3

Mass Murder in Europe

In the first decade of the twentieth century, sex crime was still something of a rarity. It seems to have been the triggering mechanism of the First World War that finally released the age of sex crime on Europe. The dubious distinction of being its inaugurator probably goes to the Hungarian Bela Kiss, whose crimes presented an apparently insoluble problem to the police of Budapest.

In 1916, the Hungarian tax authorities noted that it had been a long time since rates had been paid on a house at 17 Rákóczi Street in the village of Cinkota, ten miles north-west of Budapest. It had been empty for two years, and since it seemed impossible to trace the owner, or the man who rented it, the district court of Pest-Pilis decided to sell it. A blacksmith named Istvan Molnar purchased it for a modest sum, and moved in with his wife and family. When tidying-up the workshop, Molnar came upon a number of sealed oildrums behind a mess of rusty pipes and corrugated iron. They had been solidly welded, and for a few days the blacksmith left them alone. Then his wife asked him what was in the drums—it might, for example, be petrol—and he settled down to removing the top of one of them with various tools. And when Molnar finally raised the lid, he clutched his stomach and rushed to the garden privy. His wife came in to see what had upset him; when she peered into the drum she screamed and fainted. It contained the naked body of a woman, in a crouching position, the practically airless drum had preserved it like canned meat.

Six more drums also proved to contain female corpses. Most of the women were middle-aged; none had ever been beautiful. And the police soon realized they had no way of identifying them. They did not even know the name of the man who had placed them there. The previous tenant had gone off to the war in 1914; he had spent little time in the house, and had kept himself to himself, so, nobody knew who he was. The police found it difficult even to get a description. They merely had seven unknown victims of an unknown murderer.

Professor Balazs Kenyeres, of the Police Medical Laboratory, was of the opinion that the women had been dead for more than two years. But at least he was able to take fingerprints; by 1916, fingerprinting had percolated even to the highly conservative Austro-Hungarian Empire. However, at this stage, fingerprinting was unhelpful, since it only told them that the women had no criminal records.

Some three weeks after the discovery, Detective Geza Bialokurszky was placed in charge of the investigation; he was one of the foremost investigators of the Budapest police. He was, in fact, Sir Geza (lovag), for he was a nobleman whose family had lost their estates. Now he settled down to the task of identifying the female corpses. If Professor Kenyeres was correct about time of death—and he might easily have been wrong, since few pathologists are asked to determine the age of a canned corpse—the women must have vanished in 1913 or thereabouts. The Missing Persons’ Bureau provided him with a list of about 400 women who had vanished between 1912 and 1914. Eventually, Bialokurszky narrowed these down to fifteen. But these women seemed to have no traceable relatives. Eventually, Bialokurszky found the last employer of a 36-year-old cook named Anna Novak, who had left her job abruptly in 1911. Her employer was the widow of a Hussar colonel, and she still had Anna’s ‘servant’s book’, a kind of identity card that contained a photograph, personal details, and a list of previous employers, as well as their personal comments. The widow assumed that she had simply found a better job or had got married. She still had the woman’s trunk in the attic.

This offered Bialokurszky the clue he needed so urgently: a sheet from a newspaper, Pesti Hirlap, with an advertisement marked in red pencil ‘Widower urgently seeks acquaintance of mature, warm-hearted spinster or widow to help assuage loneliness mutually. Send photo and details, Poste Restante Central P.O. Box 717. Marriage possible and even desirable.’

Now, at last, fingerprinting came into its own. Back at headquarters, the trunk was examined, and a number of prints were found; these matched those of one of the victims. The Post Office was able to tell Bialokurszky that Box 717 had been rented by a man who had signed for his key in the name of Elemer Nagy, of 14 Kossuth Street, Pestszenterzsebet, a suburb of Budapest. This proved to be an empty plot. Next, the detective and his team studied the agony column of Pesti Hirlap for 1912 and 1913. They found more than twenty requests for ‘warm-hearted spinsters’ which gave the address of Box 717. This was obviously how the unknown killer of Cinkota had contacted his victims. On one occasion he had paid for the advertisement by postal order, and the Post Office was able to trace it. (The Austro-Hungarian Empire at least had a super-efficient bureaucracy.) Elemer Nagy had given an address in Cinkota, where the bodies had been found, but it was not of the house in Rákóczi Street; in fact, it proved to be the address of the undertaker. The killer had a sense of humour.

Bialokurszky gave a press conference, and asked the newspapers to publish the signature of ‘Elemer Nagy’. This quickly brought a letter from a domestic servant named Rosa Diosi, who was 27, and admitted that she had been the mistress of the man in question. His real name was Bela Kiss, and she had last heard from him in 1914, when he had written to her from a Serbian prisoner of war camp. Bialokurszky had not divulged that he was looking for the Cinkota mass murderer, and Rosa Diosi was shocked and incredulous when he told her. She had met Kiss in 1914; he had beautiful brown eyes, a silky moustache, and a deep, manly voice. Sexually, he had apparently been insatiable…

Other women contacted the police, and they had identical stories to tell: answering the advertisement, meeting the handsome Kiss, and being quickly invited to become his mistress, with promises of marriage. They were also expected to hand over their life savings, and all had been invited to Cinkota. Some had not gone, some had declined to offer their savings—or had none to offer—and a few had disliked being rushed into sex. Kiss had wasted no further time on them, and simply vanished from their lives.

In July 1914, two years before the discovery of the bodies, Kiss had been conscripted into the Second Regiment of the Third Hungarian Infantry Battalion, and had taken part in the long offensive that led to the fall of Valjevo; but before that city had fallen in November, Kiss had been captured by the Serbs. No one was certain what had become of him after that. But the regiment was able to provide a photograph that showed the soldiers being inspected by the Archduke Joseph; Kiss’s face was enlarged, and the detectives at last knew what their quarry looked like. They had also heard that his sexual appetite was awe-inspiring, and this led them to show the photograph in the red-light district around Conti and Magyar Street. Many prostitutes recognized him as a regular customer; all spoke warmly of his generosity and mentioned his sexual prowess. But a waiter who had often served Kiss noticed that the lady with whom he was dining usually paid the bill…

Now, at last, Bialokurszky was beginning to piece the story together. Pawn tickets found in the Cinkota house revealed that the motive behind the murders was the cash of the victims. But the ultimate motive had been sex, for Kiss promptly spent the cash in the brothels of Budapest and Vienna. The evidence showed that he was, quite literally, a satyr—a man with a raging and boundless appetite for sex. His profession—of plumber and tinsmith—did not enable him to indulge this appetite, so he took to murder. He had received two legacies when he was 23 (about 1903) but soon spent them. After this, he had taken to seducing middle-aged women and ‘borrowing’ their savings. One of these, a cook named Maria Toth, had become a nuisance, and he killed her. After this he had decided that killing women was the easiest way to make a living as well as indulge his sexual appetites. His favourite reading was true-crime books about con-men and adventurers.

Bialokurszky’s investigations suggested that there had been more than seven victims, and just before Christmas 1916, the garden in the house at Cinkota was dug up; it revealed five more bodies, all of middle-aged women, all naked.

But where was Kiss? The War Office thought that he had died of fever in Serbia. He had been in a field hospital, but when Bialokurszky tracked down one of its nurses, she remembered the deceased as a ‘nice boy’ with fair hair and blue eyes, which seemed to suggest that Kiss had changed identity with another soldier, possibly someone called Mackavee; but the new ‘Mackavee’ proved untraceable. And although sightings of Kiss were reported from Budapest in 1919—and even New York as late as 1932—he was never found.

The first decade of the twentieth century also saw the emergence—and decline—of two female mass murderers: Jeanne Weber and Belle Gunness. Belle—whom we shall consider in the next chapter—seems to have killed purely for profit. Jeanne Weber, on the other hand, was undoubtedly a genuine serial killer—that is, one who kills repeatedly with a sexual motive. As in the case of her German predecessor, Anna Zwanziger (whose crimes took place precisely a century earlier), the sexual motive is less obvious than in the case of male serial killers; but no one who studies the case of the ‘ogress of the Goutte d’Or’ can fail to be aware of its existence.

In the Goutte d’Or, a slum passageway in Montmartre, lived four brothers named Weber, one of whose wives, Jeanne Weber, had lost two of her three children, and consoled herself with cheap red wine. Just around the corner lived her brother-in-law Pierre and his wife. On 2 March 1905, Mme Pierre asked her sister-in-law if she would baby-sit with her two children, Suzanne and Georgette, while she went to the public lavoir, the 1905 equivalent of a launderette. Mme Pierre had been there only a short time when a neighbour rushed in and told her that 18-month-old Georgette was ill—she had heard her choking and gasping as she passed. The mother hurried home, and found her child on the bed, her face blue and with foam around her mouth; her aunt Jeanne was massaging the baby’s chest. Mme Pierre took the child on her lap and rubbed her back until her breathing became easier, then went back to the launderette. But when she returned an hour later, with a basket of clean washing, Georgette was dead. The neighbour observed some red marks on the baby’s throat, and pointed them out to the father, but he seems to have shrugged it off. Nobody felt any suspicion towards Jeanne Weber, who had behaved admirably and apparently done her best.

Nine days later, when both parents had to be away from home, they again asked Aunt Jeanne to baby-sit. Two-year-old Suzanne was dead when they returned, again with foam around her mouth. The doctor diagnosed the cause of death as convulsions. Aunt Jeanne appeared to be dazed with grief.

Two weeks later, on 25 March, Jeanne Weber went to visit another brother-in-law, Leon Weber, and was left with the seven-month-old daughter Germaine while her mother went shopping. The grandmother, who lived on the floor below, heard sudden cries, and hurried upstairs to find Germaine in ‘convulsions’, gasping for breath. After a few minutes of rubbing and patting, the baby recovered, and the grandmother returned to her own room. Minutes later, as she talked with a neighbour, she once more heard the child’s cries. Again she hurried upstairs and found the baby choking. The neighbour who had accompanied her noticed red marks on the child’s throat. When the parents returned, Germaine had recovered.

