Richard G. Epstein

[left.htm]

MAN IDENTIFIED AS

HITLER ARRESTED

IN GERMANY

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When Adolf Hitler, one of the twentieth century's most infamous war criminals, bit into a glass cyanide capsule eighty-three years ago in his Berlin bunker, he certainly figured that he was escaping from human, if not Divine, justice. Unfortunately for him, he figured wrong. Hitler didn't know about computers.

Bavarian State Police announced this evening that Heinrich Gretchler, a neo-Nazi rabble-rouser and wallpaper hanger from Munich, has been identified by Linguistic Identification Analysis (LIA) as one and the same person as Adolf Hitler, the Nazi Fuehrer. The German parliament voted to accept Linguistic Identification Analysis as incontrovertible proof of a person's identity in 2020. The arrest of Mr. Gretchler marks the first time that a person has been positively identified as the reincarnation of some "other" person.

Rumors swept Moscow and Beijing that the arrests of Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong were imminent. Stalin and Mao were each responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people during their reigns of terror during the mid 1900s. [At press time, police have surrounded a house in a Moscow suburb that reportedly belongs to the reincarnation of Josef Stalin. The suspect is a well-respected member of the community who runs a chain of travel agencies.]

When Germany voted in 2020 to accept Linguistic Identification Analysis as proof of a person's identity, no one dreamt that the technique could be used to identify the reincarnations of former Nazi war criminals. The German legislation did not preclude that possibility. Similar laws in the United States do not preclude the possibility that a criminal from one life might be apprehended in some subsequent life.

Indeed, only a small cadre of experts in the Linguistic Identification Analysis community even whispered the "great secret" as it was called, that Linguistic Identification Analysis, which is considered 100% fool-proof, could be used to establish that a contemporary person is the same "mind and spirit" as a person who lived decades or even centuries ago.

Linguistic Identification Analysis (LIA) has been used to solve literally thousands of crimes around the world. Although the world has not had much time to react to the news of Hitler's arrest, some critics of Linguistic Identification Analysis, and there are still a few critics who oppose its use, are already alleging that the reason that Heinrich Gretchler and Adolf Hitler have the same linguistic fingerprint is that LIA is not 100% reliable.

One such critic is United States Senator Sam Horden (D-MA). "I opposed LIA and I still do. Now the LIA technologists are extrapolating their results to establish reincarnation as a fact, while the truth is that there has never even been a public consensus that reincarnation is a real phenomenon. While Heinrich Gretchler's political views are reprehensible, from what I have heard, I think it is ridiculous to allege that the man IS Adolf Hitler based upon his linguistic fingerprint. Doesn't this just show that linguistic fingerprinting is not 100% reliable?"

Many experts believe that the phenomenal success of linguistic fingerprinting in solving crimes is likely to convince the public that we now have proof of reincarnation and that Heinrich Gretchler and Adolf Hitler are manifestations of the same mind, the same repository of meanings and intentions.

Gretchler's arrest sent shock waves throughout all of Germany. Further arrests of reincarnated Nazi war criminals are expected. Bavarian State Police Chief, Wolfgang Kreizler, told reporters that at least twenty additional former Nazi war criminals have been identified in Germany and Austria, including Josef Mengele, the notorious "angel of death" at Auschwitz.

"Mengele is a prominent physician in Berlin and we plan to arrest him by tomorrow," Kreizler told reporters in a NewsNet teleconference.

The German legal establishment is working overtime to determine the status of war criminals who were already tried and sentenced (perhaps in absentia) during the Nuremberg war crimes trials that followed World War II.

German Chancellor Steinhart told the press during the intermission at a concert in Berlin that his government plans to extradite reincarnated war criminals who were already convicted by the victorious World War II allies at Nuremberg "to Israel or other jurisdictions that might have a proper cause to retry these criminals."

German Social Democratic leader Martha Wagner is opposed to any prosecutions based upon the "reincarnation theory" as she calls it. "Enough is enough. Let by-gones be by-gones. Now the entire German people will be stigmatized by what happened over eighty years ago. People should start with a clean slate based upon the good and the evil that they perform in this life. If you want to talk about reincarnation and other mystical ideas, then I would say that we should leave Hitler's punishment to his karma," she told a crowd of reporters outside of her Berlin office.

"This is Hitler's karma," replied Wolfgang Kreizler, when he was told of Mrs. Wagner's objections.

Linguistic Identification Analysis has been around for nearly twenty years and it is accepted as proof of identity in all fifty states and in many foreign countries, including Germany and the rest of Europe.

