ATL: Infernal Act

Sycamore

Banned
After finding out about this story on the internet, and of what the deranged Harvard Professor Erich Muenter so nearly succeeded in doing, I felt it deserved to be explored in an ATL. The main story (of this, the first part of the TL, relating to the POD itself and its immediate aftermath) will have a similar format to an action novel, with a limited third-person narrative; but the first few posts will serve as background introduction, providing detail and information regarding the central character, and setting out the background of the story prior to the POD in a textbook format. With the exceptions of those small snippets which provide hints about the events yet to come, every historical detail will be true to real life IOTL.

... Accounts of Erich Muenter's early life are sketchy. Muenter was apparently born in Germany about 1871 and emigrated to the U.S. in 1890; however, he would in his later life fabricate a whole host of completely different origin stories, as his tenuous grip on reality slipped away. He alternately claimed to have been born in Texas or Wisconsin, the son of German immigrants, or in the South as the son of landed aristocrats, or that he was of Finnish extraction forced to emigrate to the United States by Russian persecution- and unsurprisingly, given the infamy of his notorious actions, his true origin story is heavily disputed. Muenter clearly possessed a natural gift for languages. He demonstrated fluency in German, French, Spanish, and Finnish. His German accent was almost imperceptible, except on the few occasions when he was seen by friends to explode in rage; most who met him thought he merely had a mild speech impediment.

Muenter took his Bachelor’s degree in German at the University of Chicago, graduating in 1899. In 1902 Muenter married a young woman named Krembs, who acquaintances described as “a pleasant German-American woman,” and as a “a woman of striking beauty.” She taught school in Chicago for a brief period. 1903 found Muenter and his wife at Kansas State University, where he took some graduate courses. There he authored a paper entitled “Insanity and Literature”, and his wife gave birth to their first child, a boy.

In 1904, Muenter hit the big time: he was accepted for doctoral work at Harvard University, and was permitted to teach undergraduate courses in German language. One of the faculty members at Harvard said that “in the classroom Professor Muenter was very calm and precise, and had much charm of manner.” Muenter and his wife lived in modest rooms at 107 Oxford Street in Cambridge, which they rented from Thomas W. Hillier, a local livery stable owner. Hillier later recalled that the only evidence of strangeness Muenter had shown was his bizarre conviction that “a wonderful new language could be built up out of Gaelic and Scots” (actually, newspapers published the report as a language built from combining “Gaelic and Scotch”, making this conviction even more bizarre). Muenter was affable, if quiet; an excellent scholar and linguist, and meticulous in the classroom. He was always neatly dressed, sporting a neatly groomed moustache, a Vandyke beard, and a stylish derby hat.

Yet even then, his university colleagues already saw dark oddities in Muenter’s behavior. There were three separate occasions on which neighbors accused Muenter of blowing out the gas lights in his bedroom, in an attempt to asphyxiate his sleeping wife. Muenter claimed that the gas had been blown out by the wind — a common hazard in the days of gas lighting — and the neighbors’ accusations were dismissed as over-active imagination. Certainly, his landlord had vouched for Muenter, claiming that Muenter had seemed genuinely concerned for his wife’s fate. He showed moments of irrational behavior- he “discovered” a poem which he touted as a previous unknown masterpiece of German literature. A German literary society pointed out that it was a fairly well-known work of Goethe, and Muenter seethed with anger for months over the affair.

Professor Hugo Münsterberg later recalled that while Muenter was at Harvard, “he often came to my laboratory... for the purpose of borrowing books on insanity. Some of these he needed to write theses on insanity. Others he would borrow because he was interested in the subject.” Münsterberg thought Muenter was a “pathological study” even before he emigrated to the U.S., and that “the man was always interested in mysticism and metaphysics”. He added, “I can scarcely imagine any man being a more interesting psychological study that this man Muenter.” Several associates recalled that he obsessed over sexual matters (the details of which were apparently too risqué to detail in Edwardian newspapers)- and one reported that he had, with some friends, formed “a secret organization for the study of medieval mysticism.” This report in particular has been seized upon, and forms the basis of the popularized 'Infernal' conspiracy theory, alleging that many other disasters and terrorist incidents can also be attributed to the actions of the occult 'Infernal Society', which Muenter allegedly founded during his Harvard days- however, these conspiracy theorists' allegations are baseless and without merit.

