Herman Lamm - A Soldier Turned Bank Robber
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There is a common expression heard in the military, at least in more recent years. When it comes to obtaining something that is either not for sale or simply needs taking, soldiers have a very clever way of phrasing it. You didn't steal that, did you, Sergeant? No, sir. It was tactically acquired.

Or, since all military personnel are issued hundreds of pieces of the same gear, various pouches, bags, rucksacks, tarps, helmets, flashlights, canteens, etc. Gear which often goes missing and has to be paid for if you can't find it. There is another expression to explain everyone's missing gear. There is only one thief in the military. Everyone else is just trying to get their stuff back.

It's an endless cycle of robbing Peter to pay Paul, in other words. Such petty thievery is frowned on by the senior officers, not that they didn't also pilfer things when they were young troops. But otherwise, stealing in the military is largely a punishable offense. But what would a commanding officer think if he received a report that one of his men had just robbed several banks?

and not only robbed them, but had pulled off the greatest heists in the history of bank robberies, using tactics he learned in the army. This is one such story, the story of a dishonorably discharged German soldier whose use of military tactics led to some of the most successful bank heists in American history.

His methods would in fact revolutionize the world of organized crime and mark him as one of the world's most elite criminals. His name was Herman Lamb, although his friends called him "The Baron." I'm Luke LaManna and this is Wartime Stories.

Born on April 19, 1890, in the city of Kassel, Germany, Hermann Lahm's road to a career in larceny began as a young man, after enlisting in the German army. As a member of a Prussian infantry unit, Lahm was relentlessly drilled in the small unit tactics of warfare, gaining a quick appreciation for the importance of clear communication, discipline, and chain of command when in the field.

While he was an effective leader, Lamb proved harder for his superiors to tame when it came to his personal conduct towards fellow troops. Over the course of hundreds of years, the Prussians had come to foster a tradition of excellence, born from the earliest days of the former Kingdom of Prussia, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. As such, they saw themselves as the military elite of the Imperial German Army.

With such a prestigious reputation, Prussian officers would do everything in their power to hold their soldiers to the highest possible standards, both in their combat effectiveness and moral fiber. The most highly regarded ethical traits shared amongst Prussian soldiers, aside from loyalty and bravery, were honesty and integrity, two things that Herman Lamb proved to be sorely lacking in.

When granted temporary leave from their rigid military schedule, Prussian soldiers, like all the other enlisted men, enjoyed two common vices: flirting with girls and gambling. More often than not, Herman Lamb would be found engaging in the latter, eyeing his comrades over a hand of cards, competing to win the ever-growing pile of cash before them.

However, instead of coming by his many wins honestly, Lamb would resort to cheating, counting cards, or sneaking peeks at the hands of other soldiers.

With their money or valuables at stake, the card games often ended in brawls between Lamb and the unfortunate soldier who felt he was scammed out of his winnings. Far from building lifelong bonds of trust with his brothers-in-arms, Lamb, though otherwise clever, resourceful, and charismatic, soon developed a reputation as a conman.

Being a repeat offender, it was this core breach of trust among his fellow soldiers that resulted in Herman Lamb standing before a disciplinary tribunal on more than one occasion.

While it may seem harsh to enact such disciplinary measures on someone for something as trivial as cheating at a game of cards, officers within the Prussian hierarchy saw his behavior as unfitting of a soldier. In their view, Lamb's consistent habit of lying and cheating was a telling sign of the man's true nature. If he was willing to cheat at cards to win small sums of money, how could he be trusted to act in an honorable manner either on or off the battlefield?

After numerous infractions, followed by harsh but ineffective punishments, it seemed Lamb was beyond reforming. At any rate, his superiors had had enough. Once again brought before his commanding officer in 1914, the young soldier was finally thrown out of the German army.

After being in military service for much of his working life, Lamb, now in his mid-twenties, like many veterans, found it difficult to adapt to living as a civilian in a world devoid of military order, structure, and a clearly defined purpose. With nobody telling him what to do, he didn't know where to start.

