ένα μείγμα αντιλήψεων περι φόνου και αυτοκτονίας + η εγγυημένη θανατική ποινή για τους δολοφόνους στη Γερμανία και τις σκανδιναβικές χώρες έπλασε ένα ολόκληρο κοινωνικό φαινόμενο αυτοκτονικών δολοφόνων: Οι δράστες ήταν κυρίως γυναίκες, κοινωνικά καταπιεσμένες, πολιτικά ανύπαρκτες χωρίς εξόδους διαφυγής, που ήθελαν να αυτοκτονήσουν αλλά δεν μπορούσαν να το κάνουν γιατί ήταν βαθιά πιστές χριστιανές και δεν ήθελαν να καταδικαστούν αιωνίως στην κόλαση.
Η λύση που βρήκαν ήταν να κάνουν φόνο. Κατα προτίμηση φόνο βρέφους, αφού το ίδιο το βρέφος, ως αθώο και αναμάρτητο, σύμφωνα με τη χριστιανική αντίληψη πήγαινε αυτόματα στον παράδεισο. Σκότωναν ένα τυχαίο παιδί, το κράτος τους καταδίκαζε σε θάνατο, και φυσικά πριν την εκτέλεση τους προσέφεραν εξομολόγηση. Εξομολογούνταν και ζητούσαν συγχώρεση απο τον θεό για τον φόνο, ο θεός τους συγχωρούσε, η δουλειά τους γινόταν, η δικαιοσύνη είχε αποδοθεί και το αθώο βρέφος ήταν πλέον στον παράδεισο.
Τελικά μετά από πολύ σκέψη οι αρχές κατάλαβαν ότι υπήρχε μία και μόνο λύση για να σταματήσουν το φαινόμενο: απέσυραν τη θανατική ποινή σε περιπτώσεις δολοφονίας
Λεγεών NandrosA woman slit the throat of her own baby. A soldier shot a sailor on the street in broad daylight. A mother killed three of her children. These crimes were part of a wave of suicide-murders in the 17th and 18th centuries - a wave that swept through much of Europe but was especially common in Denmark. Insane though it may sound, people used to commit murder just so they could get executed. They even researched what crimes incurred the death penalty to guarantee they would die.
During that time in history, suicide was not only a crime - it also meant your soul would be condemned to Hell for eternity. Unlike people who committed public suicide, suicide-murderers were terrified of killing themselves - and so they committed capital crimes punishable by death. Unlike the suspicious suicides in history, these murderers were upfront about their crime and their motivation. One man even sang on his way to the gallows because he was so happy that he was about to die.
Shockingly, suicide-murders were common at the time for religious reasons, as murderers justified their actions by pointing to Martin Luther himself. And the crime wasn't uncommon - hundreds of people killed others just so they would be executed. How did people justify killing to guarantee their own deaths? And how did Denmark stop the crime wave caused by murderers who wanted to state to execute them? This bizarre and shocking trend was serious enough that it took well over a century to fix.
On February 25, 1755, Cicilia Johansdatter slit the throat of her four-month-old baby. She didn't try to hide her crime. Instead, she sat with her hands on the dead baby's head, declaring that she would happily die for her crime. After being convicted of murder, Cicilia was decapitated with a sword and her head was stuck on top of a pole.
Why did Cicilia kill her child? She was a 22-year-old housemaid, an unwed mother at a time when there was a strong stigma against having a child out of wedlock. Her fiance had stopped visiting; the engagement was off. But Cicilia was still trapped with a young baby. She was suicidal, but if she committed the act herself, she would be condemned to Hell. So Cicilia killed her child and happily walked to her execution.
As shocking as this sounds, she wasn't the only person committing suicide-murder.
Medieval Christians agreed: people who committed suicide were damned to an eternity of suffering in Hell. Before the word "suicide" was coined in 1651, it was called self-murder, and like other forms of murder the penalties were harsh. In antiquity, suicide had been met with understanding, but the Christian condemnation of suicide dated back to at least the sixth century. "He that kills another [may only kill]... his body, but he that kills himself kills his own soul," theologians argued, stating that suicide was even worse than murder. Canon law even made it illegal to give suicide victims Christian burials.
Dante's Inferno similarly declares that violence against self is worse than violence against others. Victims of suicide are condemned to live as twisted trees, deprived of the bodies they harmed on earth.
As suicide-murderers looked around for people to kill, they most often chose children as their victims. Three-quarters of the victims identified by scholar Tyge Krogh were children under the age of 10. Many were killed by their own suicidal parents. Most of the dead children were killed by slitting their throats, while others were thrown into the canals of Copenhagen. And most of the murderers were women.
There was another twisted benefit to murdering children: child-killers were more likely to get the death penalty, guaranteeing that the suicidal murderer would get his or her wish.
Martin Luther was a religious reformer who split the Catholic church by founding the first Protestant denomination, which was named after him: Lutheranism. But in promoting a new theology, Luther created the twisted trend of suicide-murders that would sweep through Europe's Lutheran countries, especially Denmark.
As scholar Tyge Krogh explains in A Lutheran Plague: Murdering to Die in the Eighteenth Century, Luther promoted a very literal interpretation of the Old Testament. The text was clear: the punishment for murder was the death penalty. But murderers who repented their sins could be saved from eternal damnation. The result was hundreds and perhaps even thousands of cases of suicide-murders in Denmark alone. Krogh found 100 cases in less than 100 years just within the city of Copenhagen.