While at Harvard, Muenter’s wife gave birth to their second child. By early 1906, she was pregnant a third time. But this time, something went terribly wrong. She was, from all accounts, a strong, healthy woman. Yet with this pregnancy, she seemed to grow weaker and weaker with each passing week. Friends of the family attempted to bring in a physician, Dr. H. B. McIntyre of Boston, to attend her in her confinement (a quaint but dysfunctional Victorian custom of keeping a woman housebound during the final months of pregnancy). But Erich Muenter would have none of this; he 'did not believe in doctors', and his wife meekly acceded to the dismissal of Dr. McIntyre. On April 16th, 1906, Muenter’s wife died before she could give birth to their third child. There was no attending physician at her deathbed, in accordance with to her husband’s demands.

Muenter turned her body over to a local undertaker, A. E. Long, to be prepared for burial. Long, an experienced mortician, grew suspicious when he began embalming the body. There was something not quite right with the look of the woman’s internal organs. He called in Professor Whitney of the Harvard Medical School, who conducted an impromptu autopsy. He determined that Mrs. Muenter had died from the cumulative effects of numerous small doses of arsenic. Throughout her confinement, her husband had laced his wife's beef tea with poison. Long and Whitney went to the Cambridge police with their information. But before the Cambridge police could obtain an indictment for murder against Muenter, the case took a bizarre and fateful turn. Muenter took his two children and his wife’s corpse, placed them all in an automobile, and drove off to Chicago. On the 19th of April, he had his wife’s body cremated, in a vain attempt to destroy the evidence of his crime. Abandoning his children to his sister’s care, Muenter fled the country, to Mexico...
 
Cool to see someone taking up Muenter story. I look foreward to this ever since I read a cracked article about him. I also was musing with the idea of a short Germany Delande Est timeline were his attack leads to a tigher security and the subsequent discovery of the Black Tom explosion agents and Anton Dilger's Bio terrorism programm.

However I compeletly forgot about his obssion with the philosophy and causes of insanity. He was even more fascinating/crazy than I thought. Anyway subscribed :)
 

Sycamore

Banned
Following on, directly from where the previous excerpt trailed off:

... After he fled, the Cambridge police announced a reward of $1,000 for the capture of Erich Muenter, accompanied by his description: “age 35 years; height 5 feet 9 or 10 inches; weight 150 pounds; florid complexion; dark hair; long face; slanting forehead, full dark Vandyke beard; loose-jointed walker.” But it was to no avail- unbeknowst to them, Muenter had already left the United States. In Mexico, he shaved off his defining Van Dyke beard, traded his hall-mark derby for a soft felt hat, and settled briefly in Mexico City. He immediately set about creating a new identity for himself, and it was at this stage that he decided to adopt the name which would eventually become infamous across America and the globe; “Frank Holt”.

In early 1907, “Frank Holt” appeared on the doorstep of Samuel Brothers- an American owned gold mining company operating in El Oro, Mexico, a small gold mining town about a hundred miles north of Mexico City- seeking a position as a stenographer. One of the executives of the company, James Dean, recalled that “Frank Holt” had proved “an excellent stenographer, but remained haughty and aloof from every one in the company. This drew many comments, and attracted attention to him. He had a worried look, and gazed abstractedly into space for long periods, frequently. He never spoke a word about his past, even when questioned closely.”

