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You are getting very sleepy. You are going to rob a bank and murder two people in the process. Welcome to the story of the Copenhagen hypnosis murders.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: March 29, 1951--
If mind control was possible to make average people commit murder, then you can bet the CIA and KGB would have used it. And they tried, even pumping people full of drugs in the process. All they did was melt people’s brains and give them PTSD. You can’t gain total control over someone with hypnosis and make them do shit they’d not normally do. But it doesn’t stop criminals from using being hypnotized as a defense in their murder trials. It’s been used to argue being not guilty a number of times, and sometimes it even worked.
Hypnosis won’t make you violate your personal values, but the Danish man Palle Hardrup had a shit moral compass, directly pointed at shit by shitwest. I mean, he worked for the fucking Nazis during World War II. After the war, his country threw him in prison for treason. Bjørn Nielsen, who was Hardrup’s cellmate for a few months, was in prison for the same reason. They were both “spiritual” or some shit and were into yoga and hypnosis. Continues below …
You are getting very sleepy. You are going to become a paid subscriber. I had to try.
After they got out of prison, Hardrup went to rob a Copenhagen bank on March 29, 1951, and in the process shot and killed one of the cashiers and the bank manager. Then he fled on Nielsen’s bicycle and entered another building, but people saw him and said to the cops “Motherfucker’s in there!” and the cops said come out motherfucker and the motherfucker surrendered without a fight.
The ensuing trial got deep into the whole hypnosis thing. Criminals are generally not the smartest people, as demonstrated by the fact that a few days after the murders Nielsen contacted the cops and said hey I just want to make sure I’m not a suspect because he used my bike, k? And the cops were all well we’re certainly thinking about you now.
They looked into the hypnosis thing because plenty of guards and prisoners where they’d shared a cell said that Hardrup was under Nielsen’s mental control, that the killer was manipulated by Nielsen like a puppet. Psychiatrists were involved in the trial and basically said that someone could be manipulated into committing a crime if it could be seen as morally justified, but as we already established, Hardrup was a goddamn Nazi collaborator.
The psychiatric interest in the case wasn’t about letting Hardrup off the hook but finding Nielsen guilty as an accomplice. And that’s what happened. The trial didn’t wrap up until 1955, when Hardrup was put in a mental institution and Nielsen got life in prison. Both were released a dozen years later.
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