Adolf Gustav Seefeld was born in 1871 and spent his life on the road across northern Germany as a clockmaker and general repairer, sleeping rough and in barns. He had convictions for offences against children going back to 1908 and had served long sentences, including twelve years, and had been released each time.
Between 1933 and 1935 he killed at least twelve boys aged between four and eleven, in Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, Pomerania and elsewhere along his usual circuits. He befriended them, gave them a drink containing a poison he had prepared himself from wild plants and fungi, and left them lying in woods and fields, arranged neatly, without visible injury. Because there was no wound and no obvious cause, a number of the deaths were recorded as natural. German children knew him as Onkel Tick Tack, Uncle Tick Tock, after the clocks he mended.
That the killings crossed many jurisdictions and produced bodies with no apparent cause of death is why he was able to continue for years, and why the total is uncertain; his own figure was higher.
He was arrested in 1935. He was tried at Schwerin, convicted, and guillotined on May 23, 1936, aged sixty-five.
The case was handled by the Kripo of the Nazi period and was used at the time in support of the regime's hereditary-criminality doctrine, which is a caution to apply to the surviving official material about him.