The following day, Jeanne Weber came to enquire after the baby. And, incredibly, the mother again left her baby-sitting. When she returned, her child was dead. The doctor diagnosed the cause as diphtheria.

Three days later, on the day of Germaine’s funeral, Jeanne Weber stayed at home with her own child Marcel; he suffered the same convulsions, and was dead when the others returned.

A week later, on 5 April, Jeanne Weber invited to lunch the wife of Pierre Weber, and the wife of another brother-in-law, Charles. Mme Charles brought her ten-month-old son Maurice, a delicate child. After lunch, Jeanne baby-sat while her in-laws went shopping. When they returned, Maurice was lying on the bed, blue in the face, with foam around his lips, breathing with difficulty. The hysterical mother accused Jeanne of strangling him—there were marks on his throat—and she furiously denied it. So Mme Charles swept up her child in her arms, and hastened to the Hospital Brétonneau. She was sent immediately to the children’s ward, where a Dr Saillant examined the marks on Maurice’s throat. It certainly looked as if someone had tried to choke him. And when he heard the story of the other four deaths in the past month, Dr Saillant became even more suspicious. So was his colleague Dr Sevestre, and together they informed the police of this unusual case. Jeanne Weber was brought in for questioning, and Inspector Coiret began to look into her background. When he learned that all three of her children had died in convulsions, and that three years earlier, two other children—Lucie Alexandre and Marcel Poyatos—had died in the same mysterious way when in the care of Jeanne Weber, suspicion turned to certainty. The only thing that amazed him was that the Weber family had continued to ask her to baby-sit; they were either singularly fatalistic or criminally negligent. But then, the death of Jeanne’s own son Marcel had dispelled any suspicions that might have been forming. When Examining Magistrate Leydet was informed of this, he found himself wondering whether this was precisely why Marcel had died.

The magistrate decided to call in a medical expert, and asked Dr Léon Henri Thoinot, one of Paris’s most distinguished ‘expert witnesses’, second only to Paul Brouardel, the author of a classic book on strangulation and suffocation. Thoinot began by examining Maurice, who had now fully recovered. The child seemed perfectly healthy, and it was hard to see why he should have choked. Thoinot decided it could have been bronchitis. Next, the bodies of three of the dead children—Georgette, Suzanne and Germaine—were exhumed. Thoinot could find no traces of strangulation on their throats. Finally, Thoinot studied the body of Jeanne Weber’s son Marcel; again he decided there was no evidence of strangulation—for example, the hyoid bone, which is easily broken by pressure on the throat, was intact.

The accusations of murder had caused a public sensation; Jeanne Weber was the most hated woman in France. The magistrate, Leydet, had no doubt whatsoever of her guilt. Yet at her trial on 29 January 1906, Thoinot once again stated his opinion that there was no evidence that the children had died by violence, while the defence lawyer Henri Robert—an unscrupulous man—intimidated the prosecution witnesses until they contradicted themselves. The ‘ogress of the Goutte d’Or’—as public opinion had christened her—was acquitted on all charges. The audience in the courtroom underwent a change of heart and cheered her. And Brouardel and Thoinot collaborated on an article in a medical journal in which they explained once again why Jeanne Weber had been innocent.

The public did not think so. Nor did her husband, who left her. Jeanne Weber decided that she had better move to some place where she was not known. She was a flabby, sallow-faced woman, who had little chance of attracting another male. And at that point, rescue arrived out of the blue. A man named Sylvain Bavouzet wrote to her from a place called Chambon—in the department of Indre—offering her a job as his housekeeper; it seemed he had been touched by her sad tale, and by the injustice that had almost condemned her to death. In the spring of 1907, Jeanne Weber—now calling herself by her unmarried name Moulinet—arrived at the farm of Sylvain Bavouzet, and understood that the offer had not been made entirely out of the goodness of his heart. It was a miserable, poverty-stricken place, and Bavouzet was a widower with three children, the eldest an ugly girl with a hare lip. What he wanted was cheap labour and a female to share his bed. But at least it was a home.

A month later, on 16 April 1907, Bavouzet came home to find that his 9-year-old son Auguste was ill. He had recently eaten a large amount at a local wedding feast, so his discomfort could have been indigestion. The child’s sister Louise was sent to the local town Villedieu to ask the doctor to call. But Dr Papazoglou gave her some indigestion mixture and sent her on her way. Hours later, Sylvain Bavouzet arrived, in a state of agitation, and said the boy was worse. When Papazoglou arrived, Auguste was dead, and the new housekeeper was standing by the bedside. The child was wearing a clean shirt, tightly buttoned at the collar, and when this was opened, the doctor saw a red mark around his neck. This led him to refuse a death certificate. The next day, the coroner, Charles Audiat, decided that, in spite of the red mark, Auguste’s death was probably due to meningitis.

The dead boy’s elder sister Germaine, the girl with the hare lip, hated the new housekeeper. She had overheard what ‘Mme Moulinet’ had told the doctor, and knew it was mostly lies. Her brother had not vomited just before his death—so requiring a change of shirt. Precisely how Germaine realized that Mme Moulinet was the accused murderess Jeanne Weber is not certain. One account of the case declares that she came upon Jeanne Weber’s picture by chance in a magazine given to them by neighbours; another asserts that she searched the housekeeper’s bag and found press cuttings about the case. What is certain is that she took her evidence to the police station in Villedieu and accused Mme Moulinet of murdering her brother.

An examining magistrate demanded a new autopsy, and this was performed by Dr Frédéric Bruneau. He concluded that there was evidence that Auguste had been strangled, possibly with a tourniquet. (Doctors had found a scarf wrapped around the throat of Maurice Weber, the child who had survived.) Jeanne Weber was arrested. The new accusation caused a sensation in Paris.

Understandably, Henri Robert, the man who had been responsible for her acquittal, felt that this reflected upon his professional integrity. Thoinot and Brouardel agreed. They decided that the unfortunate woman must once again be saved from public prejudice. Robert agreed to defend her for nothing, while Thoinot demanded another inquest. He carried it out three and a half months after the child’s death, by which time decay had made it impossible to determine whether Auguste Bavouzet had been strangled. Predictably, Thoinot decided that Auguste had died of natural causes—intermittent fever. More doctors were called in. They agreed with Thoinot. The latter’s prestige was such that Examining Magistrate Belleau decided to drop the charges against Jeanne Weber, although he was personally convinced of her guilt. Henri Robert addressed the Forensic Medicine Society and denounced the ignorance and stupidity of provincial doctors and magistrates. Jeanne Weber was free to kill again.

History repeated itself. A philanthropic doctor named Georges Bonjeau, president of the Society for the Protection of Children, offered her a job in the children’s home in Orgeville. There she was caught trying to throttle a child and dismissed. But, like Thoinot and Henri Robert, Bonjeau did not believe in admitting his mistakes and he kept the matter to himself.

She became a tramp, living by prostitution. Arrested for vagrancy, she told M Hamard, chief of the Sûreté, that she had been responsible for the deaths of her nieces. Then she withdrew the statement, and was sent to an asylum in Nanterre, from which she was quickly released as sane. A man named Joly offered her protection, and she lived with him at Lay-Saint-Remy, near Toul, until he grew tired of her and threw her out. Again she became a prostitute, and finally met a lime-burner named Émile Bouchery, who worked in the quarries of Euville, near Commercy. They lived in a room in a cheap inn run by a couple named Poirot. One evening, ‘Mme Bouchery’ told the Poirots that she was afraid that Bouchery meant to beat her up—as he did periodically when drunk—and asked them if their seven-year-old son Marcel could sleep in her bed. They agreed. At 10 o’clock that evening, a child’s screams were heard, and the Poirots broke into Mme Bouchery’s room. Marcel was dead, his mouth covered in bloodstained foam. Mme Bouchery was also covered in blood. A hastily summoned doctor realized that the child had been strangled, and had bitten his tongue in his agony. It was the police who discovered a letter from maître Henri Robert in Mme Bouchery’s pocket, and realized that she was Jeanne Weber.

Once again, the reputations of Thoinot and Robert were at stake (Brouardel having escaped the public outcry by dying in 1906). Incredibly, both declined to admit their error. They agreed that the evidence proved unmistakably that Jeanne Weber had killed Marcel Poirot, but this, they insisted, was her first murder, brought about by the stress of years of persecution. It is unnecessary to say that the French press poured scorn on this view. Yet such was the influence of Thoinot that Jeanne Weber was not brought to trial; instead she was moved out of the public gaze to an asylum on the island of Maré, off New Caledonia in the Pacific. There she died in convulsions two years later, her hands locked around her own throat.

In the year of Jeanne Weber’s death, another mass murderer had already embarked on a career that would end under the guillotine. Henri Désiré Landru’s motives were strictly commercial; after an unsuccessful career as a swindler, which earned him a number of jail terms, Landru decided that dead victims would have no chance to complain. Between 1914 and 1918 he seduced and murdered ten women (as well as the son of one of his victims) for the sake of their property and savings. He was guillotined in 1922, and his nickname—Bluebeard—has since been applied to all mass killers with purely commercial motives.

England’s most celebrated Bluebeard had already gone to the gallows seven years earlier. George Joseph Smith was a petty crook with a cockney accent, and he had served two jail sentences for persuading women to steal for him when he decided that murder was less complicated. His method was to marry a lonely spinster or widow, persuade her to make a will in his favour, then drown her in the bath tub by raising her ankles. His first two victims died in seaside resorts, with minimal publicity. Smith’s mistake was to move to Highgate, in London, for his third murder, and the resulting publicity in The News of the World drew the attention of relatives of previous victims, who informed the police. Smith was tried only for the death of his last victim, but his fate was sealed when the judge ordered that details of the previous ‘accidents’ should be revealed to the jury.

The interest of these two mass murderers, in this particular context, is that women who had escaped with their lives testified that both had curiously hypnotic powers, and that a single penetrating glance could deprive them of their will. By contrast, most serial murderers have clearly failed to master the art of seduction—often because they have been physically repulsive.

