Reinhold deliberately engineers his own arrest

Reinhold deliberately engineers his own arrest to escape the danger gathering around him after Mieze’s murder. He commits a conspicuous theft while carrying false identification, expecting the police to take him into custody without recognizing him. The maneuver works: he is sentenced under another man’s name and sent to prison, while Franz Biberkopf is arrested in a separate case and wrongly treated as a possible accomplice. The episode turns arrest into both refuge and disguise, and its delayed revelation exposes the gap between what the authorities believe and what has happened.

The decision to seek custody

By the time the police conclude that catching Franz Biberkopf will lead them to the other man, Reinhold has already made his own calculation. Posters about the murder and a reward have appeared on Motzstrasse; he understands that attention is tightening around him and decides that prison will be safer than remaining at large. Rather than wait to be identified in connection with Mieze, he plans to provoke an arrest for an unrelated offence, while ensuring that the police encounter someone with no recognizable identity.

The choice is presented as practical evasion, not a confession or an attempt to clear his name. Reinhold intends to be caught without his proper papers and counts on the ordinary machinery of policing to carry him away before it recognizes who he is. His plan depends on two things working together: an offence sufficiently visible to bring the police, and a false identity sufficiently plausible to redirect their attention. He succeeds in getting himself into custody, although the theft also involves striking a woman harder than he intended. The account registers that consequence without making it the centre of his calculation.

A false identity becomes a conviction

At police headquarters, Reinhold’s false papers identify him as Moroskiewicz, a Polish pickpocket. The officers do not connect him to the wanted man: he has not previously been in prison, and they cannot retain every personal description. His assumed identity is therefore not merely a disguise for the arrest. It becomes the identity through which the subsequent legal process treats him.

The trial proceeds quietly and without public attention. The court sentences the supposed pickpocket to four years in prison and five years’ loss of civil rights, orders police supervision, and confiscates his knuckleduster. It also imposes the costs of the proceedings. Reinhold reserves the right to appeal, but the narration emphasizes that he is satisfied with the result: the sentence means that he has reached the safety he sought. The punishment is severe, yet for Reinhold its immediate function is protective. The court’s judgment confines the wrong person under the wrong name, without exposing the crime he wants hidden.

The arrest of Franz Biberkopf

The contrast becomes sharp when Franz Biberkopf is brought in after the raid at the Alexanderquelle pub. He is handcuffed and does not speak during questioning. The police report presents him as a valuable arrest: he had been discovered wearing a grey wig and an artificial right arm, and the disguise, compared with a photograph they possess, leads them to identify him as a man connected to the murder case of Emilie Parsunke in Freienwalde. Because of his prior record, the authorities consider him a possible accomplice.

This arrest does not reveal Reinhold’s arrangement to the police. When they assume that Franz’s capture will soon lead to the other suspect, their expectation is already out of date: Reinhold has passed through police headquarters and is in Moabit Prison. The narration corrects the authorities’ confidence by moving between the two men’s different routes into custody. Franz is identified through his disguise and history; Reinhold, by contrast, has entered prison precisely because the false papers prevent identification. Their simultaneous confinement conceals a decisive difference in responsibility.

Temporary success and narrative irony

When Franz is caught, Reinhold is already in Brandenburg Prison, and the account describes him as forgotten. His plan has therefore achieved its immediate aim: he is removed from the search and, for the time being, no one is looking for the real murderer in the place where he is held. Yet his security depends on a mistaken identity and on the assumption that a conviction has settled matters. The narrative warns that this confidence will not last, without making the later capture part of the arrest scheme itself.

The episode’s suspense comes from the discrepancy between official procedure and the truth the reader is given. Police reasoning appears orderly: one suspect should lead to another. But the sequence has already separated them, allowing the guilty man to hide inside the very system searching for him. Reinhold’s self-arrest is thus both an act of calculation and a temporary reversal: the prison that ordinarily marks the state’s control over a person becomes his chosen shelter, while the man treated as the accomplice remains the focus of the investigation.