Cashier robber

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The cash messenger robbers were a gang of three who carried out 31 robberies on cash carriers from banks in the period from 1929 to 1943 in the Weimar Republic and under the Nazi regime. They killed three people and seriously injured 16 by gun violence. The robbers' booty totaled 480,058 Reichsmarks. The gang went down in German criminal history because they were the first to use a passenger vehicle for their robberies.

Method of raids

They carried out the first attack on August 28, 1929 in Hanover , stealing 60,000 Reichsmarks and shooting at a cashier. This pattern continued in the raids that followed. Before the crime, they had investigated the local conditions in order to choose exactly the time when the cashier would deliver or collect the money for the bank. The key to their mobility was the use of a stolen car that they left behind after the crime and switched to another car. Using a car gave the gang the opportunity to carry out the attack at any time of the day.

Analysis of the crime scenes

The analysis of the crime scenes revealed a scattering of the locations in the west, south and east as far as Erfurt . In the west there were mainly places in the Ruhr area and the surrounding area such as Remscheid, Dortmund, Düren, Krefeld, Hamm, Witten, Lüdenscheid. Iserlohn and Solingen affected. The raids went south to Pforzheim and Karlsruhe. The accumulation of places in the west led the police to conclude that the perpetrators lived in the west. Detective Inspector Schuermann from Düsseldorf and Public Prosecutor Regula from Hildesheim led the investigation into the robberies.

Attack in Goslar

On September 8, 1938, the gang in Goslar attacked the cashier carriers Eikelmann and Fessel from Deutsche Bank in what was then Hindenburgstrasse, which is now Klubgartenstrasse. The messengers had parked their van in front of the Reichsbank building, which was opposite the train station. As instructed by the bank manager, they did not take their pistols with them. When Eikelmann was standing alone at the van, two men came up to him, threatened him with a gun and took his wallet with 66,000 Reichsmarks from him. Then they jumped into a vehicle that was parked there with the engine running and drove over the newly opened level crossing on the Seesen -Goslar- Bad Harzburg railway line .

The detective inspector Karl Kiehne from the Hanover State Criminal Police Office was called in to investigate the attack . His investigations revealed that the gang succeeded in escaping the immediately set up police station within a radius of 20, 50 and 100 km from the crime scene. Witness statements made it possible to identify the car as a 6-cylinder Hansa. The car was discovered on Friedrichstrasse in Northeim . With the methods used at the time, no traces of the perpetrators could be found on the car. When Kiehne wanted to call in the local police authorities to check the hotel's guest lists, this was rejected because it was too costly. After the robberies ended, these lists were examined and the names of the perpetrators were found in a Goslar hotel.

End of the series in 1943

The last attack occurred on July 3, 1943 in Krefeld. Due to the war and hindered, only one robber undertook the attack on a vehicle. When one of the armed messengers recognized the attack, he shot his pistol directly at the robber, who was already in the seat in front of the steering wheel. He shot back and seriously injured the two messengers. A messenger shot hit the robber in the head and killed him. He was identified as the 43-year-old Franz Baumeister from Munich-Gladbach .

The investigations now led to his brother Paul Baumeister, who lived on Florastrasse in Düsseldorf. It turned out that he lived very close to the employee of Detective Superintendent Schuermann, Chief Criminal Secretary Bracken. The astonishment was even greater that Paul Baumeister was a conscripted auxiliary policeman. When he was supposed to be arrested, he escaped and was persecuted for several days. Finally he killed himself with a shot. The third robber Paul Quaken was in the Wehrmacht at the time. When he returned to see his accomplice Paul's funeral, he was arrested and hanged himself in his cell while in custody.

List of raids

The statement of the injured means the cashiers who were shot by the robbers during the attack. This also applies to the information provided by the dead. The prey of the robbers is given in Reichsmarks (RM). If the prey was stolen from the robbers during the attack, this is known as lost prey .

  • August 28, 1929: Hanover, RM 60,000, 1 injured
  • December 30, 1930: Mainz, RM 90,000
  • October 31, 1932: Erfurt, loot lost, 1 dead
  • February 17, 1933: Offenbach, RM 14,100
  • September 22, 1933: Mannheim, 1,961 RM
  • November 10, 1933: Karlsruhe, RM 1,000, 1 injured
  • November 30, 1933: Remscheid, 4,500 RM
  • December 28, 1933: Mönchen-Gladbach, 2,300 RM
  • January 12, 1934: Bonn, 800 RM, 1 injured
  • March 9, 1934: Düren, 3,000 RM
  • April 20, 1934: Mainz, loot lost, 1 dead
  • May 25, 1934: Krefeld, RM 2,576, 1 injured passerby
  • July 6, 1934: Cologne, 3,390 RM
  • August 10, 1934: Frankfurt / Main, 631 RM
  • September 11, 1934: Hanover, 20,000 RM
  • March 8, 1935: Wuppertal, 3,200 RM
  • April 11, 1935 Halle (Saale): 10,000 RM, 1 injured
  • August 9, 1935: Krefeld, RM 2,000
  • September 20, 1935: Dortmund, RM 1,000, 1 injured passerby
  • October 18, 1935: Hildesheim, 9,500 RM
  • February 6, 1936: Mannheim, RM 9,500
  • February 28, 1936: Velbert , 49,600 RM
  • November 27, 1936: Witten, RM 10,000
  • April 30, 1937: Hamm, RM 8,000
  • July 22, 1937: Pforzheim , RM 15,000, 1 injured
  • December 31, 1937: Aschaffenburg, RM 27,000
  • September 8, 1938: Goslar, RM 66,000
  • April 26, 1940: Lüdenscheid, RM 30,000, 1 dead
  • March 31, 1941: Iserlohn, 20,000 RM
  • August 6, 1942: Solingen, RM 20,000, 1 injured
  • July 3, 1943: Krefeld, 2 injured, 1 dead robber

credentials

  • Karl Kiehne, Not only roses on the Klingelpütz - A police chief reports from his life , Munich 1972