Siegfried Turkel

Siegfried Carl Türkel (1932)

Siegfried Carl Türkel (born January 31, 1875 in Vienna ; † April 20, 1933 in Gries im Sellrain ) was a lawyer and scientific director of the criminological institute of the Austrian State Police in Vienna.

Life and work

Siegfried Carl Türkel was born as the third son of a Viennese master shoemaker. After graduating from high school and studying law in Vienna, he received his doctorate in 1900. On January 10, 1910, he was appointed head of the criminal institute at the Vienna Federal Police Directorate. He was a brother of the Viennese doctor Rudolf Türkel.

From 1922 onwards, Türkel was a member of the board of directors of Ankerbrot AG , a baked goods manufacturer in Austria.

In 1929, together with the Swiss criminalist Marc-Alexis Bischoff , the French Edmond Locard , the Dutch CJ van Ledden Hulsebosch and the German Georg Popp in Lausanne, he founded the Académie Internationale de Criminalistique (International Academy for Criminalistics), based in Vienna.

In 1937, Türkel was posthumously awarded the Ring of Honor of the City of Vienna .

The statistician Türkel

As part of an internship with the Viennese police, Türkel was entrusted with staff duties and published his first publication in Vienna in 1895, “The work statistics with special consideration of the Austrian draft law and the reform proposals”. He postulated that the sizing of the crime and the quality of police work, the relation of crime to population (which is also still in use today not alone frequency number can be set) basis, but that other factors must be included in the formula. These factors are

• the geographic size of the area to be measured,
• the number of inhabitants,
• the number of police officers deployed and
• the sociological structure of the population in terms of education and ancestry.

Türkel did not continue these considerations because he could not determine the sociological measuring points.

The criminal psychiatrist Türkel

In various publications, Türkel published the insights he had gained on criminal psychology, which the Wiesbaden criminologist Hermann Nobel summarized as "Türkel theses". In the guiding principle

• The vast majority of manic-depressive patients come from structurally incomplete or functionally disturbed homes.

he summarized the problems of alcoholism and single parents (at that time usually due to early deaths of father or mother).

In 1902, while studying the role of the mother in upbringing, Türkel came across Goethe's considerations and as a result published the core sentence taken up by Ernest Jones in 1953 :

• Legislation and custom have much withheld rights to give women, but the position of women can be no other than they are, an adored lover at a young age and a beloved woman in more mature years.

In his research, Türkel separated the field of sexual delinquency through innate and incurable behavior ( pedophilia , homosexuality or sodomy ) and behavior that was used to finance livelihoods (all forms of prostitution, which were still punishable at the time ).

• Sexually delinquent behavior can be found in all social classes. While in higher strata the sexual partners are acquired with money or find each other in close proximity, in lower social strata violence is used to achieve sexual satisfaction, so a high proportion of sodomite acts is also evident here.

As a result of his considerations in 1907, Türkel stated:

• Congenital sexual abnormalities cannot be permanently cured by deprivation of liberty, violence or medication. Suspicious persons require constant care and observation until they die. Difficult cases can only be alleviated by castration, just as one turns the boar into a borrow and robs the strength or the bull into an ox.

In 1905, in his three-part main work Psychiatric-Criminalist Problems , Türkel dealt with the problems of sanity . He recognized the circumstances that arise in the case of perpetrators who are incapable of seeing the wrongdoing of the crime when they commit the crime because of nonsense or a pathological mental disorder or serious sexual abnormality.

From 1908, Dr. Siegfried Carl Türkel as court and court attorney , with law firm: Vienna, VII. District, Mariahilferstrasse 26, Vienna entrance, VII. District, Stiftgasse 1 and appeared as an independent expert in the trial against the prostitute Berta Kuchta.

The crime chemist Türkel

In the period after the First World War, Türkel devoted himself extensively to the investigation of handwriting and machine fonts. In 1927 his atlas of pencil writing appeared . He and his colleague Andreas Figl presented methods of making secret messages visible that were burned or erased. The book describes very clearly how one can conclusively determine which pencil line is over which one, how to make etchings visible and how to go. a. also on the different textures of the graphites used (at that time) in pencils.

In the same year his treatise Prehistoric Forgeries: A Circular Question appeared .

With his works Encryption with Devices and Machines and Kryptographische Parerga (from encryption and decryption): Case reports from criminal practice , Siegfried Turkey dealt with various ciphers as well as encryption machines and techniques, including the Enigma .

Türkel found a new chemical method to detect writing ink in places where it doesn't belong . He wrote that the multitude of inks forgers can easily imitate, especially the color of the writing. The Viennese experts had found that all writing inks contain chloride , but in a widely used variant, such as table salt . Chloride slowly spreads in paper , but is considered colorless and invisible to the human eye. Türkel replaced the chloride in a document with metallic silver and photographed the “chloride yield”. This gives the document a different appearance depending on its age: After an hour, the document shows clear black writing; after a day the writing is clear, but the lines are extended; after four days the lines become hazy, after ten days the extended lines are fully developed. Sixty days after application, the bleeding converges in small loops; after six months the writing is illegible, after one or two years the document is completely illegible.

The last known publication by Türkel Dust Masks for Criminalist Laboratories was only published a year after his death.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Friedrich L. Bauer: Historical Notes on Computer Science , Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg 2009, ISBN 9783540857907
2. ↑ koeblergerhard.de accessed on September 14, 2009
3. ↑ encyclopedia.com. Retrieved September 15, 2009
4. ↑ The labor statistics with special consideration of the Austrian draft law and the reform proposals, in the annual report of the Austrian Criminalist Association, Vienna, 1895
5. ↑ Türkel, Irrenwesen und Strafrechtspflege, published in: Archiv für Kriminalanthropologie, Vol. VII, 1900
6. ^ Türkel, Goethe als Psychiater, in: Wiener Morgen-Zeitung, 52nd vol., No. 290, Vienna October 21, 1902, pp. 1-3
7. ↑ Türkel, Sexualpathologische Cases, published in: Archiv für Kriminalanthropologie, Vol. XI, 1903
8. ↑ Türkel, The Reform of the Austrian Irrenrechts, Verlag Kürschner, Vienna, 1907
9. ↑ Türkel, Problems of Responsibility, in Yearbooks for Psychiatry and Neurology, Vol. XXXVI, 1914
10. ↑ Türkel, The case of the murderess Berta Kuchta, FCW Vogel, Leipzig, 1909
11. ↑ Türkel, Atlas of Pencil Writing, Scientific Publications of the Criminalist Laboratory of the Vienna Police Department, Ulrich Moser's bookstore (J. Meyerhoff), Graz, 1927
12. ↑ Türkel, Prehistoric forgeries: a survey, Ulrich Moser's bookstore (J. Meyerhoff), Graz, 1927
13. ↑ Türkel, Encryption with devices and machines, Ulrich Mosers Buchhandlung (J. Meyerhoff), Graz, 1927
14. ↑ Türkel, Kryptographische Parerga, Ulrich Mosers Buchhandlung (J. Meyerhoff), Graz, 1929
15. ↑ Türkel, Schrift, Script Expertise and Script Experts, From the criminalistic laboratory around the Federal Police Directorate, Vienna, 1933
16. ↑ Türkel, Dust masks for criminological laboratories, From the criminological laboratory around the Federal Police Directorate, Vienna, 1934

literature

• Siegfried Türkel: Psychiatric-criminalistic problems. I. The psychiatric expertise. II. About imputation and responsibility. III. Psychopathic states as reasons for exclusion from punishment in criminal law . Franz Deuticke, Leipzig and Vienna 1905.