Why we fall for cons — Dark Emu Exposed - And the Assault on Australian History

Mar 30

Mar 30 Why we fall for cons

Germany in 1906 wasn’t a good place to talk back to a military officer, so when a young corporal called Muller, who was leading his squad of four privates down Sylterstrasse in Berlin, was challenged by a captain, he stopped, clicked his heels and waited. Captain Voigt was in his fifties, a slim fellow with a large, white moustache. Truth be told, he looked strangely down on his luck — but Corporal Muller didn’t seem to take that in. Like any man in uniform, Captain Voigt appeared taller and broader thanks to his boots, smart grey overcoat and Prussian-blue officer’s cap. His white-gloved hand rested casually on the hilt of his rapier. “Where are you taking these men?” he barked. “Back to barracks, sir,” replied Muller. “Turn them around and follow me,” ordered Voigt. “I have an urgent mission from the “all-highest” command.” Direct orders from the Kaiser himself!

As the small group marched towards Putlitzstrasse station, the charismatic Captain Voigt saw another squad and ordered them to fall in behind. He led his little army on a train ride towards Köpenick, a charming little town just south-east of the capital. On arrival, the adventure continued: bayonets were to be fixed for inspection. It had been an extraordinary day for Corporal Muller and his men. But it was going to get a lot more extraordinary: what they were about to do would be the talk of newspapers around the world.

Capt Voigt .jpg — What is thought to be a portrait of fraudster Wilhelm Voigt, dressed in the military uniform that helped deceive his victims.
© Imagno/Getty Images

Captain Voigt’s impromptu strike force burst into Köpenick town hall and into the office of the mayor, a man named Georg Langerhans. Langerhans, a mild-looking fellow in his mid-thirties with pince-nez spectacles, a pointed goatee and a large, well-groomed moustache, stood up in astonishment and demanded an explanation. Voigt promptly placed him under arrest, by order of the Kaiser. “Where is your warrant?” stammered Langerhans. “My warrant is the men I command!” Voigt ordered the town treasurer to open the safe for inspection: fraud was suspected. The safe contained three thousand five hundred and fifty-seven marks. Captain Voigt was punctilious about the count, confiscated the money and handed over a receipt to be stamped. It was nearly a quarter of a million dollars in today’s money.

Captain Voigt then decided to wrap up the mission. The officials were to be driven to a police station where they would be detained and interrogated. Captain Voigt himself walked to Köpenick railway station. He collected a package from the left-luggage office and stepped into a toilet cubicle. A minute or two later, he stepped out again — and he was almost unrecognisable, having changed into shabby civilian clothes. He ambled, bandy-legged, across the station concourse. This anonymous fellow boarded the train back to Berlin, with his uniform neatly folded under one arm, and a bag of money under the other. Just like that, the “Captain of Köpenick” was gone.

Meanwhile, Corporal Muller dutifully presented his prisoners at the police station in central Berlin. The situation quickly became baffling to all concerned. Nobody had heard anything about the “all-highest” demanding the interrogation of the Mayor of Köpenick. After a phone call to headquarters, the head of the German general staff himself, General Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, arrived to resolve the situation. But nobody had received any orders from the Kaiser. Nobody could see any reason to detain the mayor or his treasurer. And nobody could recall ever having met a “Captain Voigt” before. No wonder. Except in the minds of the bemused soldiers and their civilian prisoners, Captain Voigt never existed. They met instead Herr Wilhelm Voigt, an ex-convict, an ex-shoemaker, a nobody, who possessed nothing more than a confident manner . . . and a very nice uniform. This tale is a famous one in Germany.

When the Germans tell the story, they tend to linger on the prelude to the heist. What kind of a man does this? Who was Wilhelm Voigt, and what inspired his audacious confidence trick? Voigt was a crook, no doubt about it — his crimes included armed robbery. But the judicial system had treated him harshly, stuffing a legitimate appeal into a filing cabinet. In this version of the story, Voigt was persecuted by a cruel bureaucracy, driven to ransacking the mayor’s office looking not for money but for the paperwork he needed to get a job. No wonder he became seen as a sympathetic figure in German literature.

The English-speaking world drew a different lesson from the reports that filled their newspapers: that the Germans are a sucker for a shouty man in a uniform. It’s easy to laugh when it happens to someone else. But the closer one looks at the story of the Captain of Köpenick, the less funny it looks. Faced with the right con, we’re all vulnerable. Any one of us, or even our Australian society as a whole, could have been the hapless Corporal Muller. And if we don’t understand how the trick worked, Wilhelm Voigt’s modern-day successors will do far more damage than he could ever have imagined.

Another case since Wilhelm Voigt persuaded people to obey orders that they should not have obeyed, is that of Stanley Milgram, the psychologist who, in the 1960s, conducted the most famous and controversial psychological experiment of all time, where Milgram recruited unsuspecting members of the American public (all men) to participate in a “study of memory”. On showing up at the laboratory, in a basement at Yale University, they met a man — apparently a scientist, just as Voigt had apparently been a Prussian army captain — dressed in a tie and grey lab coat. “Very straightforward and professional, just what you’d expect from Yale,” one participant recalled.