Yet there is, nevertheless, a basic similarity. Landru, like Casanova, found seduction the most fascinating of sports. The way women yielded and melted as he gazed into their eyes was a kind of drug. He might be a crook and a failure, but when he saw that yielding look in a woman’s eyes, he felt like a god. And so, as in the case of the serial killer, the mass murderer kills out of a form of inadequacy.

At the same time as Landru was pursuing his career as a lady-killer in Paris, another mass murderer of women was operating in Berlin. The full details of Georg Karl Grossmann’s crimes will never be known, since he committed suicide before he came to trial. But it is clear that, in terms of the number of victims, he is one of the worst mass murderers of the century.

In August 1921 the owner of a top-storey flat in Berlin near the Silesian railway terminus heard sounds of a struggle coming from the kitchen and called the police. They found on Grossmann’s kitchen bed (a camp bed) the trussed-up carcass of a recently killed girl, tied as if ready for butchering.

Grossmann had been in the place since the year before the war. He had stipulated for a separate entrance, and had the use of the kitchen, which he never allowed his landlord to enter. He was a big, surly man who kept himself to himself, and lived by peddling. He was not called up during the war (which led the other tenants to assume—rightly—that he had a police record), and lived in self-chosen retirement. He picked up girls with great regularity (in fact, he seldom spent a night alone). He killed many of these sleeping partners and sold the bodies for meat, disposing of the unsaleable parts in the river. (The case became known as Die Braut auf der Stulle—‘the bread and butter brides’, since a companion for a night is known as a ‘bride’ in Germany.) At the time of his arrest, evidence was found which indicated that three women had been killed and dismembered in the past three weeks.

Grossmann was a sexual degenerate and sadist who had served three terms of hard labour for offences against children, one of which had ended fatally. He also indulged in bestiality. It is of interest that Grossmann was indirectly involved in the famous ‘Anastasia’ case—the Grand Duchess Anastasia who was believed by many to be the last surviving member of the Tsar’s family. At one point it was announced that ‘Anastasia’ was really an impostor named Franziska Schamzkovski, a Polish girl from Bütow in Pomerania. Franziska’s family were told that their daughter had been murdered by Grossmann on 13 August 1920; an entry in his diary on that date bore the name ‘Sasnovski’. Anastasia’s enemies insisted that this was not true, that Franziska and Anastasia were the same person.

Grossmann laughed when he heard the death sentence, and afterwards had fits of manic behaviour. He hanged himself in his cell. The number of his victims certainly runs into double figures, since he was ‘in business’ throughout the war.

The defeat of Germany in 1918 brought soaring inflation, which was soon followed by revolution. In October 1918 the sailors at Kiel mutinied when ordered to go to sea and fight the British. In November an independent socialist republic was proclaimed in Bavaria. On 9 November the Kaiser abdicated and a republic was proclaimed in Berlin. Two days later, the Armistice was signed. In January, there was a communist (Spartacist) revolt, which was crushed by the army; two of its leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were killed while under arrest. Magnus Hirschfeld described going to the mortuary with a patient in search of her son, and seeing hundreds of bodies, many mutilated or with their throats slit. He also observed some young girls who kept rejoining the queue who filed past the unidentified bodies, obviously fascinated by the sight of naked male bodies, and unable to remove their eyes from genitals that were swollen with haemorrhages and decay.

In the same paragraph, Hirschfeld also describes standing beside the wife of a State Attorney at an execution, and observing her heaving chest and ecstatic groans as the condemned man was dragged to the executioner’s block, followed by a convulsion like a sexual orgasm as the axe fell. These two descriptions—in juxtaposition—suddenly afford us one of those flashes of insight into the rise of sex crime. There is no great gulf between bored working girls, inexperienced and sexually frustrated enough to be fascinated by swollen male genitals, and a State Attorney’s wife, so morbidly aroused by the thought of a man’s execution that horror turns into sexual excitement. Sade once admitted that his senses were too coarse and blunt, so that it required a strong stimulus to arouse them. But there is a sense in which this is true for all human beings. We are all too mechanical, too prone to sink into a state that is akin to hypnotism. Intense sexual stimulus causes a sudden awakening. A man who catches sight of a woman undressing through a lighted window—as Ted Bundy did—is literally ‘galvanized’. This in turn explains why Sade was stimulated by blows; they stirred his jaded senses to sudden attention.

Moreover, having experienced such a sensation once, human beings discover that nature will obligingly reproduce the sexual excitement at the mere thought of the original stimulus—for example, swollen genitals or a man losing his head. The link is created by association of ideas, and persists through habit. And so the straightforward sexual urge—which is, after all, designed simply to ensure the continuation of the species—turns into a kind of monstrous parody of itself.

The mechanism can be seen clearly in the most notorious German sex killer of the post-war period, Fritz Haarmann.

The city of Hanover, in Lower Saxony, was reduced to unparalleled chaos by the poverty and starvation that followed the First World War. It became the centre of crime, black marketeering and prostitution—particularly male prostitution.

In the summer of 1924, the city’s inhabitants were disturbed by rumours of a mass murderer. Five skulls were found on the banks of the River Leine within a few weeks, and boys playing in marshland found a sack full of human bones. The skulls were those of boys, one as young as eleven. These skulls had been cleanly removed with a sharp instrument. At first it was suggested that they might have been planted as a joke by medical students, but the fact that fragments of flesh were adhering to some of them made this unlikely. Superstitious servant girls began to talk about a ‘werewolf’. Finally, a massive search of the surrounding countryside was organized on Whit Sunday. After more human bones had been found, the river was dammed, and the mud searched by workers. More than five hundred parts of corpses were found. Medical examination revealed that these came from at least twenty-two bodies. And some of the remains were still fresh.

In fact, the police had a suspect—an overweight middle-aged man with a Hitler moustache named Fritz Haarmann, who was known to be homosexual—as the killer obviously was. He was often seen in the company of young men, whom he picked up at the railway station, and witnesses also reported seeing him throw a heavy sack into the river. But the thought that Haarmann might be the ‘werewolf’ caused some embarrassment, since Haarmann had been working for the police for the past five years—in fact, some people knew him as ‘Detective Haarmann’. He mixed freely with the police, and was also a leading member of a patriotic organization called the Black Reichswehr, which was opposed to the French occupation of the Ruhr. He even ran a detective bureau called the Lasso Agency, in partnership with a police official. If Haarmann was ‘the werewolf’ there would be a great many red faces.

The police finally decided to try and trap Haarmann by means of two young policemen from Berlin. But before this could happen, Haarmann fell into their hands by accident. On 23 June 1924, he approached the police and demanded that they arrest a 15-year-old boy called Fromm, who was travelling on forged papers. The boy was taken to the police station at two in the morning. He countered by alleging that he had spent several nights in Haarmann’s apartment, and that Haarmann had repeatedly performed homosexual acts on him. He had also held a knife against his throat and asked him if he was afraid to die. The vice squad used this allegation as an excuse to keep Haarmann in custody. The police then hastened to search his room in the Neuerstrasse. There they found many bloodstains, as well as a great deal of clothing that obviously belonged to young men. Confronted with this evidence, Haarmann pointed out that he made a living both as a butcher and an old clothes merchant. And after several days of questioning, the police had to admit that they had no evidence to link Haarmann with the human bones and skulls.

The breakthrough came by chance. A couple named Witzel were the parents of a teenage boy named Robert Witzel, who had disappeared. Robert Witzel’s friend had finally admitted to the parents that both he and Robert had been seduced by ‘Detective Haarmann.’ Some of Witzel’s clothes had been found in Haarmann’s room, but Haarmann professed to know nothing about them. Now, as Herr Witzel and his wife sat outside the office of Police Commissioner Ratz, a young man walked past them, and Frau Witzel recognized the jacket he was wearing as belonging to her son. When the young man—named Kahlmeyer—was asked where he had obtained the jacket, he acknowledged that he had been given it by Haarmann, who had also given him a pair of trousers in which he had found an identification card belonging to Robert Witzel.

Confronted with this evidence, Fritz Haarmann suddenly broke down, and admitted that he had murdered young men in the act of sexual intercourse; he said that he would suddenly be overcome with an insane desire to bite their throats and strangle them.

Even now, Haarmann refused to make a full confession. When pressed, he burst into tears or violent rages. It took seven days of non-stop interrogation finally to wear him down. Finally, his resistance collapsed, and he took the police to a site where he had hidden the skeleton of a youth of 16—his last victim, Eric de Vries, killed only a week before his arrest. He now claimed that he had asked the police to take young Fromm into custody because he knew that he would be unable to resist the urge to kill him that night.

There was something oddly childish about Haarmann; it was clear that, in spite of considerable cunning and impudence, he was in some ways mentally retarded. His confession also made it clear that he was—like Zola’s bête humaine—in the grip of a sadistic obsession that swept him away and made him kill his sex partners.

Haarmann was also known to be intimate with a young man called Hans Grans, who had not been present at Haarmann’s arrest, since he was in prison for stealing a watch. Haarmann’s confession soon made it clear that Grans knew about his strange sexual habits, and had often procured murder victims for him. Two weeks after Haarmann’s arrest, Grans was also taken into custody.

A psychologist named Theodore Lessing was fascinated by the case. Lessing was also a philosopher—strongly influenced by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche—and a pacifist. He was struck by the parallel between Haarmann’s crimes and the carnage of the recent world war. He received permission to interview Haarmann, and got to know him well. This is what he learned.

Friedrich Heinrich Karl Haarmann was born on 25 October 1879, the youngest of six children. His father was a retired railway worker, cantankerous, miserly and inclined to drunkenness. He had married a woman seven years his senior, who brought him a small fortune in property; even so, he remained an indefatigable satyr, even bringing his mistresses into the home. In later life he contracted syphilis.

Haarmann senior seems to have detested the gentle, rather effeminate Fritz, who was pampered by his mother. Fritz, in turn, hated his father. And although he loved to play with dolls, he also had a morbid streak—he liked to tie up his sisters so they looked like bodies, and to tap on windows at night, pretending to be a ghost.