While in Mexico, Erich Muenter did not fully sever his ties to his old acquaintances, which he'd made prior to his wife’s murder. Even as he created his new persona as “Frank Holt”, he continued sending abusive letters back to his former associates at Harvard, still writing as Erich Muenter. He even took time to publish a rambling pamphlet which burlesqued the death of his wife, “and told in gruesome fashion how he had put into practice his theories of revenge.” In it, he stated that the law had taught him that revenge was right. Police were quickly tipped off as to Muenter’s whereabouts by tracing the origin of these letters, and dispatched investigators to Mexico City to track him down.

Unfortunately, Erich Muenter would always be a few steps ahead of the authorities. Days before they arrived in Mexico, he had already quit his job with the mining company, packed his few belongings and moved to Dallas, Texas, where he set about the necessary task of re-establishing his academic credentials all over again as “Frank Holt”. Muenter (or, rather, Holt) elected to enroll in a small Texas college, the Agricultural and Mechanical College at College Station, Texas. In this intellectual backwater, it would be less likely that any of his former Harvard co-workers would stumble across him and reveal his true identity. While there, he met a young lady, Leone Sensabaugh, the daughter of a prominent Dallas minister. They were soon married. He graduated in 1909 with a degree in German language (when Muenter's terror spree was finally brought to an end, he was still wearing a gold tie pin on which “09” was engraved — evidently, a memento of his graduation).

During the 1909-1910 term, he served as Assistant Professor of German at Oklahoma University. A local newspaper carried a notice when he joined the faculty: “Mr. Frank Holt, the new Instructor in German, is a graduate of the Fort Worth Polytechnic Institute and has spent several years of his life in Germany and speaks German as well as English. He has had several years of experience in teaching the language and comes highly recommended. He also speaks Spanish and French fluently and has studied at the University of Berlin, and studied in Rome and Paris and has traveled over Europe. He gave lectures on German literature in Berlin.”

Most of the notice appears to be completely fictitious and foundless, conjured by Muenter’s fertile imagination. Nonetheless, the university accepted his claims at face value without ever investigating his veracity. The employment of “Frank Holt” there was to be short-lived. He was frequently afflicted with insomnia, and would disappear from campus for days on end. Brooding over fancied injustices to himself, he grew increasingly angry that the chairmanship of the languages department had not been given to him, but had instead been granted to another professor who had served at the university for many years; and he was soon dropped from the faculty.

He left Oklahoma to teach French at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee for a year, then moved on to teach French and German at Emory and Henry College in Virginia for two years. In 1913, he obtained a position back in the Ivy League, at Cornell University, where he worked towards his Ph.D. while teaching under-graduate German and tutoring in several private prep schools in Ithaca. The university was impressed by his fluency in German, French and Spanish. Colleagues described Holt as “a rather reticent man” and recalled that he strongly condemned munitions shipments to the Allies because “Germany didn’t get a square deal.”

Professor Clark E. Northrup, of Cornell’s English Department, and who was reputedly a close friend of Muenter’s during his stay there, stated that “Holt always struck me as a sane and intelligent man. His scholarship was well founded, and he was considered an able teacher who might have held his position indefinitely.” He added that, like most of the staff of the Cornell German language department, Frank Holt was “decidedly pro-German”, and that he had belonged to a newly-formed society on campus, which had been created to discuss the war after such discussions were prohibited at meetings of the university’s official German club.

But Erich Muenter never forgot that he was still a fugitive from justice, and never dropped his guard. Upon learning that a former Harvard colleague, Professor Kuno Francke, was planning to visit the Cornell to give a short series of lectures, Muenter decided to take a short vacation to New York City, thereby denying the opportunity for his web of deceit to be exposed. He did not return until the day after Francke departed. He received his doctorate in June, 1915. His thesis was entitled “The Effect of the Works of Shakespeare on German and French Literature”.

“Frank Holt” informed the university that he would be resigning to accept a professorship teaching Romance Languages at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, Texas, which was scheduled to open for its first classes in September of 1915. He packed his wife and children off to Dallas to live with his father-in-law just before the term ended. As he left Cornell, “Holt” informed his colleagues that he intended to spend a few days in New York City doing research, before rejoining his family in Dallas.