With few job opportunities surfacing in Germany, Lamb, with the clothes on his back and some money in his pocket, decided it was best to start somewhere fresh. America seemed hopeful. He soon hopped aboard a ship bound for the United States. X-Tree, X-Tree, read all about it. Great Britain declares war on Germany. Summary rejection of British ultimatum. Read all about it. X-Tree, X-Tree, read all about it.

In retrospect, the timing of Lamb's military discharge and subsequent migration couldn't have been more fortunate for him. By the summer of 1914, the great powers of Europe, including Germany, were teetering on the brink of an all-out war, a conflict that would end in the death of some 40 million lives. But not Herman's. As he arrived in New York City, he instead found himself quite free of his former country's troubles.

Before him was a land of limitless opportunity, a chance to leave his tarnished past and reputation behind and start life anew, an honest one. However, like many millions of immigrants before him, Herman Lamb quickly found that starting a new life in America would be anything but easy.

Contending with major changes in culture, language barriers, and the already difficult transition from military into civilian life, steady work was hard for Lamb to come by. To top it off, with the outbreak of the First World War, the United States, though still neutral and boasting a large population of ethnic German peoples, saw a dramatic rise in anti-German sentiment.

With the sinking of the ocean liner RMS Lusitania by a German U-boat in 1915, which claimed the lives of over 1,100 men, women, and children, 123 Americans among them, hostility towards German Americans only increased. Cultural displays of Germanic heritage were shunned, the language silenced, and German-owned businesses boycotted or even vandalized.

Small villages and towns, even entire cities bearing German names, would swap out their former labels, opting for something less reminiscent of their former nation's culture. In darker cases, individual Germans, even full-blooded Americans with German lineage, were attacked or killed by vigilante mobs under lofty suspicions of treason.

Herman Lamb, with his thick German accent and a mere basic grasp of the English language, found himself in a country that openly despised him for his heritage. With door after door to living an honest life now being closed in his face, Lamb, possibly even as a way of rebelling against this hateful society, resorted to petty crime.

Using what earnings he had, Lamb purchased a pistol, then embarking on a string of low-level thefts, burglaries, and holdups, pocketing just enough cash to get from one day to the next. Ultimately, however, Lamb's luck would run out, his law-breaking soon landing him with a stint behind bars.

Confined to their jail cells, the long hours of silence and boredom were intended to give prisoners plenty of time to think long and hard about the choices that landed them there, and ideally, how to make better choices in the future.

Herman Lamb did indeed spend a lot of time thinking during his time in prison, though not about the consequences of his criminal actions. Instead, he would find himself reflecting on his past robberies, the methods which had failed, as well as his time spent as an infantryman with the German army.

During his time as a soldier, he learned that a small unit of men could become a force to be reckoned with when they were well coordinated, communicative, disciplined, and when their planning was implemented on the collection of reliable intelligence. If small unit actions worked well on the battlefield, then how effective would they be when targeting a different kind of objective? Lam began to wonder.

What if he could assemble the right crew and adapt his military training to rob banks? With his jail sentence coming to an end, Herman Lamb was a reformed man, although not in the way society would have hoped. The former petty thief had evolved, not into an upstanding citizen, but into a far more sophisticated type of criminal.

As World War I came to an end in late 1918, the United States had emerged as the world's dominant superpower, its surging economy soon propelling the nation into the Roaring Twenties, a decade of decadence and prosperity.

The country's banks were practically bursting with cash, and with his military training to hand, Herman Lamb was now determined to begin lining his own pockets using the technique he had devised during his incarceration. It would come to be known as the Lamb Technique, and it worked better than he could have ever expected.

Up until that point in American history, criminals approached bank robbery in a very spontaneous and reckless manner. One or two gunmen would burst in the bank doors with plenty of violence and enthusiasm, but little in the way of actual planning. Hopping the counter and shoving a gun in the face of the frightened teller, the bandits would then flee the scene with only a few hundred dollars in their pockets, perhaps a thousand if they were lucky.