He seems to have suffered from meningitis as a child, and after his death, examination of his skull revealed that the brain touched it in several places, probably as a result of the illness. Again, when he was a 16-year-old recruit in the army, he began to show signs of mental illness and was admitted to hospital. Haarmann blamed a blow on the head which had occurred during bar exercises in the gymnasium, and sunstroke. In fact, both probably reactivated the problems due to the meningitis. Many murderers have changed character after a blow on the head.

This may also explain Haarmann’s lifelong record as a child molester. Lessing learned that he had been seduced at school when he was 7 years old—Lessing does not say by whom—and that the offences against children began after a sexual experience with a ‘mannish woman’, who lured him into her room when he was 16. It seems possible that the experience suddenly convinced Haarmann that he was not heterosexual, and that the attempts to seduce children resulted from a kind of revulsion.

At 17 he was charged with acts of indecency performed with children he had lured into doorways or cellars. He was found to be suffering from ‘congenital mental deficiency’ (in fact, probably a result of the meningitis) and placed in an asylum at Hildesheim. Because he was regarded as dangerous, he was transferred for a while into a Hanover hospital—presumably with better security—then back to Hildesheim. He developed a kind of terror of mental hospitals, and often said to Lessing: ‘Hang me, do whatever you like with me, but don’t send me back to the loony bin.’ After several escapes, he succeeded in escaping to Switzerland, where he worked in a shipyard near Zurich. By the time he returned to Hanover, his escape seems to have been forgotten.

He quarrelled endlessly with his father, mostly about Haarmann’s refusal to take a regular job—even in his own father’s cigar factory. He became engaged to a girl called Erna, who became pregnant by him a few years later. But they were to drift apart.

In 1900, at the age of 21, Haarmann enlisted for his military service, and for a while was an excellent soldier. But on a strenuous route march, he collapsed with dizzy spells—a recurrence of the old trouble with his head. He was dismissed from the army after a diagnosis of mental deficiency, and granted a small pension. This meant that for the rest of his life he was never destitute.

His mother had died while he was in the army. Back in Hanover, Haarmann again quarrelled continuously with his father, who tried to have him committed to a mental home. But a doctor who examined him declared that although he was ‘morally inferior, of low intelligence, idle, coarse, irritable and totally egotistical, he is not mentally ill as such…’

Haarmann had gonorrhoea for a while, which seems to have confirmed his indifference to women. At this point—in his early twenties—he met a 40-year-old homosexual, Adolf Meil, who picked him up at a fair and invited him back to his room. ‘He kissed me. I was shy…He said: “It’s late, stay with me.” I did. He did things I’d never imagined…’ The affair lasted for many years—possibly until Meil’s death in 1916.

In 1904 he applied for a job as an invoice clerk in a paint factory, although he had no idea of what this involved. He persuaded an apprentice in the office to do his work, so his own duties were relatively light. He presented invoices to customers in which the price was deliberately low, so they paid in cash, which Haarmann then pocketed. He also became friendly with the factory cleaner, Frau Guhlisch, who had a 10-year-old son who was already an accomplished thief. The three of them removed large quantities of paint from the factory, which they sold. They also burgled homes and robbed graveyards, often digging up recently buried corpses…Eventually Haarmann was caught and received his first prison sentence—the first of many. Released from jail, he pretended to be an official from the municipal ‘disinfection service’, calling at homes in which someone had recently died of disease and advising the family to have the place disinfected; he used the opportunity to steal.

He spent the First World War in prison for burglary. Back in Hanover in 1918, he found himself in a Germany suffering from galloping inflation and acute food shortages. It was just the kind of environment in which he was fitted to thrive. He soon discovered that the railway station was the centre of the black market, and it became virtually his headquarters. He also discovered that the police were understaffed and overworked, and were glad of any tip-offs he could offer. Within months, Haarmann was accepted by the police and railway officials as a kind of unofficial policeman. His friendship with crooks, pimps and prostitutes meant that he often got wind of big ‘jobs’ before they happened; in one case he was instrumental in catching a gang of counterfeiters.

But for a man of Haarmann’s sexual tastes, the railway station represented a non-stop temptation. Homeless young men flocked in from the countryside. Haarmann often demanded to see their papers, and even questioned them in the station-master’s office. The young men he liked were invited back to his room for food and a bed. They soon learned that the price was to spend the night in bed with Haarmann, engaged in mutual oral sex which often went on for hours before Haarmann reached orgasm. He claimed to be impotent—perhaps as a result of the gonorrhoea—and in any case was not inclined towards sodomy. But he had one disconcerting peculiarity. As he reached sexual ecstasy, he experienced an overpowering desire to bite the windpipe of his sexual partner. If the youth was young or slightly built, he stood no chance against the well-built Haarmann. The result—Haarmann confessed to Lessing—was that his partners often died from lack of air; in some cases, he actually bit through the windpipe.

One of the major shortages in post-war Germany was of meat. Haarmann dealt in the meat of horses and other illegally slaughtered animals. His landlady became accustomed to the sound of chopping and banging from his room, and on one occasion met him coming downstairs with a covered bucket; the cloth slipped aside and she saw that it contained blood. The woman next door received a bag of fresh bones from Haarmann, from which she made brawn. Then she decided that the bones looked too white, and decided not to eat the meat. To Haarmann, the cheerful opportunist, it would probably have seemed sinful to waste the body parts of his victims when they could be sold as meat. Haarmann never actually confessed to this—but then, he made a habit of confessing only to crimes that could actually be proved against him.

Some time in 1919, Haarmann was approached by a ‘pretty’ youth named Hans Grans. His father was a bookbinder, and Hans was an obsessive reader. But he was less than honest, and already had a varied career of petty crime behind him when he met Haarmann. A friend at the railway station told him that ‘that queer over there gave a pretty boy 20 marks the other day.’ Grans lost no time in approaching Haarmann and fluttering his eyelashes. Although not specifically homosexual—in fact, he was something of a womanizer—Grans had no objection to selling his body.

What he saw was a plump little man with a full-moon face and a broad and reassuring peasant accent. As he walked he moved his behind in a feminine manner, and his hands were soft and white. The rather high voice quavered like that of an old woman. His teeth were very white, and he had a habit of licking his lips with his fleshy tongue.

Haarmann was fascinated, and lost no time in inviting Hans back to his room and persuading him to undress. But when naked, Hans ceased to be attractive: his body was covered with hair like a monkey. It was not until he shaved it off that Haarmann was able to experience desire.

There was something about Hans that arrested Haarmann’s murderous impulses—the mixture of charm, dishonesty and total unscrupulousness. Haarmann became the teacher, Hans the pupil. Haarmann gave him cigarettes and meat to sell, and lent him money which Hans often spent on girls. Hans soon became aware of Haarmann’s sexual peculiarities, and often procured boys for him. He discovered what happened to some of the boys when he walked into Haarmann’s room one day and found a corpse in the bed. Haarmann told him to go away; the next day, the corpse had gone. It was not difficult for Haarmann to dispose of a body: the river ran past the wall of his lodgings in the Neuestrasse. Provided he dismembered the corpse and carried it down in a bucket, chances of detection were virtually non-existent.

The two of them remained together until Haarmann’s arrest—although often separated when one or the other of them was in prison. They sometimes quarrelled violently, on one occasion brandishing knives at one another and shouting ‘Murderer!’ More than once, Haarmann ordered Hans to leave—then found himself unable to exist without him, and begged him to return. When Haarmann became angry and violent—as he was prone to—Hans would put his arms round his waist and slip his tongue into his mouth, whereupon Haarmann would melt. Hans always made sure that he held his lover’s arms as he did this, knowing that when sexually excited, he would bite the throat. (Later, Haarmann became sentimentally attached to his lawyer, and on one occasion, hugged him enthusiastically; when the lawyer looked anxious, Haarmann assured him: ‘Don’t worry—I won’t bite.’)

Oddly enough, there was a third member of this partnership, another good-looking boy named Hugo Wittkowski, who was Grans’s closest friend. Unlike Grans, Hugo was completely heterosexual, and often brought women to Haarmann’s apartment. When Haarmann was in prison for six months, Hugo and Hans allowed young prostitutes to move in, and took a share of their earnings. Haarmann hated Wittkowski, and on one occasion planned to murder the two young men and then commit suicide. Haarmann suffered from the odd delusion that young men found him irresistible, and once shouted at Hugo: ‘You’ve offered yourself to me hundreds of times, but I didn’t want you. You weren’t good enough for me’—to which Wittkowski replied simply: ‘I only like women.’

Within a few weeks of Haarmann’s arrest, the prosecutors had enough evidence to charge him with twenty-seven murders, beginning with a schoolboy called Fritz Rothe in 1918. When asked how many boys he had killed, Haarmann would shrug and say: ‘I forget. Perhaps thirty, perhaps forty…’ Grans was charged as an accessory in at least one murder.

His trial began at the Hanover Assizes on 4 December 1924. It lasted fourteen days and 130 witnesses were called. The public prosecutor was Oberstaatsanwalt Dr Wilde, assisted by Dr Wagenschiefer; the defence was conducted by Justizrat Philipp Benfey and Rechtsanwalt Oz Lotzen. Haarmann was allowed remarkable freedom; he was usually gay and irresponsible, frequently interrupting the proceedings. At one point he demanded indignantly why there were so many women in court; the judge answered apologetically that he had no power to keep them out. When a woman witness was too distraught to give her evidence about her son with clarity, Haarmann got bored and asked to be allowed to smoke a cigar; permission was immediately granted.

He persisted to the end in his explanation of how he had killed his victims—biting them through the throat. Some boys he denied killing—for example, a boy named Hermann Wolf, whose photograph showed an ugly and ill-dressed youth; like Oscar Wilde, Haarmann declared that the boy was far too ugly to interest him.

Haarmann was sentenced to death by decapitation; Grans to twelve years in jail. Haarmann later produced a confession which has much in common with that of Mme de Brinvilliers or Gilles de Rais; it is full of accounts of sexual perversion and the pleasure he took in committing murders that were all inspired by his sexual perversion.