The man-dressed-as-a-scientist supervised proceedings where participants would be assigned the role either of “teacher” or “learner”. The learner was then strapped into an electric chair while the teacher retreated into another room to take control of a machine with switches labelled with terms including: “slight shock”, “moderate shock”, “danger: severe shock” and, finally, “XXX” [to signify a fatal dose of electricity]. As the learner failed to answer questions correctly, the teacher was asked to administer steadily increasing electric shocks. Although the teachers had received a painful shock themselves, as a demonstration that the shocks were real, many proved willing to deliver possibly fatal shocks while listening to screams of pain from the other side of the wall. Of course, there were no shocks being administered; both the screaming “learner” and the scientific supervisor were actors. The true experiment was studying the “teachers”: how far would they go when following direct orders?

In the best known study, 65 per cent of experimental subjects went all the way to 450 volts, applying shocks long after the man in the other room had fallen silent. Under the guise of science, Milgram had perpetrated yet another of these grim hoaxes. But an important finding from this experiment was that the participants had to be persuaded, not bullied, into participating. If participants hesitated and were told, “you have no other choice, you must continue”, they tended to conclude that this was simply untrue and nobody continued after receiving that order.

Various pictures from the Milgram experiment in the 1960s, where the psychologist Stanley Milgram demonstrated that, given the right circumstances, unsuspecting members of the public could be persuaded to obey unreasonable orders - Tim Harford, FT W… — Various pictures from the Milgram experiment in the 1960s, where the psychologist Stanley Milgram demonstrated that, given the right circumstances, unsuspecting members of the public could be persuaded to obey unreasonable orders - Tim Harford, FT Weekend, 16-17/11/2019, p20

Milgram’s shock machine had 30 settings, fine increments of 15 volts. It’s hard to object to giving someone a tiny 15-volt shock. And if you’ve decided that 15 volts is fine, then why draw the line at 30 volts? Why draw the line at 45? Why draw the line at all? At 150 volts, the “learner” yelled out in distress. Some people stopped at that point. But those who continued past 150 volts almost always kept going to the full 450 volts. They were in too deep. Refusing to administer a shock of 225 volts would be an implicit admission that they had been wrong to deliver 210. Perhaps Milgram’s experiments weren’t a study of obedience so much as a study of our unwillingness to stop and admit that we’ve been making a dreadful mistake. We’re in too deep; we’re committed; we can’t turn back.

Think back to that day in Berlin, in 1906. Voigt stopped Corporal Muller in the street and demanded to know where he and his men were going. What was Muller to do? Demand proof of identification? Of course not. Muller didn’t want to risk a court martial over answering a simple question. Voigt then asked Muller’s squad to follow him. That’s a bit more of a stretch, but Muller had already obeyed one order, already addressed this stranger-in-a-uniform as “sir”. Marching down the street behind him was just one small action further. The pattern repeated itself with the second squad: when they first saw Captain Voigt, he was already at the head of half a dozen men; that was the evidence he was who he said he was. Why not fall in? Why not get the train to Köpenick? Why not fix bayonets for inspection? It’s really only at the moment that they burst into the town hall that the doubts might occur. Milgram understood the need to get the clothes right. In a variation where the experimenter didn’t wear a lab coat, few people went to 450 volts.

At first glance, then, Wilhelm Voigt’s con and Milgram’s shock experiments are evidence for the idea that we’ll do anything for a figure of authority wearing the right outfit. But look deeper and they’re evidence for something else — that we’re willing to help out with reasonable requests, and that step by step we can find ourselves trapped in a web of our own making. Each small movement binds us more tightly to the con artist. We become complicit; breaking free becomes all but impossible. That said, the right outfit matters. And we should think bigger than the world of the con artist. Yes, we fall for cons. But we fall for all kinds of other superficial things that shouldn’t matter, like a nice uniform, and those superficial things are constantly influencing our decisions — including decisions that we may later come to regret.

The same thing can happen in politics and political activism. Across the world, voters and progressive citizens favour candidates and causes based on the most superficial characteristics imaginable. For example, one study — by economists Daniel Benjamin and Jesse Shapiro — found that people were fairly good at predicting the victor of an election for state governor after being shown a brief piece of video of a gubernatorial debate with the sound turned off: just looking at the candidates seemed to be enough to judge who voters would pick. In fact, giving people audio too actually made the predictions worse, presumably because it distracted them from what mattered: appearances. Humans seem to go for simple proxies when judging someone’s capacity for leadership. Take that 400-page political manifesto, or a 277 page book, like Dark Emu, which are apparently based on valid, accurate sources. We’re only going to skim them and not read them in full detail and certainly not check the original sources for veracity. But we pay close attention, whether we realise it or not, to the fine details of a candidate’s, activist’s or author’s posture, height, styling, clothes, demeanour and voice – do they match what we expect for a politician, activist or author of this cause? Corporal Muller and his men were completely taken in by Wilhelm Voigt’s appearance and mannerisms.