However, this sort of on-the-spot thinking presented far too many risks for the perpetrators. More often than not, the would-be bandits ended up in handcuffs or riddled with bullets due to the quick response of security, law enforcement, or even armed civilians. Herman Lamb's approach to taking down banks would be far more methodical in nature, carried out with the careful precision of a military operation.

Much like the early stages of a battle plan, Lam's heist would begin with a period of reconnaissance and intelligence gathering. When the target bank was selected, Lam and another associate would enter the building posing as security systems salesmen, or in some cases, location scouts attached to an upcoming film production.

The unsuspecting bank manager, enamored at the prospect of top-of-the-line security or being featured in the movies, would happily show the men every nook and cranny of the bank. This included the vault and all the contents held within.

As the manager led the tour, Lam would take note of the guards, the number of employees, and business hours that saw the least and most amount of customers at a given time. Meanwhile, outside the bank, Lam's crew would set out into the community, mapping out police stations and the patrol routes most frequently traveled by law enforcement.

Based on their proximity to the bank, Lam could get an idea of how long it would take for local police forces to arrive on scene once the alarm was inevitably sounded.

When enough reliable intelligence had been gathered, Lam set about assigning specific roles to his hand-picked crew. Sourced from local gangs and individuals Lam had come to know in prison, the men selected for the job were done so for their reliability, discipline, and unique skill set. The task at hand was dangerous, and much like the infantry sections Lam was a part of, there was little room for trigger-happy cowboys.

While the crew who stormed the bank would vary in size depending on the needs of the raid, there were three key roles that always needed to be filled: the lobby man, the vault man, and the lookout.

Once successfully inside the bank, the lobby man would be tasked with neutralizing any armed security before shifting his focus to crowd control, keeping the bank's employees and customers subdued as the other men pushed deeper into the building. With the bank secured, the vault man would locate the branch's manager and, at gunpoint, force him to open the secured vault. Once they had access to the money, the vault man, along with some extra hands,

would oversee the stuffing of cash into the bags. During all of this, the lookout would be posted at the front door, tucked away in cover as he kept a watchful eye for any cops or curious persons approaching the bank. However, getting into the bank was the easy part. As Lam had learned from his previous low-level robberies, getting out and away cleanly was an entirely different matter.

To swiftly escape the clutches of law enforcement, he would need a reliable set of wheels and an excellent driver. Considering their very lives depended on these, Herman went to the one place he knew he'd find the right ones.

During the early 1920s, America had seen a massive surge in the popularity of motorsports. The rapidly evolving technology of vehicles meant that cars were now faster and more powerful than ever, with modified engines capable of topping out at over 100 miles an hour.

With thousands of American servicemen returning from Europe in the aftermath of World War I, there were plenty of hot-headed young men willing to push these vehicles to the absolute limit, hoping to make a name for themselves in the ever-growing sport.

And that's just where Lamb would recruit his ideal getaway driver, at the races. As motorsport wasn't the most lucrative profession in its early days, many of these drivers, tempted by the prospect of a major payout, would have gladly accepted. While other members of Lamb's crew would be busy acquainting themselves with the bank layout, the chosen getaway driver would familiarize himself with the streets surrounding the target area.

Aiming to avoid traffic and routes commonly patrolled by lawmen, the driver would create detailed maps that highlighted what were dubbed "cat roads." These paths, consisting of alleyways and side streets, would allow the fleeing bandits to quickly elude any incoming police response.

while also keeping them off the busy main streets. From behind the wheel of their car, its engine modified for above-average speeds, the getaway driver would run these cat roads dozens of times under varying conditions, timing their laps to arrive at the designated safe house in the quickest manner possible.

With the crew now fully assembled and a strategy in place, Lam, using detailed floor plans of the bank, would build mock-ups of the building's interior. While crewed in their construction, these mock-ups allowed bandits to perform dry-run rehearsals of the upcoming robbery, ironing out any last kinks in their plan before putting it into action.

