the manner in which it was committed, be clarified
- Items confiscated from gypsies; z. B. Thieving tools, devices for fortune telling, etc., as they only occur with gypsies
- Disposition arts and their devices (false beards, arms, beard dye, etc.)
- Prison products for the purpose of mutual understanding in the investigations, secret scripts and tools used in escape attempts, etc.
- Tattoos z. B. found bodies
- Objects to be compared that are not directly related to a criminal case, but either arose elsewhere or were specially created for this purpose
- Varia, objects nowhere classified here