So think what a successful promoter of a new, radical theory of a pre-colonial, Aboriginal agricultural society might look like – perhaps, a kindly, photogenic Elder, with a distant, wise gaze and an authoritative, story-telling voice; slightly scruffy beard and unpretentious, country clothing; carrying The Book – the word of a Revisionist and a New Truth - as he travels the land spreading the word.

Now, maybe Mr Pascoe’s theory is correct and there is a New Truth of an ‘Aboriginal Agricultural Industry’, as he claims, that will be shown to stand up to academic scrutiny, but don’t we owe it to ourselves, and our Australian society, to perhaps just tread carefully before swallowing the whole story on face-value? The ‘Corporal Muller’ in us should stand his ground and respectfully ask, “ Please sir, show me your credentials and your evidence? Are you who you say you are? Please wait while I check your sources and evidence with my staff and superiors before marching off in the direction that you propose.”

Con artists and fraudsters using the playbook of Wilhelm Voigt trick people every day. First, they get the appearances right. They dress, speak and get their mannerisms to look the genuine part – perhaps they start to wear a noticeable cultural marker such as a military uniform, a certain type of hat, the long beard of an Elder, or speak a few phrases in their ancestral language at the opening of their speeches, or even wear a red-bandana, possum coat or engage in defunct ancient ceremonies. Captain Voigt and Milgram well understood the need to get the clothes and appearances just right.

Second, fraudsters put people into what psychologists call a ‘hot state’. We don’t think so clearly when we’re guilty, angry, afraid, insecure or intimidated. An activist who wanted to put people into a ‘hot state’ might announce that the country was going to descend into rioting, or people would die, or even claim ‘you people’ would be immoral and failing to live up to an acceptable level of social justice and so be seen the world over as racists and bigots, unless a particular cause was taken up and promoted into law. Whatever works, the activist will adopt.

Third, they pull the heist one small step at a time. They start with a simple request for recognition of a problem, or cause, that is real or even imaginary; “lets start with just a small, low-cost survey, enquiry, task force or government program”, they say; “let’s eliminate racism and treat Aborigines the same as all Australians”; “let’s subsidise a publisher to print some innocuous kids’ books on this, or that, particular social justice subject”.

Give us someone who looks or sounds the part; apply a bit of fear, anger, guilt, blame or greed; and then proceed in salami slices from the reasonable to the insane, so smoothly that we don’t stop to think. It’s then a quick progression to wholesale distribution through schools of highly contentious activist material; the promotion of many minority groups from being not merely equal, but to actually being better than the rest of society with additional benefits flowing exclusively to those better groups; now that you’ve given us our equality, Native Title land rights and affirmative action social welfare and employment benefits, we want Treaties and Sovereignty – we want to re-write history to show that we were ‘settled agriculturalists’, not nomads, so therefore you stole ‘our’ farm land illegally and we want it back; and you people who don’t identify as Aborigines can get off our Sovereign Nation lands, but make sure you keep funding us.

That is how Wilhelm Voigt fooled Corporal Muller and it is how he would have fooled any of us, if he caught us at the wrong moment.

And how does the story end? At first it looked as though Voigt would enjoy the fruits of his acting skills in peace. But as he relaxed with his money, a former accomplice of his saw the reports of the daring heist in all the newspapers and remembered a prison conversation in which Voigt had dreamt of such a coup. He promptly reported Voigt to the authorities. When four detectives burst in to his apartment at six o’clock in the morning, they found Voigt enjoying breakfast. He protested that the timing was inconvenient. “I should like a moment to finish my meal.” So the detectives watched him break open another crusty white roll, spread on a thick layer of butter, and wash it down with his coffee. You can’t help but admire the audacity. At trial, Voigt became a folk hero. The judge sympathised with the way he had been treated, gave him an unexpectedly short sentence, then took off his judge’s cap and stepped down to clasp Voigt by the hand. “I wish you good health throughout your prison term and beyond.” The German authorities felt that — in light of the popularity of the Captain of Köpenick — even more ostentatious clemency was required. They pardoned him after less than two years in jail. The Kaiser himself was said to have chuckled, “Amiable scoundrel” at the deed. Statues of Voigt were erected and waxworks made of him — including one in Madame Tussauds in London. He was paid to record his story so that people could listen to him recount his deeds. He went on tour, posing in his uniform and signing photographs of himself for money. A local restaurateur begged him to come and dine as often as he wanted, free of charge, knowing that his presence would attract other customers. A wealthy widow gave him a pension for life. Never let it be said that the Germans lack a sense of humour*.

But while the comedy is undeniable, we should not be too fond of the Prussian prankster. Perhaps Wilhelm Voigt’s adventure did little harm in the long run. The same cannot be said for some of the con artists who followed in his footsteps. It is exciting to read about a con or a fraud — from a distance. It will be not so funny if Australia has to live through one, or more.