As the men ran through each step of the heist, Lam, like a squad leader commanding his troops, would orchestrate the operation, stopwatch in hand, to ensure they met their tight deadline. On paper, these steps, known collectively as the "Lam Technique," would result in a foolproof heist. However, being the soldier that he once was, Lam knew that it was impossible to account for everything that could possibly go wrong.

What Lamb and his gang otherwise had no way of predicting were the effects that their actions would have on organized American crime as a whole. More specifically, although not a man who desired to gain notoriety as a criminal, Lamb had no idea that his military technique would forever revolutionize the art of bank robbery. "Behind you." "Yeah, sure boss." "I think."

By implementing his newfound strategy, Herman Lamb, alongside his assortment of gang members, conducted some of the most successful bank heists yet seen in American history.

Throughout the 1920s, the German soldier would leave his mark all over the Midwestern United States, taking down the most secure banks with startling ease and walking away with tens of thousands of dollars, what would today be hundreds of thousands, if not millions. As Lamb's criminal resume began to grow, so too did his reputation. In criminal circles, Lamb was quickly becoming a legendary figure, renowned for his expertise

and daring raids that saw many opportunistic bandits practically lining up for a chance to work with him. Further adding to his mystique was Lamb's air of cultured sophistication. He took to notoriety quite well.

With his accumulating wealth, Lamb now indulged in his love for life's finer things. He was often seen dressed to the nines schmoozing amongst other socialites and criminal bigwigs within some of the most exclusive establishments. The Baron, as he would soon come to be known, was now unrecognizable from the desperate German migrant who had washed ashore several years earlier.

Despite the Baron's shameful reputation as a criminal, the American public was no less enamored by his daring bravado. To them, crime was already rampant, but Lamb brought about a rebirth of something more nostalgic: the image of the notorious outlaw, an anti-hero long romanticized in American history and popular culture.

In a decade otherwise dominated by warring mobs, corruption, and organized crime, Lamb's robberies brought to mind the smooth-talking, gunslinging exploits of Billy the Kid or Jesse James. However, while the American public might have been swooning over the Baron, the same could not be said for the state law officers and federal agents tasked with taking him down.

American law enforcement, both on a local and federal level, was not at all prepared for Lamb's tactical approach to bank robbery. His meticulous preparation and discipline ensured that he was always one step ahead of the officers who, more often than not, arrived on scene long after the bandits had fled. In one recorded instance alone, Lamb and his men hit a bank and made off with their score in less than five minutes.

While the Baron's raids were often conducted with the aim of avoiding bloodshed, the former soldier wasn't opposed to slinging a few well-aimed bullets, if that's what it came down to. On the off-chance police officers were able to confront the Baron and his men during their heist, they soon found themselves outgunned. The .38 caliber revolvers they were armed with were no match for the Browning automatic rifles, shotguns, and Thompson submachine guns frequently carried by Lamb and his men.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, having only been established in 1908 and thus still in its relative infancy, was equally caught flat-footed by Lamb's crime spree. His revolutionary criminal tactics would result in an equally drastic shift in strategy on the part of federal authorities, who quickly adapted their methods to combat the growing wave of organized crime.

Specialized task forces were assembled dedicated to studying Lam's strategies, which were now being widely adopted by other criminal gangs. Working in conjunction with state and local law enforcement, these task forces became more and more adept at tracking sophisticated bandits like Lam, cracking down on criminal networks by relying on informants and wider surveillance. By 1930, outlaws like Lam were starting to feel the heat of encroaching law enforcement,

Still, that did little to stop the Baron, whose heists had now collectively netted him over a million dollars, nearly 19 million in today's currency. Like most men who make their living at one end of a gun, however, it was only a matter of time before Lamb found himself staring down the barrel of someone else's.

On December 16, 1930, Lamb, alongside a gang consisting of W.H. Hunter, Walter Dietrich, James Oklahoma Jack Clark, and the 71-year-old G.W. Landy, robbed the Citizens State Bank in the city of Clinton, Indiana.