It would be the last any of them would ever see “Frank Holt”, Erich Muenter, alive. His wife and university colleagues could never have comprehended the sheer extent of Muenter’s obsession over American munitions shipments to Europe. With twisted hypocrisy, the same man who had had no compunction about slowly murdering his pregnant wife with arsenic had convinced himself that American arms shipments to the Allies were immoral, and must be stopped. And Erich Muenter had come to the warped resolution that it would be his divine cause to bring an end to the bloodshed in Europe, by waging his own one-man war against the United States of America and the Allies- a war of terror which would take a heavy toll...
 
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Sycamore

Banned
*does a quick Wiki search*

Oh Christ. :eek:

You have my curiosity, and my attention. :cool:

Why, thank you. :) I'll do my best.

Cool to see someone taking up Muenter story. I look foreward to this ever since I read a cracked article about him. I also was musing with the idea of a short Germany Delande Est timeline were his attack leads to a tigher security and the subsequent discovery of the Black Tom explosion agents and Anton Dilger's Bio terrorism programm.

However I compeletly forgot about his obssion with the philosophy and causes of insanity. He was even more fascinating/crazy than I thought. Anyway subscribed :)

Yeah, that'd be the same article which led me to this story as well. And indeed, the deeper you delve into it, the clearer it becomes just how much of an intriguing, comic-book-style supervillain Erich Muenter actually was.
 

Sycamore

Banned
BTW, I'm still in two minds about still what to do with the next part. I could simply do it all in one go, as a continuation of the story from the textbook ITTL (the last one before the narrative of the main story begins); or, given the dramatic potential, I could start the narrative of the main story now, which would entail building up to the actual POD and the main events over the course of several chapters. Which should I do?
 
Well I've just had a look at his wiki page and he's a good subject for an ATL. Looking forward to the next update
 
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Sycamore

Banned
June 1st, 1915

Unusual times and circumstances call for unusual means.

In connection with the __________ affair, would it not be well to stop and consider what we are doing?

We stand for PEACE AND GOOD WILL to all men, and yet, while our European brethren are madly setting out to kill one another we edge em on and furnish them more effective means of murder. Is it right?

We get rich by exportation of explosives, but ought we to enrich ourselves when it means the untold suffering and death of millions of our brethren and their widows and orphans?

By the way, don’t put this on the Germans or on Bryan. I am an old-fashioned American with a conscience, if it is not a sin to have a conscience.

We are within the international law when we make this blood money but are we also within the moral law, the law of Peace, or of Love, or of Christ, or whatever else a Christian nation may call it?

Are we within reason? Our children have to live after us. Europe helped and encouraged the Balkans in their bestial ware, and she reaped the whirlwinds. Can’t we learn wisdom?

Is it right to supply an insane asylum with explosives? Or give them to children? We even prevent our own children to kill and maim themselves at the rate of 200 dead and 5,000 maimed on the glorious Fourth.

How much more should we not hesitate to furnish strangers, and they mad? Will our explosives not become boomerangs? If we are willing to disregard our ideals for a dollar, will they hesitate some day when they get a chance? A prostitute sells out for a dollar. Fi! Columbia too?

Wilson said in his Decoration Day speech that the war developed national spirit. Good! Now let peace make for national spirit. Let all real Americans say: “We will not be a party to this wholesale murder!” Would that not be national spirit? Better than one based on the murder of our fellow-man.

We want prosperity. Yes. But Europe needs enough non-contraband materials to give us prosperity. Let us not sell her explosives. Let each nation make her own man-killing machines!

Sorry I, too, had to use explosives. (For the last time, I trust.) It is the export kind and ought to make enough noise to be heard above the clamor for war and blood-money. This explosion is the exclamation point to my appeal for peace!

One editor said: There are times when one government may be expected to speak on behalf of other countries and of humanity in general. God bless you Mr. Editor, that was a timely word in this blood-money madhouse. Let us stop this colossal American crime!