In his account of Haarmann, Theodore Lessing also mentions another case that caused a sensation at the time: that of Karl Denke. On 21 December 1924, a few days after Haarmann had been sentenced to death, a travelling journeyman named Vincenz Oliver called at the home of 54-year-old Denke to beg for food. Denke was known as a recluse—although he was a good churchgoer, and blew the organ in the local church. A retired farmer, he lived in an apartment block which he owned near Munsterberg, in Silesia.

Denke invited the journeyman in and told him to sit down. But instead of bringing him food, he attacked him with a hatchet. Oliver struggled and called out, and the noise was heard by a coachman named Gabriel, who lived in the flat above. Thinking his landlord was in trouble, Gabriel rushed downstairs—to find Oliver almost unconscious. The journeyman was able to gasp out that Denke had tried to kill him. Gabriel called the police and Denke was arrested. A search of the house revealed identity papers belonging to twelve travelling journeymen, as well as clothing. Two tubs proved to contain human meat pickled in brine, and there were also pots of fat and bones. Medical examination revealed that these belonged to thirty victims. A ledger was found in which Denke recorded the dates on which he had pickled the carcasses, and the weight. The earliest murder had been in 1921, and the victims were mostly tramps, beggarwomen and journeymen.

Denke never came to trial; he hanged himself with his braces a few days later. It is assumed that he was a cannibal, who had found this ingenious way of overcoming Germany’s meat shortage.

German schoolchildren were soon repeating a riddle that went: ‘Who is Germany’s greatest mass murderer?’ The child was instructed to answer: ‘Haarmann, ich denke’ (Haarmann, I think), which also sounded like a confession of guilt (Haarmann, I, Denke).

They also sang a nursery rhyme that went:

Warte, warte, nur ein weilchen,

Dann kommt Haarmann auch zu dir,

Mit dem kleinen Hackenbeilchen,

Und macht Hackefleisch aus dir.

Wait, wait a little while

Then Haarmann will come to you,

And with his little chopper

Will make mincemeat out of you.

(The English ‘mincemeat’ misses the sheer gruesomeness of the German Hackefleisch—hacked flesh.)

Four years after Haarmann’s execution, Germany again became the subject of worldwide news coverage as another ‘monster’ committed a series of sadistic crimes in Düsseldorf. Peter Kürten is Germany’s Jack the Ripper, and the book about him, The Sadist, by Karl Berg, Professor of Forensic Medicine in the Düsseldorf Academy, is—like Lessing’s book on Haarmann—one of the great classics of criminology. Since the English translation (by Olga Illnerr and George Godwin) has been out of print for nearly half a century, I shall allow Berg to introduce the case in his own words:

In the whole history of crime there is to be found no record comparable in circumstances of frightfulness with the long series of crimes perpetrated in our own time by the Düsseldorf murderer, Peter Kürten.

The epidemic of sexual outrages and murders which took place in the town of Düsseldorf between the months of February and November in the year 1929, caused a wave of horror and indignation to sweep, not only through Düsseldorf, but through all Germany and, it may be said without exaggeration, throughout the whole world.

As one outrage succeeded another and always in circumstances of grim drama; as one type of crime was followed by yet another, public consternation reached the point of stupefaction.

Kürten, however, has been judged; he now belongs to criminal history.

Kürten’s crimes were not merely the subject of exhaustive judicial examination; justice went deeper in his case and sought to probe the soul of this strange and enigmatic man.

In so doing Justice has placed us in a position to understand the nature both of the crimes and of the perpetrator of them. Here, for the medico-jurist, is truly absorbing material for study, for Kürten is a clinical subject who yields, in exchange for a careful analysis, a real enlargement of our knowledge of the abnormal operating in the sphere of crime.

Here is Berg’s account of Kürten’s first murder of 1929:

On the 9th of February, 1929, about 9 o’clock in the morning, workmen going to work found in the vicinity of the building upon which they were employed in the Kettwiger-strasse, in the Flingern district, the body of an eight-year-old girl lying under a hedge. The ground at that point sloped slightly towards the hedge, and as the hedge faced a wide open space, it was only by chance that the body was discovered.

The body was completely clothed and clad in a cloak. The clothing, however, was partially burnt and the underclothing still smouldered. The body, which smelled strongly of petroleum, was not in any sort of disorder, for even the openings of the dress and the knickers were not disarranged. A closer examination of the clothing revealed bloodstains from multiple wounds in the breast, wounds made, quite obviously, through the clothing. On the inner part of the knickers near the external genitalia were two small bloodstains. Microscopic examination revealed the presence hereabouts of seminal fluid. In the vagina there was fluid blood which had flowed from a wound 1 cm in length, at the entrance of the vaginal cavity.

The autopsy showed that the burning had affected practically only the clothing, injuring the skin surface nowhere but on the upper part of the thighs, the neck and chin, over which area the skin was blackened and discoloured, while the hair of the head was a black, charred mass, here and there completely burnt off. On the left breast there was a group of thirteen wounds, the face was bloated and livid. The stabs about the left breast were grouped over an area rather smaller than a hand. Five of the wounds had penetrated the heart, three had pierced the left and right pleuræ; three had penetrated the liver. In the pleural cavities I found 750 cc. of blood. Death must have been swift through internal haemorrhage. The scene of the crime was without trace of blood. The criminal had attempted to burn the clothing of the body only. There were no traces to suggest that soot had been inhaled, and the burning was without vital reaction. In the tissues of the lumbar region there was some 4 cm. of blood infiltration.

In the stomach was found a mass of chyme, partially digested white cabbage, and remains of meat.

The essential factors to be considered, from the medico-legal standpoint, for a diagnosis of the cause of death and for a theory as to the time of it, as well as for the motive of the murderer, were the characteristic stabs, the congestion of blood which was found in the head, the exact nature of the wounds and the condition of the contents of the stomach, and, last, the injury to the genitalia. So far as the congestion of blood in the head is concerned, one can only suggest that it indicated a forcible strangulation.

The judicial autopsy of the Ohliger child established the time of death, the contents of the stomach assisting to that end.

Death must have occurred very quickly through the heart wounds. There were no visible marks where the strangling grip had been applied, but some manner of strangulation must have initiated the attack though leaving no traces on the skin of the neck. No calls for help were heard in the rather populous neighbourhood where the crime was committed.

The mother deposed that the murdered child had eaten sauerkraut about 2 p.m. and had then set out to visit a friend. At 6 o’clock the friend had advised the child to hurry home before dark. There was a public footpath which she could take and which offered her a short cut.

Bearing in mind the fact that in six hours the stomach could normally complete the work of digestion, then the scarcely digested food found in the stomach indicates that death took place between 6 and 7 o’clock in the evening. The autopsy indicated that the child had been waylaid while on her homeward way.

The condition of the genitals revealed an injury of little consequence on the mucous membrane of the vagina. The hymen was torn about 1 cm. Only slight traces of seminal fluid were found on the child’s underclothing. It was clear that an ejaculation could not have taken place into the vagina.

From these considerations I arrived at the conclusion that the criminal’s objective had not been coitus, but that he must have inserted a finger smeared with semen under the unopened knickers of the child and thus inserted it, into the vagina. This must have been done with force, for in addition to the scratch at the entrance of the vagina, there was also a trace of bruising of the pelvis.

The stabs in the skin of the breast were all together and parallel. Some of these showed that the knife had been held with the cutting edge of the blade upwardly. I concluded from the position of these wounds that the criminal had done the stabbing in the breast as the child lay unconscious on the ground, delivering the blows in swift succession. Otherwise one would have expected that the stabbings inflicted on a person still conscious would have been placed irregularly. In addition one would expect to find defensive wounds on the hands.

That my conclusions were correct is borne out by the attack which took place on an elderly woman and of which I learned only later. This attack took place five days before the murder of Rosa Ohliger. I attributed it immediately to the same criminal, an assumption which was to be confirmed by later events.

In April 1929 it seemed that the ‘monster’ had been caught. Following two more attacks on women, an idiot named Stausberg was arrested and confessed to the murders. He had a cleft palate and hare lip. The police were soon convinced that, although he was undoubtedly responsible for the latest attacks, he had not committed the murders. He was sent to a mental home.

For three months, Kürten satisfied himself with affairs with servant girls, whom he attempted to strangle ‘playfully’. (All this emerged at the trial.) On 30 July a prostitute named Emma Gross was found strangled in her room, but it seems that Kürten was not responsible for this.

In August, Kürten strangled a girl he referred to as ‘Anni’, and pushed her body into the river; but the body was not recovered, so it is not certain whether this story was Kürten’s invention. Also in late August, a young woman, Frau Mantel, was stabbed in the back as she walked in the western suburb of Lierenfeld, where a fair was being held. Her wound was not serious. In the same month a girl, Anna Goldhausen, and a man, Gustav Kornblum (who was sitting in the park), were stabbed in the back. In neither case were the injuries fatal. Then, on 24 August, a double murder horrified the city. The bodies of two children, 5-year-old Gertrude Hamacher and 14-year-old Louise Lenzen, were found on an allotment near their home. Both had been strangled, and then had their throats cut. Neither had been raped.

The same Sunday afternoon, a servant girl named Gertrude Schulte was on her way to a fair at Neuss, and was spoken to by a man who called himself Fritz Baumgart. In a wood he attempted sexual intercourse, and the girl said, ‘I’d rather die.’ ‘Baumgart’ replied, ‘Well die then,’ and stabbed her several times. But she did not die, and was eventually able to give the police a description of her assailant.

This episode strengthened the police suspicion that there were two maniacs at work, since it seemed unlikely that the same man would kill two children on Saturday, and be out looking for further victims on Sunday.

In September, Kürten attacked three more girls and threw one of them into the river after his attempted strangulation. But these events caused little sensation in comparison with the next murder, which occurred in late September. Another servant girl, Ida Reuter, set out for her Sunday afternoon walk and never returned; the next day she was found in a field near the Rhine meadows. Her head had been battered with a heavy instrument (which turned out to be a hammer), and her handbag and knickers were missing; she was found in a position that indicated sexual assault.

The next case took place a few weeks later, in October. Again the victim was a servant girl, Elizabeth Dorrier. Again she was found (on 12 October) near the River Düssel at Grafenberg. Her death was also due to hammer blows on the head, and her hat and coat were missing.