The robbery itself went off without a hitch, the men making for the getaway car with the haul of $15,657, nearly $300,000 today. Not the baron's biggest score, but the stock market crash the year prior was hitting everyone hard, including the banks. W.H. Hunter, sitting behind the wheel of their escape vehicle, anxiously waited for the men to pile in. It was then that he spied a lone man exiting a barbershop,

approaching the suspicious group of bandits with a shotgun, clutched firmly in his hands. Panicked, Hunter floored the gas pedal, whipping the vehicle into a sharp U-turn that forced them to hop the curb onto the sidewalk. The impact blew out the vehicle's front right tire, crippling its speed as it then took off down the street. The vigilante barbershop owner let loose with his shotgun, its blasts

alerting other armed law-abiding citizens and lawmen to the presence of fleeing robbers. Ditching the car, the robbers took off on foot, an armed posse now hot on their heels as a rolling gunfight played out on the Clinton streets.

With the sirens of law enforcement closing in, the desperate criminals quickly commandeered a new vehicle. However, in another stroke of misfortune, the stolen car in question had been modified with a speed limiter, making it impossible to go over 35 miles an hour. Under constant fire from a mob now numbering in the hundreds, Lamb and his gang would hop from vehicle to vehicle, embarking on a 50-mile chase that saw them cross into neighboring Illinois.

Despite the criminal's best efforts, the posse of armed citizens and policemen was impossible to escape. With Hunter mortally wounded, Lamb and what was left of his gang found themselves cornered in the small village of Seidel, Illinois.

Walter Dietrich and Jack Clark would surrender to law enforcement. However, Lamb and his colleague, G.W. Landy, affectionately dubbed Dad by his younger cohorts, had no intention of surrendering. For a prolific criminal like Herman Lamb, to give up now would at best mean a life behind bars, and at worst, a trip to the electric chair. Indeed, this was to be the Baron's last stand. And B.

And being the soldier that he was, he was keen to go out on his own terms. With Landy preparing to follow, Herman Lamb, the father of the modern bank robbery, had reached the end of what felt like a long, but also very short road. He chambered one more round into his pistol before turning the weapon on himself.

While the famed baron of bank robbery had met his end in the botched Clinton job, the effectiveness of his techniques used in bank robberies would live on well after his passing. But as the 1930s played out, his grandeur as a nostalgic anti-hero would sour as economic conditions within the United States continued to worsen in the wake of the Great Depression. Nobody was enamored by bank robbers anymore.

As for his cohorts, with little in the way of job prospects, convicts like Walter Dietrich, now serving a lengthy term in Indiana State Prison in the aftermath of Lamb's final heist, would spend their years in jail, planning both their escape and future bank jobs. Falling in with Dietrich and soaking up all of his wisdom from his time working with Herman Lamb,

was another hot-headed convict whose exploits would eventually overshadow the Barons. Another man who would become known as one of the most notorious outlaws in American history. His name was John Dillinger. Though now his name has been lost to the passing of time, Herman Lamb and his legacy have left a lasting mark on American crime and our modern society.

Whether it be the bulletproof glass windows our bank tellers now sit behind as we slip our checks to them through the small crack at the bottom, or something else we take for granted, Lamb's bank robberies have had some notable impacts on the country's history. A disgraced German soldier who came to America hoping to find his place in a new world. Did he succeed? Perhaps not as he intended, but he made a mark nonetheless.

After all, who hasn't heard the expression of an escaped criminal being on the lam?

Wartime Stories is created and hosted by me, Luke LaManna. Executive produced by Mr. Ballin, Nick Witters, and Zach Levitt. Written by Jake Howard and myself. Audio editing and sound design by me, Cole Lacascio, and Wit Lacascio. Additional editing by Davin Intag and Jordan Stidham. Research by me, Jake Howard, Evan Beamer, and Camille Callahan. Mixed and mastered by Brendan Cain.

Production supervision by Jeremy Bone. Production coordination by Avery Siegel. Additional production support by Brooklyn Gooden. Artwork by Jessica Clarkson-Kiner, Robin Vane, and Picotta. Thank you so much for listening to Wartime Stories.