In addition to the religious prohibition on suicide, there were also harsh laws against suicide by the 16th and 17th centuries. In 1554, when Sir James Hales, an English judge, committed suicide after Queen Mary's government forced him to convert from Protestantism to Catholicism, he was seen as a criminal. The state declared: "the forfeiture of the goods and chattels, real and personal, of Sir James shall have relation to the act done in his lifetime." In other words, the English Crown seized all of his property.
England legally classified suicide as a crime starting in the 10th century. By the 14th, courts commonly seized the property of suicide victims. The justification - the punishment would prevent suicides - was rooted in the idea that suicide was a crime against the state: "The king hath lost a subject... [and had] his peace broken."
Murder was against the law, too, of course. The penalty for committing murder was almost always death by execution. But there was one big difference between murder and suicide in the minds of 17th-century Europeans. Murderers could beg forgiveness for their crimes just before death. Repenting before being executed meant that even a murderer could go straight to Heaven instead of Hell.
People who committed suicide had no "get out of Hell free" card - you couldn't repent suicide before killing yourself. For centuries, many Europeans justified committing murder in order to save their own souls - even if it meant killing an innocent person.
In many countries, the crime determined the punishment. Women who killed their husbands in England, for example, were sentenced to burn at the stake, while women who murdered their children were hanged. Men who were guilty of high treason were hanged, drawn, and quartered. Class also mattered - aristocrats were more likely to lose their heads from an executioner's sword.
Certain minor crimes might not get the death penalty at all. In spite of the fact that there were 222 crimes punishable by death in 18th century Britain, including stealing, cutting down a tree, and counterfeiting tax stamps, capital punishment was often reserved for the most serious crimes. Suicidal people couldn't risk committing a minor offense and ending up in jail or simply losing a hand. If they wanted to be executed, they had to commit murder.
As late as 1848, a Dutch woman killed her three children so that she could die herself. The woman, described in court records as very religious, explained that she was depressed. She had become obsessed with the idea that her children would go to heaven if she killed them. And she added that she, herself, would be blessed if the state sent her to the gallows. Rather than committing suicide and condemning herself to Hell, this woman was willing to kill her children to insure that her family would end up in heaven.
Another mother, Anne Maria Truelsdatter, killed her newborn child in 1733. She was "depressed at her terrible poverty and therefore wanted to end her life." Before Anne Maria was executed, she requested that the king allow her to be buried in consecrated ground next to the child she murdered, which was allowed. She left behind three other children.
Suicide was understood in religious terms and legal terms. According to religion, suicide would condemn your soul to Hell for eternity. On the other hand, people who committed suicide were treated like criminals on earth, meaning they often lost their property. On top of that, the social punishments for suicide were incredibly high.
As historian Jeffrey Watt explains, after death the bodies of suicide victims were often desecrated as a way to punish the victim and discourage suicides: “The body would be desecrated; it might be hanged, dragged on a hurdle, dumped in a river. They were not allowed funerary honors, not allowed to be buried in a regular cemetery. Instead, they’d be buried with victims of plague or criminals."
In light of that treatment, execution didn't appear so terrible.
While women were more likely to commit the crime of suicide-murder, men were also found guilty and executed. In fact, Krogh found that soldiers were often numbered among those guilty of the crime.
In 1733, for example, Carl Heinrich Mensing, a musketeer who had served for 13 years, committed murder to end his own life. As he was walking down the street, Carl shot a sailor at random from behind. Carl explained to the court that he was depressed and "committed the murder in order to get rid of his life." He was sentenced to have his hand and head chopped off and his corpse stuck on the post and wheel.
Like Cicilia, who instantly confessed to murdering her own child so that she would be sent to the gallows, most suicide-murderers did not try to conceal their crimes. Nor did they conceal the motives. In court, the murderers would explain that they wanted to end their lives by taking an innocent life.
As historian Watt says, one murderer even sang on his way to the gallows: "He was joyfully marching toward his execution, believing that he couldn’t have done it himself because then he would’ve been damned." Obviously Denmark's courts noticed the trend of suicide-murders, but their first response completely backfired.
Danish authorities were aware that suicidal people were using the legal system to guarantee their deaths. And they wanted to stop the wave of murders caused by suicidal Danes. So they introduced extreme execution methods to discourage suicidal murderers.
“The convicts would be whipped or pinched with red-hot tongs on the way to the gallows. Their limbs would be broken with a wagon wheel or cut off, and their bodies were displayed in public,” Krogh explains. By 1733, men who admitted they committed murder to end their lives had their hands chopped off and were placed on a wheel.
The new tortures backfired. In fact, they encouraged even more suicide-murders, as suicidal Lutherans, driven by a fear of Hell, convinced themselves that torture before death would help them secure a spot in heaven - essentially turning them into martyrs.
Instead of gruesome tortures, the authorities took a different approach. In 1767, Denmark passed a new law that abolished the death penalty for suicide-murderers. Instead, they would be condemned to a lifetime of hard labor.
When the idea was initially proposed, many were strongly opposed. After all, Lutheran countries were committed to a literal interpretation of the Bible's statement that the penalty for murder was death. Theologians, lawyers, and government officials all argued that abolishing the death penalty violated the nation's religious beliefs. Still, when the death penalty was finally abolished, the wave of suicide-murders finally ended.
https://www.ranker.com/list/ways-danes- ... ve-carlton
εδω να πουμε οτι ολοι τους ειναι αιρετικοι εκτος απο τους Ορθοδοξους.