Let us have a vote on it by mail. We can trust the President. Let every man and woman in favor of not being party to further murder write to Mr. Wilson at once. This is necessary. The people financially interested in explosives have done all the talking so far (that includes many a newspaper). For once let the rest of us have a chance. Write at once and send petitions. We would, of course, not sell to the Germans if they could buy here, and since so far we sold only to the Allies, neither side should object if we stopped.


Erich- no, Frank, Frank Holt- read through his letter again. He'd read through it repeatedly over the past few days- ever since he'd set out on the mission that he'd resolved to carry out almost a month ago now. It strengthened his resolve, clarified the all-important truths. He knew that his cause was a just and righteous one. He'd first typed the letter out back on campus at the Cornell; a couple of days before he'd sent Leone and the children back to Dallas, back to stay with her father. He'd told them then that he'd see them again soon, and that he'd be heading down there to join them soon enough. He felt somewhat downcast, knowing that he'd never see any of them again- but Leone was a good wife. Reliable, loyal, level-headed; strong in her faith of God. She'd understand. she'd surely realize that he was morally obliged to do this, because it was in his power to do so, and his power alone. He was going to stop the slaughter...

Come to think of it, he'd told Leone that he'd be there by today, hadn't he? Either today or tomorrow. What was the date today again? The 13th, or the 14th? He knew it was one or the other- but he'd had a busy schedule. And to be fair, he had only woken up roughly ten minutes ago. Still, time waits for no man. Rise and shine... The springs in the mattress squeaked as Frank Holt rose to his feet, walking across to the curtains and opening them, allowing the light to come flooding in. It was a bright morning, and as to be expected in the City that Never Slept, the sidewalks of Seventh Avenue down below were already congested with people. All going about their business- and it was high time that he set about his business. Of making the world a better place.

Frank picked up his razor from the bedside, and adjusted his mirror to get a good look. A decent amount of stubble had grown overnight, and he tackled the task of shaving his cheeks first. Then, he paused for a moment. Looked into the mirror, admired the fuzzy, ethereal semblance of the Van Dyke beard which he was once so fond of, back then. Which he'd already made his own back when he was still just barely a man, in his late teens, fresh off the boat from Germany, setting foot in America for the very first time on these same streets. Back when he was still Erich Muenter. But even now, he couldn't afford to let his cover slip- he wasn't that man any more. Muenter finished the job- finished shaving his chin and his upper lip, and completed the transition from the shadow of his former self back into his true, current self. Back into Frank Holt.

So, what was the day today? The 13th of June, or the 14th? There was only one way to make sure. Frank swiftly got changed- cleaned himself up, and switched his night-time attire for suitable daytime attire. He'd only brought a couple of suits with him, to save space for more important luggage later on- and of the two, he far preferred the mauve one to the navy one. With a white shirt, of course- and which tie? The green one contrasted best with the deep mauve of his suit, so it was an easy choice to make. With that done- after making sure that he wasn't leaving his suitcase, which contained his letter and all of his other paperwork, behind- Frank locked the hotel room door shut behind him, and headed down the stairs to the lobby.

Momentarily, he cast his thoughts back to his letter, re-reading it mentally. That blank space in the second sentence was still blank- he had, just as he'd told his Cornell colleagues before leaving, travelled here to New York City in order to spend a few days conducting research. But he would complete that research and fill it in soon enough. And once he had- well, with the right target, it shall make enough noise to be heard above the warmongers' clamour, shall suffice as a sufficiently hard slap-in-the-face to bring America to its senses. It shall indeed...
 

Sycamore

Banned
*ignore the last entry- since it didn't really get any response, I've decided to get this TL back up and running again by switching back to the original format. Enjoy (hopefully)- and BTW, all of this is still prior to the POD. Every detail is still true to OTL...*

In Manhattan, Muenter checked in at Mills Hotel Number 3, located on Seventh Avenue at 36th St, for two weeks. It was a large but certainly not lavish hotel, where rooms rented for 30¢ a day, paid for in advance. Clerks at the crowded hotel only recalled that Muenter had stayed there due to the inordinate amount of mail which he received; and also because of an altercation which he had gotten into with another guest, over a war notice which was posted on a newspaper stand. Muenter and the other man reportedly came to blows, and it had required police intervention to break up the fight.

