The stomach-turning crimes Fritz Haarmann committed will no doubt remain in the minds of Hanoverians for generations to come. The Butcher of Hanover sold meat on Germany’s black market, but what his customers thought was knock-off pork or beef was in fact something quite different, and not at all nice.
At the end of World War I, Germany was in economic meltdown. The allies had blockaded German ports throughout the war and food was scarce. Meat, in particular, was hard to get and, when it was available, it was rationed and expensive. In 1918 in Hanover, Fritz Haarmann began to sell beef and pork on the black market and, along with his homosexual lover Hans Grans, also made money selling second-hand clothes. It would be six years before the connection between these two money-making schemes was exposed. Haarmann had been picking up homeless boys and young male prostitutes, killing them, butchering their bodies and selling their flesh as pork or beef. Germany had just been through the wholesale slaughter of World War I, but, even so, the horrific nature of Haarmann’s crimes shocked and appalled the country. Even worse, the citizens of Hanover knew that a good number of them had unknowingly eaten human flesh, and it looked as if the Hanover police had been turning a blind eye to Haarmann’s gruesome activities for years.
Haarmann had an unhappy and troubled childhood. His father was emotionally distant and domineering and his mother was overprotective and manipulative. In more recent times in America, the FBI have developed psychological profiles of serial killers and have, in almost every case, found a similar pattern of childhood trauma as that experienced by Haarmann. The first signs of the trouble to come appeared when he was sixteen. He was accused of sexually molesting younger children and spent six months in a mental institution. After a failed engagement and a short spell in the army, from which he was honourably discharged on health grounds, he fell into the life of a petty criminal in Hanover. He became well known to the police after being arrested a number of times on a variety of minor charges.
In 1914 he was sent to prison for the burglary of a warehouse and spent the majority of the war years behind bars. On his release he returned to a life of crime, but this time he also became a police informer. He was involved in the black market and, while he continued to provide useful information, he was allowed to get away with it. The first signs of what he was really doing emerged in 1918. Had the police chosen to investigate him thoroughly then, they could have prevented the horrors that were to come. But he was a protected man and the police didn’t want to lose the information he was giving them. Friedel Rothe, a seventeen-year-old boy, had gone missing and had been tracked to Haarmann’s apartment by his father. The police were called and they found Haarmann in bed with a thirteen-year-old boy. He was arrested for indecency with a minor, for which he would spend nine months in prison, but the police found no sign of Rothe. At his trial six years later, Haarmann would claim that Rothe’s head was in the apartment at the time of his arrest. He said it was in a paper bag behind the stove.
While in prison, Haarmann met Hans Grans, a homosexual pimp. On their release, Grans became Haarmann’s accomplice, as well as his lover. They picked up homeless boys who were hanging around the railway station and took them back to their apartment. Haarmann had sex with them and, while he was in some sort of sexual frenzy, he bit the boys in the throat, ripping out their carotid arteries. The boys bled to death and Haarmann butchered their bodies, dumping the body parts he could not sell in the nearby River Leine. Grans took their clothes and sold them.
Local residents alerted the police to some strange goings on at the apartment. Boys were often seen going into the apartment, but were rarely seen coming out. Haarmann was seen disposing of buckets of blood, and Grans was selling blood-stained clothing. The police did nothing. It was as if they had gone beyond protecting him and were now colluding in his crimes.
In May 1924 children playing by the river found human bones. Initially the police dismissed the finds as some sort of sick joke, perhaps perpetrated by medical students. More bones were found, including a human skull, and the police still did nothing. Then a bag of bones was found in the river and rumours of there being hundreds of boys missing in Hanover spread like wildfire. The police could not stall any longer and, finally, an investigation began. The river was dredged and the remains of more than 20 boys were found. Suspicion immediately fell on Haarmann and the authorities called in detectives from Berlin, not trusting the local police to run the investigation properly. The detectives followed Haarmann and watched him attempting to pick up a boy at the railway station. He was arrested and his apartment searched. Inside the apartment they found bloodstains on the floor and walls. Haarmann tried to explain it away as the result of his activities as a black-market butcher. He could not explain the clothes and personal effects of some of the missing boys they also found.
The identities of 27 boys were established from what the detectives found in the apartment, and Haarmann was charged with their murders. These only accounted for the boys known to have been killed since the start of 1923, and there were undoubtedly many more murders before then. Haarmann admitted the murders he was charged with, but said he could not remember how many boys he had killed in total. He also implicated Grans, who was charged with complicity to murder. It didn’t take the jury long to find both of them guilty. Haarmann was sentenced to death and was beheaded in Hanover Prison on 15 April 1925. Grans served 12 years of a life sentence. After his release he is thought to have continued to live in Hanover, until his death in the 1980s.