On 25 October a Frau Meurer was accosted by a man in Flingern, who asked, ‘Aren’t you afraid to be out alone?’ She woke up in hospital, her skin having been broken by a hammer, which had not, however, cracked the skull. Later the same evening, in the centre of the city, a Frau Wanders, who was seeking an escort, was accosted and knocked unconscious with a hammer, which had struck her four blows.

On 7 November a 5-year-old child, Gertrude Albermann, was missing from her home. Two days later her body was found near a factory yard, among nettles and brick rubble; she had been strangled and stabbed thirty-six times.

At this point Kürten imitated the ‘Ripper’s’ tactics by sending a letter to a newspaper, stating where the body could be found, and mentioning the whereabouts of another body. (Kürten had a great admiration for the Ripper, and had studied the case carefully.) A spot in the meadows at Papendelle was mentioned. This letter led to the discovery of the body of Maria Hahn, who had been dead since August. Her body was dug up, after some days of searching, on 14 November, and was found to be completely naked. She had twenty stab wounds. Thousands of spectators streamed out to the spot where her body was found.

Berg comments:

No other crime is more significant for an understanding of the personality of Kürten than this. Kürten himself has told about it in all its details, and even confessed to the examining magistrate the sexual motive. Here is his statement:

‘On the 8th of August, 1929, I was strolling in the Zoo district. I hadn’t any intention of committing any offence on a girl at the time. On the Hansaplatz, a girl was sitting on a bench. She accosted me. I sat down beside her and we talked pleasantly together and made a date for an excursion to the Neanderthal the next Sunday. On Sunday, punctually at 1.30 in the afternoon, I found myself in the Hansaplatz where the girl was already waiting. We went to the Neanderthal, visited a beer garden and then on to the Stinter mill. We stayed there for three hours, drank a glass of red wine each. There also I bought her a slab of chocolate. Towards 7 o’clock we went to Erkrath where we had supper with beer. We then strolled past the house of the Morps, and along by the river. Here we decided to have sexual intercourse. After sexual intercourse we left the bank of the river and went into the meadow. Here I decided to kill her. I led Hahn to a big bush near a ditch and there we settled down. It was half-past nine. Suddenly I strangled her until she became unconscious, but she came to herself quickly again. Again I strangled her. After a bit I stabbed her in the throat with the scissors. She lost a lot of blood but regained consciousness, repeatedly asking me in a feeble voice to spare her life. I stabbed her in the breast a blow that probably pierced the heart. I then gave her repeated stabs in the breast and head. The process of dying probably took an hour. I let the body roll into the ditch and threw branches over it. Then I crossed the meadow and came to the road that runs from Morp-Papendell highway. I had taken the handbag of Hahn with me. From it I took the watch of the dead girl. I made a gift of it to somebody later on. The bag with the keys I threw into an oatfield.

‘When I got home my wife was already in bed. Next morning we had a row, because she was suspicious about the night before. She became so excited about it that I made up my mind that I would have to find some way of seeing that the body of Hahn wasn’t discovered, otherwise my wife would connect the blood stains on my clothes with it. So I went again on Monday after finishing work to the scene of the crime and pondered where I could bury the body. I went back to the flat and fetched a shovel, inventing an excuse to give my wife. Near the scene of the crime, in the corner of the wood, I dug a deep hole in a fallow field, and carried the body along the footpath, avoiding the oatfield. By the hole I put the body down. I got into the hole and dragged the body down to me. Here I laid it on its back as one buries a body. A shoe had slipped off when the body was dragged down and I laid it beside it. Then I filled the hole. During the whole of this funeral ceremony a sentimental feeling possessed me. I caressed the hair and the first shovelful of earth I strewed thinly and gently on the body. I stamped the earth down and smoothed the soil as it was before. As my shirt had become bloody in carrying the body I took it off and washed it in the river and put it on again still wet. I hid the shovel near the river, then I went home and arrived there about 6 o’clock. My wife began reproaching me, asked me where I had been wandering all the night. I had cleaned my shoes thoroughly in the grass, using a cleaning rag which I always carried with me. I then drank coffee and went to work in the same clothes. After I had put the body of Hahn in the grave I removed her wrist-watch. Four weeks later I gave the watch to Kaete W…W…lives in the same house where I live. She often came into my room and we repeatedly had sexual intercourse.’

(The witness W…vehemently denied this assertion. I found, as a matter of fact, that she was a virgin with enlarged introitus of the vagina.)

The shovel was in fact found at the place indicated. Frau Kürten confirms the hour at which her husband left her on the 12th of August, namely, about 11 o’clock p.m., when he gave as explanation that he was on night work. Between 5 and 6 o’clock he had come back with dirty shoes and blood on his clothes. Later Kürten admitted that he had not given the wristwatch to the witness W…The first assertion that he had done so was an act of vengeance for the trouble she had given him and the part she had taken in bringing about his capture.

The murders were, of course, causing a panic in the Düsseldorf area that can only be compared to that caused by the Ripper in 1888 or by the Ratcliffe Highway murderer in 1811. Inspector Gennat, of the Berlin police, was assigned to the case. He had once had to follow up eight hundred clues to track down a murderer, and was noted for his thoroughness.

The German underworld was also greatly disturbed by the murders (as Fritz Lang showed in his film version of the crimes, M), and police raids made the criminals of the Rhine as anxious as the general public to see the murderer taken.

A tailor’s dummy, dressed in Dorrier’s clothes, was taken around the dance halls of Düsseldorf, in the hope that one of the dancers would recognize the clothes and remember the girl’s companion on the day of her death.

But although no one knew it, the murders had come to an end, although the attacks would continue for six months more. There had been eight murders in ten months, and fourteen attacks.

In 1929, there were several attacks on girls walking alone, and Kürten also continued playfully to strangle his girlfriends, some of whom did not seem to object to the treatment. (Evidence of these girls figures largely in the trial.)

Let Berg tell the story of Kürten’s capture:

Suddenly all these uncertainties and perplexities were ended by the capture of the criminal and his confession. This totally unforeseen outcome was not due to the efforts of the police, but to a sheer coincidence, coupled with the criminal’s lack of caution.

It was the famous Butlies affair which resulted in the discovery. For that reason I propose to describe it here, and do so in Kürten’s own words.

‘On the 14th of May, 1930, I saw a man accost a young girl at the railway station and go off with her. Out of curiosity I followed the couple along the Graf-Adolf-strasse, the Karlstrasse, Klosterstrasse, Kölner Strasse, Stoffeler Strasse to the Volksgarten. When the man wanted to go into the dark park with the girl, she resisted him. I seized the opportunity and approached the couple.

‘I asked him what he meant to do with the girl. He replied that the girl had no lodging and that he proposed to take her to his sister. At this point the girl asked me whether the Achenbachstrasse was in that neighbourhood—it was there the man’s sister was supposed to live. When I assured her very convincingly that the street was in an entirely different neighbourhood, she stepped to my side, and the man made off very quickly. We returned. The girl told me that she was out of work and had nowhere to go. She agreed to come with me to my room in the Mettmanner Strasse 71. Round about 11 o’clock we got to my room which is on the third floor. Then she suddenly said she didn’t want any sexual intercourse and asked me whether I couldn’t find her some other place to sleep. I agreed. We went by tram to Worringerplatz and on towards the Grafenberger Wald, going along the Wolfschlucht until we came to the last of the houses. Here I seized Butlies with one hand by the neck, pressing her head back very hard and kissing her. I asked her to let me have her. I thought that under the circumstances she would agree, and my opinion was right. Afterwards I asked whether I had hurt her, which she denied. I wanted to take her back to the tram, but I did not accompany her right to it because I was afraid that she might inform the police officer who was standing there. I had no intention of killing Butlies. She had offered no resistance. We had sexual intercourse standing, after I had pulled down her knickers. There was another reason why I could not do anything to her—I had been seen by a friend in the tram. I did not think that Butlies would be able to find her way back again to my apartment in the rather obscure Mettmanner Strasse. So much the more was I surprised when on Wednesday, the 21st of May, I saw Butlies again in my house.’

Butlies supplements this statement thus:

On the 14th of May she had come from Cologne to Düsseldorf. There on the railway station she got into contact with a ‘Frau Brückner’, and made an appointment with her for 8 o’clock in the evening of that day. She had then waited in vain on the railway station for the woman and in the end had been accosted by a man who wanted to put her up.

Her statement corroborates Kürten’s. After her adventure Butlies took the tram from the Grafenberger Wald back to the town. Then she walked the streets of Düsseldorf. At last she went to the Gertrudishaus, where she told the Sisters about the attack. On the 17th of May she wrote to her new acquaintance, Frau Brückner, in Düsseldorf—Bilker Allee—a letter in which she hinted that she had fallen into the hands of a murderer. The recipient of the letter, Frau Brügmann, suspected the connection with the Düsseldorf murderer, and took the letter to the criminal police department. The writer of the letter was interrogated and eventually succeeded in finding the house of the unknown man. On her own account she had already made enquiries in different houses in the Mettmanner Strasse for a man of a certain type and, at last, she had heard from the inhabitants of No. 71 that a crying girl had once come in the same way asking for a man of the same description. Her description fitted Peter Kürten, who lodged there. That was on the 21st of May.

Kürten continues his Narrative

‘On Wednesday, the 21st of May, I happened to look over the bannisters and saw Butlies and recognized her. She can be recognized easily. She has very fair hair, is slant-eyed and bow-legged. She left the house again. At lunch-time she came back. This time with a police officer. I saw her stand in the entrance door and speak to the landlady. Then in the afternoon she came again to the house, this time coming up to our floor. She entered the flat of the Wimmers and she saw me. She was startled. I think it is likely that she recognized me then. I knew what would happen after that!

‘That same evening I fetched my wife from the place where she worked: “I must get out of the flat,” I said. I explained the Butlies case to her. But I only mentioned the attempt at sexual intercourse, saying that as it could be called “rape”, along with my previous convictions, it was enough to get me fifteen years’ penal servitude. Therefore I had to get out. I changed. Throughout the night I walked about. On Thursday, the 22nd of May, I saw my wife in the morning in the flat. I fetched my things away in a bag and rented a room in the Adlerstrasse. I slept quietly until Friday morning.’

