German serial killers 1920s

Take a look from these criminals. Died by wrongful overdose during castration surgery. The case of the sexual offender Bartsch in German jurisdiction history was the first to include psycho-social factors of the defendant, who came from a violent early surrounding, to set down the degree of penalty.

Karl Denke. He was known to be a cannibal; Allegedly killed people in the s;. Karl Denke February 11, — December 22, was a Prussian serial killer and cannibal who killed and cannibalized dozens of homeless vagrants and travelers from Volker Eckert.

His serial killings were prevalent between and Accused of 19 murders between. Eckert confessed to only six murders, five of whom were sex workers, but is known to have killed at least nine women, and is also accused of committing additional murders of women in several European countries including Italy and the Czech Republic , but investigations were closed after Eckert committed suicide during his criminal proceedings on July 2, Gesche Gottfried.

A serial poisoner who murdered 15 people in Hanover and Bremen who was publicly executed in ;. Gesche Margarethe Gottfried, born Gesche Margarethe Timm 6 March - 21 April , was a serial killer who murdered 15 people by arsenic poisoning in Bremen and Hanover, Germany, between and She was the last person to be publicly executed in the city of Bremen. Karl Grossmann. Killed women only to sell their flesh on the black market.

Fritz Haarmann. He was attracted to and preyed on young men and boys; Executed in ;. Friedrich Heinrich Karl "Fritz" Haarmann 25 October — 15 April was a German serial killer, known as the Butcher of Hanover, the Vampire of Hanover and the Wolf-Man, who committed the sexual assault, murder, mutilation and dismemberment of a minimum of 24 boys and young men between and in Hanover, Germany.

Upon arrest, Bartsch openly confessed to his crimes. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on December 15, , by the Wuppertal regional court Landgericht Wuppertal. Initially, the sentence was upheld on appeal. There, he married Gisela Deike of Hanover on January 2, The forensic psychiatrists considered various therapy concepts: psychotherapy, castration and even psychosurgery.

Bartsch initially refused any surgery but finally agreed to voluntary castration on April 28, in order to avoid lifetime incarceration in a mental hospital. This was about ten years after incarceration, two years after his marriage, and after his depressive condition did not improve. The doctors of Eickelborn State Hospital chose a castration methodology that accidentally resulted in Bartsch's death.

An official autopsy and investigation determined that Bartsch had been intoxicated with a Halothane overdose factor 10 by an insufficiently trained nurse. In Gust indicated to his mother that he had committed a murder.

She told a friend of hers, who informed the police. Gust was arrested shortly afterwards. On September 21, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for killing four people. Gust started a therapy which he quit after only six months, stating that he wasn't treatable and would always remain a threat to other people. On 15 July , the mummified remains were found by firemen after a fire in the house. Honka was not present, being on shift as a night watchman.

He was arrested when he returned home. In custody, Honka said he killed the women after they mocked his preference for oral sex over "straight" intercourse. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, the maximum possible under German law. Honka was released from prison in and spent his last years under the name of Peter Jensen in a nursing home.

He died in a hospital in Langenhorn, Hamburg on 19 October German director Andreas Schnaas has said that his film Violent Shit series is very loosely based on the exploits of Honka, who is mentioned in Violent Shit II, which states he was once cellmates with the fictional serial killer Karl Berger.

From until , Zwanziger was employed as a housekeeper at the home of several judges in Bavaria. She would poison her employers with arsenic, and then nurse them back to health to gain their favour. She poisoned three people, and attempted to poison several others. She killed four people, one of whom was a baby. Four others survived.

Zwanziger was judged guilty of murder and sentenced to death. Before she was beheaded, she said it was probably a good thing she was to be executed, as she did not think she would be able to stop. On June 10, Pommerenke broke into a gun shop and stole a small bore rifle and an air gun. With this gun he robbed Deutsche Mark from a counter clerk at a railway station in Karlsruhe on June On the same day he went to a tailor in Hornberg.

Besides his clothes he left a packet with the stolen small bore rifle there, which he wanted to pick up in a few days. A footprint was found at the station in Karlsruhe and it matched the footprint from June 8. This and the description of the gun were the evidence of a connection between the robbery and the series of murders. On June 19 the tailor reported the finding of the rifle and gave the police Pommerenke's personal data. He was arrested on the same day. Pommerenke confessed to overall 65 criminal acts, among them were the four murders, seven attempted murders, two accomplished and 25 attempted rapes, six robberies, ten burglaries and six petit larcenies.

He died of leukemia in a prison hospital in Asperg in December At the time of his death he was the longest-serving prison inmate in Germany. Werner Boost. The illegitimate son of an East German peasant woman, Boost had entered the world of crime early; a child thief who later earned a dishonest pfennig guiding parties of East Germans safely, if illegally, over the border into the West. Only in the light of subsequent revelations were a number of unsolved homicides around the border area at the same time laid to Boost's account.

