Adolf Seefeld, also written Seefeldt, was a traveling clock repairer from Potsdam who spent decades without a fixed home, moving between villages in Mecklenburg and the neighboring districts. In 1935 he was arrested in the district of Ruppin after the deaths of a group of boys had set off one of the largest police inquiries of the Nazi period in northern Germany. In January and February 1936 he stood trial before the jury court at Schwerin. He never confessed in court, and the case against him was built from circumstantial evidence. On February 22, 1936, he was found guilty of twelve murders of boys and sentenced to death. He was executed in Schwerin on May 23, 1936.
His name is attached to much larger numbers than twelve. Statements made in Gestapo custody after the verdict, and suspicion that reached back to the 1890s, led to claims of thirty or more killings and of a hundred further offenses. None of those further cases was tried, and the value of the statements is doubted. What the Schwerin court decided in 1936 is on firm ground; the larger figures were only attributed to him.
Seefeld was born on March 6 in Potsdam. The year is given as 1879 by the Berlin writer Frank-Rainer Schurich and as 1870 by the Nordkurier; Time magazine, reporting from Schwerin in 1936, gave his age as 65, which fits 1870. He trained as a locksmith. He married, in Lübeck according to the Nordkurier, and the marriage ended. Schurich writes that he left his wife and three children; the Nordkurier mentions a son. From 1904 he had no fixed address.
For the next three decades he earned his living as an itinerant clock repairer, working from village to village in the country between the Baltic coast and the Elbe. Schurich and the Nordkurier both report that he had served about 23 years in prisons and penitentiaries in total for earlier offenses, and that some of that time was spent in psychiatric institutions.
Police records had followed him for years. Schurich reports that before the first murder later proved against him, in April 1933, he had come under suspicion in about ten cases of killed children, none of which could be proven. His name was already on police files.
The Schwerin court convicted him of the murders of twelve boys, aged between five and thirteen according to Schurich. No surviving account ties a name to a particular count. The three whose cases drew the largest police response in the spring of 1935 were Hans-Joachim Neumann, 11, of Wismar; Heinz Zimmermann, 9, of Schwerin; and Gustav Thomas, 9, whose case was in the district of Wittenberge. Reports differ on the first names of two of them: the Nordkurier calls the Schwerin boy Hans Zimmermann, and Schurich at one point calls the Wismar boy Karl-Heinz Neumann.
Later accounts list all twelve boys, with the day each died. They were Kurt Gnirk, 12, who died on April 16, 1933; Wolfgang Metzdorf, October 8, 1933; Ernst Tesdorf, a boy known around his village for gathering pine kindling, November 2, 1933; Alfred Prätorius, November 12, 1933; Hans Korn, January 16, 1934; Günter Tieske of Oranienburg, October 2, 1934; Erwin Wischnewski of Brandenburg, 11, October 8, 1934; Artur Dill, 4, and Edgar Dittrich, 5, both found at Neuruppin and both dead on October 16, 1934; Hans-Joachim Neumann, who died on February 16, 1935, and was not found until June 20; Heinz Zimmermann, February 23, 1935; and Gustav Thomas, who died on March 22, 1935, and was found the next day in a pine wood near Wittenberge. The same list gives Neumann and Zimmermann as ten and Thomas as eleven, a year off the ages in other reports, and its youngest boy, Artur Dill, was younger than the range Schurich gives.
The Nordkurier lists a larger set of boys whose deaths in 1933 and 1934 were linked to Seefeld by investigators, with places that include the Lübeck area, Rostock, Ludwigslust, Wittenberge and Neuruppin. They were linked to him by investigators and are not the twelve found proven in court. The same article records one observation that shaped the inquiry: no child was harmed while Seefeld was in custody, and he had been in the areas concerned when the boys died. That pattern, together with his earlier record, put him near the top of the suspect list.
Little is on record about who the boys were beyond their names, ages and towns, and no statement from their families is on record.
Through the early months of 1935 several districts were working on the deaths of boys. The Nordkurier reports that a traveling salesman was arrested in March 1935 as a suspect and died by suicide in his cell; he was not the man the courts later convicted. Seefeld came back to the investigators' attention through reports of his movements and through the pattern described above.
Hans Lobbes, the Berlin homicide chief, joined the work and moved his base to Schwerin, according to the Nordkurier and Schurich. Schurich writes that Lobbes believed Seefeld had also killed three boys in Berlin. Lobbes learned where Seefeld had been on the relevant dates but did not obtain a confession.
Seefeld was arrested on April 3, 1935, at Wutzetz, in the district of Ruppin. Schurich says he offered no resistance. Witnesses from the Wittenberge area identified him. In questioning he stayed silent and did not answer the difficult questions put to him. He denied the charges throughout the investigation, the Nordkurier reports.
A diary found among his belongings recorded his movements and, Schurich writes, placed him in the areas concerned at the times that mattered. The diary was among the few items of physical evidence the prosecution had.
The indictment, file number Js. 425/35, was issued at the Landgericht Schwerin by the chief public prosecutor, Oberstaatsanwalt Beusch. A German book on the case reproduces its heading as an indictment against the clock repairer Adolf Seefeld of Potsdam "wegen Mordes pp.", that is, for murder and related matters. The book notes that the indictment also set out cases in which suspicion existed but no conclusive proof, and for those no charges were brought. The number of separate counts in the indictment is not on record; the verdict, as reported afterward, was on twelve murders.