The events of this Friday were described to me by Kürten in writing.

‘It was at nine in the morning when I went to my flat. Shortly before I reached No. 71 two men came out of it. I found out afterwards they were detectives. I thought right away that they were that. When I went into the flat my wife was still there. When I asked her why she had not gone to work to-day she answered: “I did, but I was taken away from it by two detectives who brought me home.” Both these men had searched the place and a few moments before they had gone down the staircase. Then my wife asked me to leave the house saying she did not want me to be arrested there. I did as she asked and later met her—she had gone back to the place where she was employed. I then asked her to come with me for a little while. Two days before I had told her about the Butlies affair. To-day, the 23rd, in the morning, I told my wife that I was also responsible for the Schulte affair, adding my usual remark that it would mean at least ten years’ or more separation for us—probably for ever. At that my wife was inconsolable. She spoke of age, unemployment, lack of means and starvation in old age. When the lunch hour approached I had not even then succeeded in calming my wife down. She raved that I should take my life. Then she would do the same, since her future was completely without hope. Then in the late afternoon I told my wife that I could help her. That I could still do something for her. I told her that I was the Düsseldorf murderer. Of course, she didn’t think it possible and didn’t want to believe it. But then I disclosed everything to her, naming myself the murderer in each case. When she asked me how this could help her, I hinted that a high reward had been offered for the discovery as well as for the capture of the criminal; that she could get hold of that reward, or at least some part of it, if she would report my confession and denounce me to the police. Of course, it wasn’t easy for me to convince her that this ought not to be considered as treason, but that, on the contrary, she was doing a good deed to humanity as well as to justice. It was not until late in the evening that she promised me to carry out my request, and also that she would not commit suicide. I then accompanied her almost to the door. It was 11 o’clock when we separated. Back in my lodging I went to bed and fell asleep at once. What happened the next morning, the 24th of May, is known.

‘First a bath, then several times around the neighbourhood of the Kortzingens’ flat [Kürten had planned a robbery here]. Lunch, a hair-cut, and then, at 3 o’clock I met my wife according to the arrangement and there the arrest took place. As a matter of fact, my wife had carried out my order a bit too quickly for me. I want to point out again that I never collapsed on the 23rd or 24th of May, but kept steadily before me my purpose to the very end.’

Thus Kürten. I now contrast his statement with that of his wife:

‘In the morning, after the detectives had brought me from the place where I work, my husband came to the flat. ‘You must have done something awful!’ I said. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I did it. I did everything.’ Then, with that he left the flat. We then met by arrangement at 11.30 in the morning in the Hofgarten. We had dinner in a restaurant in the Duisburger Strasse. I could not eat anything, but he ate up the lot, my portion, too.

‘At 2 o’clock we were walking over the Rhine Bridge back and forwards. In the late afternoon I asked him what he meant with his words: ‘I have done everything.’ ‘If you promise solemnly that you won’t give me away I’ll tell you something,’ he said. I promised. ‘I have done everything that has happened here in Düsseldorf!’ ‘What do you mean by that?’ I asked. ‘Everything—the murders and the attacks.’ ‘What, those innocent children, too?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Why did you do that?’ I asked him. ‘I don’t know myself,’ he replied, ‘it just came over me.’

‘Then all the big cases were talked over, including that of Mülheim. When I got terribly excited about it all, he said, ‘I’ve done something very silly. I ought not to have told you.’ That afternoon Kürten was very depressed and in a way I had never seen before. He told me that he had not cried once in his whole life, but yesterday evening, when he was alone, he had cried bitterly. In the afternoon while we spoke only about the fact that the detectives were after him, he was quiet and self-possessed. But towards the evening when I wanted to go home he was as I have never seen him in his life before. He was very cast down. He could not look into my eyes. All the indifference had disappeared. He burst out with it all, telling of the murders and the attacks as if some power forced him to it. I thought he had gone crazy. Nothing had been said about any reward.’

Who could not understand Frau Kürten—who would reproach her that she was not able to carry alone the weight of this ghastly secret—but that she gave it away to the police when pressed by them?

She had a last meeting with her husband near the Rochus Church, for the following day, the 24th.

That, too, the woman, who was quite distraught, reported to the police. The church square was quietly surrounded and Kürten was arrested as he walked towards his wife. He was quite composed. Subsequently, he often told me how he smilingly calmed the detective who advanced excitedly towards him, the revolver levelled at him.

When Kürten was questioned by the police he not only told of the attacks of 1929, but he gave also an account of a long chain of crimes without being questioned. For reasons to which I will return presently he lengthened this chain with some imaginary links, but he soon brought it back again to the facts.

Table I: The sequence of the crimes according to Kürten’s own statement

Born 1883 in Köln-Mülheim. Passed his childhood there. Left for Düsseldorf 1894; 1897 apprenticed as a moulder. In 1899 first convicted for theft.

Table of Offences

From 1900 to 1904 in prison

1905 to 1913 in prison

1913 to 1921 in prison

1929

1930

The way in which Kürten enumerated all his offences, tabulated here in a sequence chronologically accurate, and the way in which he dictated it with every detail, is quite extraordinary. He was not accused of these crimes one by one, but reeled off on his own account, beginning with No. 1 and ending with No. 79, every single case, dictating them, in fact, to the stenographer and even showing enjoyment at the horrified faces of the many police officers who listened to his recital, day by day.

Kürten was born in Köln-Mülheim in 1883, the son of a moulder, a violent man, boastful and given to drunkenness. The family of thirteen were very poor, and lived for a time in a single room. The environment was heavily charged with sex. According to Kürten, all his sisters were oversexed, and one made sexual advances to him. Kürten was apparently not attracted by her, but he attempted incest with another sister—a sister whom his father attempted to rape, and on whose account the moulder served a term in prison. Kürten senior was in the habit of forcing his wife to have intercourse when he came home drunk, and Kürten frequently witnessed his mother being ‘raped’. At the age of 8 he ran away from home for a short time, sleeping in furniture vans. He also admitted to Berg that his taste for sadism had first been awakened by a sadistic dog-catcher who lived in the same house, and who taught Kürten to masturbate the dogs. Kürten often watched him torturing the dogs.

Kürten was the third of thirteen children. His grandfather had served sentences for theft, and cases of delirium tremens, feeble-mindedness and paralysis abound in his family connexions on his father’s side. (His mother’s side of the family were normal and hard-working people.)

When Kürten was 12, the family moved to Düsseldorf. But according to his own confession, he had already committed his first murder. At the age of 9, he pushed a boy off a raft on the banks of the Rhine, and when another boy dived in to help the first one, he managed to push him under the raft, so that both were drowned.

In his early teens he ran away from home again and lived as a vagabond and robber—attacking mostly girls and women. His adolescent sexuality was abnormal. He attempted intercourse with schoolgirls and with his sister, and masturbated excessively. From his thirteenth year onward he practised bestiality with sheep, pigs and goats. He discovered that he received a powerful sexual sensation when having intercourse with a sheep in the Düsseldorf meadows and stabbing it simultaneously. He did this many times between his thirteenth and sixteenth years. At 16 he became an apprentice moulder, and received much ill-treatment; finally he stole money and ran away to Coblenz. There he lived with a prostitute who allowed him to ill-treat her. Finally, he was arrested for theft, and received the first of the seventeen sentences that were to take up twenty-seven years of his life. He was then 15. Released from prison two years later in 1899, he discovered that his mother was divorced from his father, and so decided to keep living a vagrant life. He lived with a prostitute of twice his age who enjoyed being maltreated, and this developed his sadistic propensities further.

In November 1899, according to Kürten’s own account, he committed what he supposed to be his first adult murder: strangling a girl while having sexual intercourse with her, he thought she had died, and left her in the Grafenberger Wald. But no body was reported in that month, so it seems likely that the girl woke up and went home, saying nothing to anyone.

His first prison period, according to himself, made a real criminal of him; in the cells at the Berger Gate he met hardened criminals, and wanted to rival them. He had himself tattooed.

He served two brief sentences about 1900 for minor fraud, and then attempted to shoot a girl with a rifle, and was given two more years. Together with another sentence for theft, this brought his period in jail up to 1904. During this time, Kürten admitted, he used to dream of revenge, and found that his fantasies of killing excited him sexually. He deliberately committed minor infringements of prison regulations to get solitary confinement, so that he could indulge these fantasies freely. On his release he was called up as a conscript to Metz, but soon deserted. He also committed his first cases of arson, setting fire to barns and hay-ricks. The sight of fire caused him sexual excitement, and he also hoped that tramps might be sleeping in the hay. In 1905 he received seven years in jail for theft (he had been living with another woman who also lived by thieving). He served the term in Münster prison, and had an attack of ‘prison psychosis’, rolling himself in a bundle of silk and lying under the table, claiming to be a silkworm. He also claimed later that he was able to poison some prisoners in the prison hospital. He nursed fantasies of revenge on society, and dreamed of ‘compensatory justice’—that is, that he could get his own back on his tormentors by tormenting someone who was completely innocent. This kind of illogicality is typical of murderers and psychopaths.

As soon as he was released from prison in 1912, he maltreated a servant girl during intercourse, and was soon back in prison for discharging fire arms in a restaurant when he tried to accost a woman and was interrupted by the waiter. For this he received a year in jail.

On 25 May 1913 he committed his first sexual murder. He had become a specialist in robbing business premises. He entered a pub in the Wolfstrasse, Köln-Mülheim, on an evening when the family were out at a fair. In one of the bedrooms he found 13-year-old Christine Klein asleep. He strangled her, cut her throat with a penknife, and penetrated her sexual organs with his fingers. He dropped a handkerchief with his initials on it. But it happened that the child’s father was called Peter Klein, and his brother Otto had quarrelled with him on the night of the murder and threatened to do something that Peter ‘would remember all his life’. Otto Klein was arrested and tried, but released for lack of evidence. Public opinion was against him, and he was killed in the war, still under the shadow of the murder. Kürten later claimed that it was the memory of his sufferings in jail that prompted the murder. A few weeks after this crime, Kürten was again about to attack a sleeping girl when someone woke up and frightened him off. He also attacked an unknown man and an unknown woman with a hatchet, securing sexual orgasms by knocking them unconscious and seeing their blood. (Since the sadistic dog-catcher, blood had always been Kürten’s major sexual stimulant.) He also burned another hay wagon, and attempted to strangle two women. Then, luckily, he spent the next eight years in prison.