By Boost had transferred his crooked career to Dusseldorf, where he served a prison sentence for plundering metal fittings from graves. But if he was an indifferent thief, then Werner Boost was at least an accomplished marksman; by the end of the decade his deadly accuracy in firing 'Wild West' style, from the hip, would make headlines throughout both Germanies.

On 17 January , a lawyer named Bernd Serve was sitting with a young male companion in his stationary car on a quiet road leading out of Dusseldorf. As they talked, two masked figures appeared out of the night, one bludgeoning the nineteen-year-old with the butt of his gun, the other shooting Dr Serve through the head.

It was later remarked by ballistics experts that the bullet had taken an unusual trajectory, entering the body below the left jaw and leaving through the right temple, seemingly fired from below the victim as he sat in the driver's seat of the car.

The crime that was to earn Werner Boost the soubriquet, the 'Dusseldorf Doubles Killer', was discovered in November A twenty-six-year-old baker, Friedheim Behre, and his girlfriend Thea had been missing for four weeks when villagers from Kalkum, just beyond Dusseldorf, found two battered bodies trapped in their car in a water-filled gravel pit.

Like Dr Serve and his friend, this couple had been robbed. With no light yet illuminating either case, the second 'doubles murder' was committed on 7 February A twenty-year-old secretary and her companion, Peter Falkenberg, had been reported missing, and police found their extensively bloodstained car the following day.

On the day after that, the 9th, two bodies later identified as the missing couple were found badly burnt in the smouldering remains of a haystack.

Both victims had been bludgeoned, and Falkenberg had been shot through the head from the same odd angle that had been observed in the case of Dr Serve. A further abortive attempt at a 'double murder' took place in May of the same year in some woods near Dusseldorf. Luckily for the potential victims the young woman alerted passersby with her screams for help and the two attackers fled.

By plain coincidence, or perhaps divine irony, it was in this same wood at Meererbusch that a forest ranger on patrol saw and apprehended an armed man who appeared to be tracking a young couple. The man's name was Werner Boost. Boost had surrendered to the ranger without a struggle because, he said, he had been committing no offence.

He indignantly denied any part in the recent series of attacks and murders, and defied the police to prove otherwise. And they might have had a much more difficult job doing so if Boost's unwilling partner in crime, Franz Lorbach, had not made a statement in which he confessed his own part in the murders and implicated Werner Boost.

Boost, he said, had 'hypnotised' him into complicity on pain of his life. He exposed the bizarre fantasy world into which Boost had dragged him - the drugs and poisons with which Boost dreamed he would find the perfect method of murder; Lorbach told police of one plan to float cyanide-filled balloons into prospective victims' cars.

There was also a string of non-fatal rapes and assaults against courting couples who, for reasons best known to himself, Boost considered immoral and degenerate.

Werner Boost was eventually brought to trial in , and sentenced to life imprisonment. For his contribution, Franz Lorbach was put away for six years. As he had previously worked as gerontological nurse for the women, they trusted him and let him into their apartment. The doctors examining the first four victims didn't notice the severe internal injuries and declared the women to have been died of natural causes, which was subject of intense public discussion.

He tried to kill a sixth woman, but she survived and told his name to the police. He named financial problems as motivation for his actions. He intended to steal money from his victims after the murder, but on several occasions he didn't manage to do so, because he was interrupted by a doorbell.

For this donative, she represented a capacity to distribute these whelps to willing adoptive families: in reality, most of them she disposed of with morphine. The nickname the "Pink Giant" came from both the killer's size and alleged penchant for pink lingerie.

The area where some of the crimes took place led to a second moniker, the "Beast of Beelitz". For the first time, Police were able to get a description of the man from the two girls who were attacked.

And who the police believed was the man was The Beelitz murderer. A composite sketch was prepared and published. On August 1, Schmidt was arrested. In late , Wolfgang Schmidt was sentenced to 15 years in prison, they sent him to the Forensic Hospital in Brandenburg. Schmidt asked the court that if he would be addressed in the future as a woman and asked that his name would be changed. In , the courts granted Schmidt's wishes and his name was changed to "Beate".

Ida Schnell in the middle. The German "nurse-girl" confessed to the heartbreaking murders in October of She admitted to killing the babies because "their crying troubled her," but that isn't the most disturbing part of her crimes. In fact, the most unsettling part of this case is how she chose to kill the helpless infants some of which just days old.

She'd use a sharp hairpin picture a Bavarian hairpin from the 18th century , and jam it into the children's skulls, instantly killing them. While many female serial killers kill children, the way Ida Schnell is said to have killed is by far one of the most unique and coldblooded.

Unfortunately there aren't many details from reliable sources regarding Ida's crimes and her life before and after she committed them. Further inquiries are extending the grim record of the Munich child murderess, Ida Schnell, and it is now believed that she must have taken the lives of at least eight or nine of the hapless infants confided to her charge.