The trial opened on January 21, 1936, before the Schwurgericht, the jury court, at Schwerin. Schurich says it ran for about four weeks and heard more than 150 witnesses and experts. Time magazine, in its issue of March 2, 1936, described the Schwerin court as methodical and the defendant as 65 years old.
The prosecution faced a difficult case. The Nordkurier reports that the cause of death of the boys could not be established. The physical evidence was thin. There was no confession. The Nordkurier reports that Seefeld denied the charges throughout.
The prosecution relied on a chain of circumstances. Seefeld's earlier convictions, his movements as recorded in the diary, the identifications by witnesses from Wittenberge, and the pattern that boys had come to harm in the districts where he worked and not while he was in custody all went to the jury.
On February 22, 1936, the court found Seefeld guilty of twelve murders and sentenced him to death. The presiding judge, Dr. Sarkander, described the prosecution case as a "restlos gelungenen Indizienbeweis," a circumstantial case that had succeeded completely. Time reported that the sentence also included preventive detention and a prison term of 15 years, with the death sentence to be carried out first, and it quoted the prosecutor as declaring that "jointly responsible with the accused for his deeds is Liberalism!" The remark places the trial in its period: the prosecutor was speaking as an official of the Nazi state, and he used the case to attack the political order of the Weimar years.
According to the same book, neither the prosecution nor the defense lawyer, Rechtsanwalt Neubeck, appealed, and the judgment became final. It says the chief prosecutor visited Seefeld in his cell several times to press him for a full confession.
After the verdict the case left the courtroom. The book on the case, which relies on a 1967 essay by Erich Ebermayer, says that Heinrich Himmler pressed for a swift execution once Hitler had declined to grant clemency, and that the Gestapo took Seefeld into its own custody. The grounds given were suspected communist agent activity, a claim that has no visible connection to the crimes for which he had been tried.
Schurich and the Nordkurier agree on what happened next. The Gestapo took Seefeld to Berlin, where he began to confess to everything he was asked about. The Nordkurier states that the confessions were made under torture and that their value is doubtful; he was said to have confessed to further killings. A Gestapo press statement, quoted in the book, claimed a comprehensive and detailed confession to murder and said the court had established twelve murders.
The criminologist Michael Stricker, cited by Schurich, argues that the regime could not tolerate a defendant who had shown contempt for the court and refused to confess, and that this is why the confession was extracted. The Nordkurier reports that he was accused of about a hundred further offenses, including at least thirty murders, between Berlin and Hamburg since about 1893. Because these claims come from statements made in Gestapo custody, they stay in the category of attributed, not proven.
Four days after the verdict, the book adds, a 68-year-old former companion of Seefeld's in Putbus died by suicide after making a statement to the police. The content of that statement is not on record.
Adolf Seefeld was executed in Schwerin on May 23, 1936. Schurich and the Nordkurier give that date and place. It came a little under three months after the verdict.
The number of boys Seefeld killed is not known. Twelve is the number the Schwerin court found proven, and it is the figure that reached the press at the time: Time, in March 1936, wrote that he had killed a dozen boys. Beyond that lie three layers of suspicion, none of them tried.
The first is the Gestapo-era material, with its claim of about thirty murders and a hundred further offenses. The second is the list of earlier cases from 1893 to 1930 recorded in the book, in which police suspected him but found no conclusive proof, so no charges followed. They include children in Spandau, Hameln, Wandsbek, the Aachen region, Harburg and Essen. The book's author concludes that for the later of these cases nothing really points to Seefeld. The third is Lobbes's belief that three boys in Berlin were his victims, which produced no confession and no charge.
Schurich adds that Seefeld's travels reached Aachen, southern Germany and Silesia, where other children had been reported dead, and that police lacked the capacity to follow those leads. Stricker suspects that the true figure will never be established.
The first dispute is the birth year, 1870 or 1879. The second is the spelling of his name, Seefeld in the German press and court papers and Seefeldt in later English usage. The third is the reliability of the Gestapo confession. The Nordkurier says its value is doubtful, and the circumstances in which it was obtained, after a death sentence and under pressure from the Berlin leadership, give that doubt a firm basis. The fourth is the cause of death, which the Schwerin court could not establish.
The transcript of the trial, the indictment's list of counts and the Schwerin judgment do not survive in any published form.
March 6 (year given as 1870 or 1879): Adolf Seefeld is born in Potsdam.
1904: begins life without a fixed address, working as a traveling clock repairer.
Before 1933: serves about 23 years in total in prisons and penitentiaries for earlier offenses.
April 1933: the first murder later proved against him, according to Schurich.
1933 and 1934: deaths of boys in Mecklenburg and neighboring districts are linked to him by investigators.
February to March 1935: the deaths of three boys, Hans-Joachim Neumann, Heinz Zimmermann and Gustav Thomas, bring a large police inquiry.
March 1935: a traveling salesman held as a suspect dies by suicide in his cell.
April 3, 1935: Seefeld is arrested at Wutzetz, district of Ruppin.
January 21, 1936: trial opens at the Schwerin jury court.
February 22, 1936: convicted of twelve murders and sentenced to death; neither side appeals.
After the verdict: Gestapo custody in Berlin; statements credit him with many further deaths.
March 2, 1936: Time reports the sentence.
May 23, 1936: executed in Schwerin.