Wiese was born on July 1, 1853 in Hamburg. She worked as an Engelmacherin. An angel-maker, the German term for a woman who took in illegitimate or unwanted infants for a fee, ostensibly to place them with families. She had previous convictions for procuring abortions and for theft.
Between 1902 and 1903 she took payments for at least five children and killed them: Peter Berkefeld, Wilhelm Karl Klotsche, Franz Sommer, Bertha Blanck and Peter Schultheiss. She gave them morphine, and she burned or otherwise disposed of the bodies in the stove of her flat. One of the dead was her own daughter's child. German reporting called her the angel-maker of St Pauli, after the district.
The case came to light when her daughter, Paula, told the authorities. She was arrested, tried in Hamburg, convicted, and beheaded on February 2, 1905.
The case belongs to a documented phenomenon rather than being an isolated horror. In Germany and Austria at the turn of the century, women in this trade advertised in newspapers and were paid a lump sum to take an infant permanently, and the economics of that arrangement rewarded the child's death. Several such cases were prosecuted in the period. What made this one notorious was the number, the morphine and the stove.
The accessible sourcing is German-language material and is not detailed on the trial.