Linguistic Identification Analysis arose during the 2000s and 2010s as the a result of the research of Harvard linguist Naomi Shapira, herself a great-granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor. Professor Shapira, who still teaches at Harvard, developed the theory of "pre-verbal semantic grammars" that provided the theoretical basis that enabled the development of today's LIA technology.

Professor Shapira's insight was that all languages are expressions of language-independent and pre-verbal meanings that constitute a universal linguistic system. She developed a symbolic, graphical notation for encoding these pre-verbal meanings. Pre-verbal semantic grammars encode the rules by which individual people transform pre-verbal meanings, encoded in her graphical notation, into streams of phonemes, syllables and words. A major assertion of Professor Shapira's theory is that each individual has his or her own, unique grammar that transforms his or her inner meanings into linguistic utterances. This insight led directly to the idea of using the grammars that can be inferred from linguistic utterances as "linguistic fingerprints".

Professor Shapira theorized that each person actually has at least two grammars: one for speech and one for formal writing.

If one has a rich enough sampling of a person's speech or writings, one can use modern computers to infer the grammatical rules that are unique to that individual.

In 2009 Professor Shapira published her landmark book, Deep Semantic Structures. In that book Professor Shapira showed that each person possesses a private grammar, which "is as unique to the individual as that person's genetic code or fingerprint." People in a linguistic community can communicate because they share the deep structure of meaning and also because their private grammars are similar enough to permit communication. But, no two people have identical private grammars.

"During the twentieth century people tended to view grammars as belonging to a language, so that one would have an English grammar or a French grammar," Professor Shapira said in an interview in 2010. "My theory shows that grammars are individual and that a language, such as English, is the result of millions of grammars that share certain common characteristics. If an individual or a group deviates from the norm, they might form their own dialect or even an entirely new language. So, a grammar is a characteristic primarily of an individual organism, an individual brain, and secondarily, of a group of people, a community, tribe or ethnic group. Consequently, I have come to the conclusion that if we could use a computer to capture a person's unique grammar, which is to say, a person's unique mode of linguistic self-expression, then we could have ourselves a perfect means of identifying people who leave sufficient written or spoken evidence in perpetrating a crime."

It has become universally accepted that no two people could possibly have the same linguistic fingerprint. In other words, no two people within a given language grouping (such as English or German) would express all meanings in exactly the same manner.

Professor Shapira saw many other applications for her work, including new means of analyzing works of literature and studying how one author influenced another, or even how language evolves from one generation to the next.

Pre-verbal semantic grammars have also provided profound new insights into mental processes and mental illness. Whereas thirty years ago the tendency was to view all mental illness in biological terms, now there is a realization that the manner in which a person expresses his or her meanings is fundamental to the development and expression of mental illness. According to this view of things, a person who is insane has a different grammar for expressing meanings than you and me. Furthermore, the chemical imbalances in the brain and these non-standard grammars are intimately related in a way that is not yet completely understood. Nonetheless, by deciphering the individual grammars of the mentally ill, psychologists have been able to develop new forms of therapy.

Professor Shapira's theory also led to the study of the "semantic differences" between people that lie at the heart of all difficulties in interpersonal communication. This is still an area of hot research in the nation's graduate schools. At issue is whether two people within the same linguistic community can understand each other at all and whether computer systems can translate from one person's grammar to another's, thus allowing for more effective communication. Professor Shapira's theory has been applied to analyzing political conflict and to suggesting how to bridge differences between two sides in any form of negotiation.

During the period of 2009-2017 several attempts were made to write computer programs that could infer an individual's private grammar or "linguistic fingerprint" on the basis of his or her writings and spontaneous speech utterances. By the end of this intense period of research, several LIA systems were available in each of the world's most common languages (e.g., English, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, Hindi, Arabic, French, German and Chinese).

By 2018 Linguistic Identification Analysis was shown to be the single most effective means of identifying criminals who had left behind a linguistic fingerprint of their crime. Linguistic Identification Analysis immediately removed the possibility of true anonymity in written or spoken communication. This has had a great impact upon human communication, removing forever the prospect of any communication remaining truly anonymous. With the advent of Linguistic Indentification Analysis it became meaningless to attempt to publish a work anonymously or under a pseudonym.

Professor Clara Thompkins of the University of Virginia developed the LIA software that proved that Heinrich Gretchler and Adolf Hitler are one and the same person. Professor Thompkins has had a life-long interest in the possibility of reincarnation and the implications of this possibility for the punishment of Nazi war criminals. She is one of those linguists who knew the "great secret" of LIA research, that it could be used to prove the reality of reincarnation and to track war criminals down through the ages.

Professor Thompkins is Professor of German at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. She explained that soon after the publication of Professor Shapira's theory nearly twenty years ago she realized that it might be possible to identify the reincarnation of former Nazis using that technology.