Friedrich Schumann. On 20 August he was arrested in Berlin. The trial against Schumann started on 5 July in Berlin. Friedrich Schumann was convicted of murder, and on 13 July he was sentenced to seven death penalties, one life sentence, ten years hard labour and several other sentences in Berlin.

He was therefore sentenced to death. The Berlin lawyer Erich Frey recalled later his brief encounter with the executioner: "At the end of the corridor, I had to give way to a broad-shouldered man.

He looked like a transportworker, the high-buttoned jacket looked strange out of place on him. His closely-cropped skull rested on a plied bullsneck. In spite of the faint light, he looked sun-tanned and healthy. But, as he passed me with a slight bow, I knew, it was him. He had been a horse butcherer before. He became for every execution, Mark and the extra costs. Police think she killed a total of 17 and attempted 18 other murders, but she was only convicted of seven.

She has never confessed to her crimes. Paul Ogorzow. Ogorzow was employed by Deutsche Reichsbahn, working for the commuter rail system in Berlin, the S-Bahn.

Ogorzow gained infamy by using the routine wartime blackouts, that took place as a result of the Allied bombing of Berlin, to more easily prey upon his victims. He was responsible for the murders of eight women during a nine-month-period from 4 October to 3 July Joachim Georg Kroll. Born the son of a miner in Hindenburg Zabrze , a town in Upper Silesia then Germany, now Poland , Kroll was the last among eight children. His education was poor.

Later psychiatrists found he had an IQ of He began killing in , after his mother died. Around , Kroll went to Duisburg and found work as a toilet attendant for Mannesmann. Afterwards he worked for Thyssen Industries and moved to 24 Friesen street, Laar, a district of Duisburg. At that time he resumed killing people. On 3 July , Kroll was arrested for kidnapping and killing a four-year-old girl named Marion Ketter.

As police went from home to home, a neighbor approached a policeman and told him that the waste-pipe in his apartment building had blocked up, and when he had asked his neighbor, Kroll, whether he knew what had been blocking the pipe, Kroll had simply replied; "Guts".

Upon this report, the police went up to Kroll's apartment and found the body of the Ketter girl cut up: some parts were in the refrigerator, a small hand was cooking in a pan of boiling water and the entrails were found stuck in the waste-pipe.

Kroll was immediately arrested. He admitted killing Marion Ketter and gave details of 13 other murders and one attempted murder over the previous two decades. He remembered fourteen victims, but he really couldn't say if there were more, a circumstance that left detectives free to speculate upon his final body-count.

Kroll said that he often sliced portions of flesh from his victims to cook and eat them, claiming that he did this to save on his grocery bills.

In custody, he believed that he was going to get a simple operation to cure him of his homicidal urges and would then be released from prison. Instead he was charged with eight murders and one attempted murder. In April , after a day trial, he was convicted on all counts and was given life sentence. He died of a heart attack in in the prison of Rheinbach. Volker Eckert 1 July — 2 July was a German truck driver and serial killer who confessed to the murders of six women, five of whom were prostitutes.

He was accused of committing 19 murders in France, Spain and Germany between and Your opinion can help us make it better. We use cookies to improve our service for you. You can find more information in our data protection declaration.

Many of the world's most horrifying crimes are committed by serial killers — among them rapists, child molesters and cannibals. DW takes a look at some of Germany's most notorious and prolific over the last century. It is thought that he even sold the flesh of his victims at the Breslau now Wroclaw, Poland market as pork. A victim was able to escape and later police found cured human flesh in his home.

Denke hung himself in his jail cell two days later. Fritz Haarmann is thought to have sexually assaulted, murdered, mutilated and dismembered at least 24 boys and young men between and The full extent of his crimes were revealed after pieces of human bone, some with knife marks, were found by Hanover residents worried about the disappearance of children in the area.

Haarmann, who was once a police informant, was beheaded in Karl Grossmann killed his victims and sold their meat on the black market and at his hot dog stand.

After neighbors heard screaming, police burst into his home to find a dead young woman on his bed. It's unclear how many lives Grossmann took, but he was suspected of dismembering 23 women and involvement in up to missing cases in Berlin.

He hanged himself in Friedrich Schumann was a locksmith who raped, murdered and stole from to After a confrontation with a local forester — whom he shot — Schumann was arrested and charged with the murder of six people and attempted murder of 11 others. He was sentenced to death six times.

The night before his execution at aged 28, he admitted to killing 25 people, including his first victim — his cousin. Paul Ogorzow was convicted of 31 sexual assaults, the murder of eight women and attempted murder of six others in Nazi-era Berlin between and Ogorzow worked for the German commuter rail system and would threaten, stab or bludgeon his rape victims before sometimes throwing them off the moving train.