In 1921 Kürten returned to Altenberg, declaring that he had been a prisoner of war in Russia. Here he met the woman who became his wife, at the home of his sister. She had had her own misfortunes; she had been engaged to a gardener for eight years and had been his mistress; then he refused to marry her and she shot him. For this she served a five-year jail sentence. When Kürten met her she was a raw-boned, broad-shouldered, prematurely aged woman. It is difficult to know why Kürten was attracted by her; perhaps because she seemed ‘solid’ and reliable, or perhaps because she had suffered. Until the end of his life, ten years later, she continued to be the only human being for whom he felt normal feelings of affection and attachment. At first, she refused to marry him, but, when Kürten threatened to murder her, she consented. Then, for two years, he lived a fairly respectable life, working as a moulder in Altenberg, and becoming active in trade union circles and in a political club. But his sadistic activities persisted and he was twice charged with maltreating servant girls. In 1925 he returned to Düsseldorf, and was delighted that the sunset was blood-red on the evening of his return. Then began Düsseldorf’s ‘Reign of Terror’. But it began quietly enough. Like many maniacs of a similar type, Kürten began with a few widely spaced attacks; these became steadily more frequent and more violent, until, in the year 1929, they finally reached a climax. Between 1925 and 1928 Kürten admitted four cases of attempted strangulation of women, and seventeen cases of arson. On two occasions he set houses on fire.

The year 1929 began with six more cases of arson of barns and stacks. Then, on 3 February, a Frau Kuhn was walking home late at night when she was suddenly attacked by a man with a knife. She received twenty-four stab wounds, and was in hospital for many months.

A few days later, on 13 February, a 45-year-old mechanic named Scheer was found dead in the roadway in Flingern; he had been drunk when attacked, and had been stabbed twenty times.

On 9 March workmen discovered the body of 8-year-old Rose Ohliger lying behind a fence on a building site. She had been stabbed thirteen times; there had been some attempt at sexual assault, and an attempt to burn the body with paraffin.

And so began the series of murders that made the ‘monster of Düsseldorf’ as notorious as Jack the Ripper, and which finally ended with his arrest on 24 May 1930.

It is not surprising that Kürten was not an obvious suspect. Even after his arrest, most of his neighbours and workmates considered that it was a mistake. He was known as a quiet, well-behaved man, a dandy in his dress, intelligent, and a good worker.

Kürten made a full confession of the murders, although he later withdrew it. Gertrude Schulte picked him out of a number of men paraded in front of her. Professor Berg was introduced to Kürten, and remarked that Kürten proved to be an intelligent truthful man, interested in his own case, and anxious to help the psychiatrist to understand the strange urges that had led to his crimes.

Some of the things Kürten revealed to Berg are terrifying. On one occasion when he could not find a victim in the Hofgarten, he seized a sleeping swan, cut off its head, and drank the blood. The swan was found the next morning. On another occasion, he saw a horse involved in a street accident, and had an orgasm. At first he tried to convince Berg that he killed for ‘revenge on society’, but was later frank in admitting the sexual origin of his crimes. The horror caused by his crimes gave him deep satisfaction. It was for this reason that he had gone back to the body of Rose Ohliger many hours after he had killed her, and poured paraffin on the body. Later still, he had lingered on the edge of the crowd, and had an orgasm provoked by the horror of the spectators.

The following is typical of Kürten’s statements about his attacks:

In March 1930, I went out with my scissors. At the station a girl spoke to me. I took her to have a glass of beer, and we then walked towards the Grafenberg woods. She said her name was Irma. She was about 22. Near the middle of the woods, I seized her by the throat and I held on for a bit. She struggled violently, and screamed. I threw her down the ravine that runs down to the Wolf’s Glen and went away.

Many young women gave evidence of similar experiences. One servant girl whom Kürten attempted to strangle complained that he was rough. He told her ‘that was what love was’. She met him on several occasions after this! Another believed he was a single man and was going to marry her; one day she inquired at his home and was told he was married; this experience made her particularly bitter against Kürten. On another occasion, Kürten’s wife caught him out with a woman and slapped her face. Kürten brushed her cheek with a rose and turned and walked off, leaving the two women together.

Kürten’s wife never suspected his perversions; he had sexual intercourse with her periodically, but admitted that he had to imagine sadistic violence in order to go through with the love-making.

With respect to his crimes, Kürten’s memory was of astonishing accuracy; seventeen years after the murder of Christine Klein, he was able to describe her bedroom in detail. On other points, his memory was average; it was obvious that he took such intense pleasure in his crimes that every detail remained in his mind. He admitted to dwelling on them afterwards and having sexual orgasms as he recalled their details. He also told Berg that he used to walk through the streets of Düsseldorf and daydream of blowing up the whole city with dynamite. Hitler lost a talented lieutenant in Kürten, one who might have outshone Eichmann or Heydrich in mass murder.

The Hahn case revealed a curious aspect of Kürten’s sadism—an element of necrophilia. The naked body had been sexually assaulted, both vaginally and anally; leaves and earthmould were found in the anus. Kürten admitted how, after killing her, he had buried her roughly. Later he decided to alter the location of her grave; he also had an idea that it would be exciting to crucify her body on two trees and leave it to be found. However, the body was too heavy; nevertheless, Kürten changed the location of the grave, and admitted to kissing and fondling the victim when he had dug her up. He returned often to the site of the grave and masturbated on it.

And yet one of Kürten’s favourite dream fantasies was of saving Düsseldorf from the ‘monster’, and having torchlight processions in his honour. He would be nominated police commissioner for his service. (Perhaps Kürten had read the life of Vidocq.)

Kürten’s trial opened on 13 April 1931. In accordance with the German custom, it took place in front of three judges. Kürten’s counsel was Dr Wehner, a young lawyer; the prosecution was led by the public prosecutor, Dr Jansen. Dr Jansen asked several times that the press and public be excluded—no doubt because he wanted to reveal evidence that would leave no room for any but the death sentence—but his pleas were unsuccessful. Professor Berg gave evidence, describing Kürten as a ‘king of sexual perverts’, Professor Sioli gave psychiatric evidence for the prosecution, and Professor Rather for the defence. The defence was of insanity at the time of the murders. The case closed on April 23rd. Kürten’s final remarks are of some interest:

As I now see the crimes committed by me, they are so ghastly that I do not want to attempt any sort of excuse for them. Still, I feel some bitterness when I think of the physician and the lady physician in Stuttgart who have been encouraged by a section of the community to murder and who have stained their hands with human blood to the extent of fifteen hundred murders.¹ I do not want to accuse, all I want to do is to let you see what passes in my soul. I cannot refrain from reproaching you, Professor Sioli, for saying that the conditions of my home were not the decisive factor. On the contrary, you may well assume that youthful surroundings are decisive for the development of character. With silent longing I have sometimes in my early days glimpsed other families and asked myself why it could not be like that with us.

I contradict the Chief Public Prosecutor when he asserts that it was out of cowardice that I revoked my confession. The very day that I opened up to my wife I well knew the consequences of the confession; I felt liberated in a certain way and I had the firm intention of sticking to my confession so that I could do a last good turn to my wife. But the real reason was that there arrives for every criminal that moment beyond which he cannot go. And I was in due course subject to this psychic collapse. As I have related already, I followed the reports in the newspapers then and, of course, later, very thoroughly. I convinced myself that on the whole the newspaper reports had been moderate. I may say that I used to intoxicate myself with the sensational press, it was the poison which must bear part of the responsibility of my poisoned life. By being moderate now, it has done a great deal to prevent the public from being poisoned. I feel urged to make one more statement: some victims made it rather easy for me to overpower them.

I do not want to forget to mention what I frequently said before—that I detest the crimes and feel deep sorrow for the relatives. I even dare to ask those relatives to forgive me, as far as that may be possible for them. Furthermore, I want to point out emphatically that, contrary to the version of the Chief Public Prosecutor, I never tortured a victim. I do not attempt to excuse my crimes. I have already pointed out that I am prepared to bear the consequences of my misdeeds. I hope that thus I will atone for a large part of what I have done.

Although I can suffer capital punishment only once, you may rest assured that it is one of the many unknown tortures to endure the time before the execution of the sentence, and dozens of times I have lived through the moment of the execution. And when you consider this and recognize my goodwill to atone for all my crimes. I should think that the terrible desire for revenge and hatred against me cannot endure. And I want to ask you to forgive me.

The jury was out for an hour and a half, and Kürten was sentenced to death nine times for murder.

For a while there seemed some hope that Kürten might not suffer the death penalty, which had not been carried out since a man named Böttcher had been executed in 1928 for the murder of a woman and a child in a wood near Berlin. It is indicative of the extreme liberalism in Germany in the early 1930s that there was something of a storm at the death penalty on Kürten, and the German Humanitarian League protested. Kürten appealed, but the appeal was rejected. Kürten himself was calm and well-behaved. He was bombarded with letters, love letters and letters describing sadistic punishments arriving in equal quantities. Many people asked for his autograph. (A girl who had been assaulted by Kürten when he was 16 described how he stood one day in front of the waxworks of murderers and burglars and said, ‘One day I shall be as famous as they are.’)

He was executed at six o’clock on the morning of July 2nd, 1931. He enjoyed his last meal—of Wiener schnitzel, chips, and white wine—so much that he asked for it again. He told Berg that his one hope was that he would hear the sound of his own blood running into the basket, which would give him intense pleasure. (He also admitted to wanting to throttle Berg’s stenographer because of her slim, white throat.) He was guillotined, and seemed cheerful and unconcerned at the last.

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¹ A reference to the case of certain abortionists.