Muenter devoted his first week in New York City to gathering together the materials he thought he would need to end the flow of weapons to Europe. He traveled to Jersey City, New Jersey, where he purchased a .38 caliber Iver and Johnson revolver from John S. Menagh, a hardware dealer. With a box of cartridges, the pistol cost Muenter $2.25. He asked the hardware dealer if the gun came with a guarantee to “work every time.” Menagh frowned and explained that revolvers didn’t come with that sort of guarantee. Muenter had actually wanted two pistols, but the .38 was the only handgun Menagh had in stock. Obligingly, he suggested that Muenter try the pawnshop of Joseph Keechan across the street. There, Muenter purchased a used .32 caliber revolver. For both transactions, Muenter gave his name as “C. Hendricks.”

Muenter then rented a cottage in Bethpage (at the time called “Central Park”) from Louis Ott, a local real estate broker. He gave his name as “Mr. Patton” on this occasion, telling Ott that his physician had ordered him to move to the country for his health, and that he wanted a quiet, isolated place to live in. The two-room bungalow Ott offered him was perfectly situated, off the main road and completely hidden by trees. The largest of the two rooms was only about ten feet square; the second, smaller room was used by the cottage’s owner are a storeroom for furniture. But it suited Muenter’s purpose, who divided his time between his rooms in New York City and the Bethpage cottage.

For the next few days, Muenter traveled through New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania to find the single most important item he needed to execute his grand design. He was frustrated again and again. Finally, he found a company in Long Island City that offered to sell him what he so desperately wanted: a case of dynamite. The sales representative informed him that the company did not, of course, keep any dynamite on hand; it would have to be special ordered and would be freighted to Bethpage by train.

Every day for the next week and a half, Muenter visited the Bethpage Rail Road Station’s freight office with clockwork regularity, impatient for his shipment of high explosives. Muenter was so annoyingly insistent that the freight agent, George B. Carnes, finally lost his temper with him. Although the manufacturer, Keystone Powder Co. of Emporium, Pennsylvania, had shipped out the explosives immediately, the dynamite had lain in a Long Island Rail Road warehouse for nearly a week. The railroad’s safety regulations required that dynamite had to be moved on special trains that carried no passengers or regular freight.

Finally, on the 28th of June, the first two of three crates arrived for “C. Hendricks,” the same alias which Muenter had used to purchase revolvers a few days before in New Jersey. The first two crates contained 120 pounds of 60% dynamite. The formulation was considerably more powerful than the standard mix of dynamite, which usually contained only 40% nitroglycerin. Muenter’s choice of manufacturer of the dynamite was especially appropriate, chosen specifically because of its relevance to his mission to end munitions sales to the Allies. The Keystone Powder Co., long prominent as a manufacturer of dynamite for hard-rock mining, had only weeks before been bought out by the Aetna Explosives Co., who were in the process of converting the factory’s entire production to munitions for the war in Europe. The third crate arrived on the 29th. It contained an assortment of blasting caps and fuse.

Muenter arrived at the station freight office at 6 p.m. on the 29th. Carnes told him, through the locked door, that the station was closed and that he would have to return tomorrow to pick up his package. Muenter begged him to let him have the package, apologizing profusely for his behavior during the previous week. Finally, Carnes gave in and let Muenter have his package. The timing was perfect. The Fourth of July weekend was only a few days away, and Erich Muenter was ready to set off some fireworks of his own...
 
Keep it up! Interest may have flagged as everyone might be holding out for the excrement to hit the fan.

"C. Hendricks", eh?

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Curse you, woman, I thought I could trust you not to blow up Congress! :mad::p
 

James G

Gone Fishin'
This is a brilliant story and I like the writing, in the different format you tried too, quite a bit.
Well done.
 
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