Professor Thompkins explained that a Linguistic Identification Analysis fingerprint just requires a large enough sample of a person's writing or spontaneous speech. "Once a LIA program has enough information, it rapidly converges to a unique set of linguistic rules, a grammar, that identifies the individual. The grammar is an extensive set of rules, which describe how a given individual is going to express a set of standard meanings in terms of atomic sounds, or phonemes. It captures the rhythm, assonance, and other characteristics of a person's speech. It is universally acknowledged in the scientific and in the legal communities that no two people could possibly have the same linguistic fingerprint. It was easy to get a fingerprint for Adolf Hitler based upon the many speeches that he made during his years in power."

Professor Thompkins has devoted considerable energies to tracking down former Nazi criminals, especially Hitler, for nearly fifteen years. "Several of my ancestors were Christian pacifists who were murdered by the Nazi thugs. I suppose my passion derives from the stories I heard about their martyrdom. I concentrated on the neo-Nazis who are at the periphery of German politics. My students regularly attend neo-Nazi rallies with chip recorders in hand. We developed linguistic fingerprints for over three hundred neo-Nazis. Then, two years ago, this Heinrich Gretchler fellow started to attract attention with his fiery anti-Semitic speeches.

"There are few Jews left in Germany. This didn't stop Gretchler. Gretchler is insisting that all Jewish cemeteries be removed from German soil. He is also calling for the deportation of all non-Germans, especially Bosnians, Russians, Poles, Turks and North Africans, from 'sacred German soil'. "

Last January, Professor Thompkins discovered that the linguistic fingerprints of Heinrich Gretchler and Adolf Hitler are an exact match. She immediately informed authorities in Germany, who were aware of her research efforts. "It is a perfect match. I would say with 100% certitude that this man is Adolf Hitler. You see, since linguistic fingerprint is based upon the structure of a person's mind and not just on physical characteristics, it is certain that Gretchler and Hitler have the same mind, the same spirit, so to speak. They are two incarnations of the same person."

It took several months for German prosecutors to lay the legal basis for trying Gretchler as Adolf Hitler. Once they were certain that they could proceed, using existing LIA legislation, they moved on Gretchler's dingy Munich apartment.

Gretchler's attorney, Karl Leinsmann, called the arrest of his client an "outrage". Speaking to reporters in Munich, Mr. Leinsmann maintained that his client has long been "obsessed with the writings and speeches of Adolf Hitler." Mr. Leinsmann asserted that this could explain why his client and Adolf Hitler have identical linguistic fingerprints.

Gretchler's arrest is certain to create a storm of controversy throughout the world. At issue is whether an identification of this nature, which purports to prove that one person is the reincarnation of another, can stand up in a court of law. There is no legal or political consensus that reincarnation is a real phenomenon.

Law Professor Tyler Sanitarium of the Silicon Valley University School of Law is skeptical. "I agree that Gretchler and Hitler are probably the same person, but I also believe that we should leave retribution in cases like this to God. In other words, if Gretchler is Hitler, then let God take care of his punishment. We should punish each person for the crimes that they commit in a given lifetime. We should not punish people for what they have done during previous lifetimes."

Bavarian Chief of Police Wolfgang Kreizler responded to a similar objection that was raised during his teleconference. "If we can find Adolf Hitler in life after life with absolute certainty, punishing him for his crimes over and over again, then that is God's punishment for Adolf Hitler. It is God who has given us this technology to identify evil people from the past. If we can prove without any doubt that this man [Gretchler] is the same mind that created the horrors of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, then we should punish him over and over again, for fifty million generations if need be. Maybe God destined this to be Hitler's punishment right from the start."

There is no consensus, even in various religious communities, that reincarnation is a real phenomenon. If two people from different times have the same linguistic fingerprint, does this prove that they are one and the same person or spirit? Could Mr. Gretchler be Hitler's reincarnation merely in the sense that, by immersing himself so totally in Hitler's writings and speeches, his own linguistic identity has merged with Hitler's?

Hindus and Buddhists tend to believe in reincarnation, but so do some religious Jews. Buddhist and orthodox Jewish prayers make explicit reference to the transmigration of the soul and the need to cleanse the soul of sin. Christians and Moslems tend to be less supportive of this idea, although even among Christians and Moslems one does not find unanimity on the issue of reincarnation. For example, some Islamic mystics, called Sufis, do assert the reality of reincarnation, but this is not a unanimous opinion among the Sufis.

Professor Shapira, whose theory of pre-verbal semantic grammars made linguistic fingerprinting possible, could not be reached for comment. However, last summer, in an interview published in the Sentinel-Observer Sunday Magazine, Professor Shapira herself voiced skepticism concerning the reality of reincarnation.