Erwin Hagedorn killed three boys in the woods around Eberswalde, a town north-east of Berlin, in what was then East Germany. Two nine-year-old friends, Henry S. and Mario L., disappeared on a bicycle ride on May 31, 1969, and were found dead two weeks later. A 12-year-old, Ronald W., disappeared in the same woods in October 1971. Hagedorn was 17 at the time of the first killings and 19 when he was arrested in November 1971.
The case has a place in German criminal history for the way it was solved. The Volkspolizei and the Ministry for State Security (the Stasi) ran a search on a scale the GDR had not seen. For the first time in East German police work, investigators asked a forensic psychiatrist, Hans Szewczyk of the Charité in East Berlin, to describe the kind of man they were looking for. His central prediction, that the killer had probably approached other children before and that those children had never told anyone, led to a program of careful interviews with Eberswalde schoolchildren. One boy finally spoke, and Hagedorn was arrested the next day.
He was tried before the district court in Frankfurt (Oder) in May 1972, sentenced to death and shot in Leipzig on September 15, 1972. The state that executed him also tried to keep the case out of view. A detective film based on it, made for the GDR's flagship crime series Polizeiruf 110, was halted and ordered destroyed. It was finally broadcast in 2011.
Hagedorn was born in 1952, the taz reported in 2011, and grew up in Eberswalde. At the time of his arrest he was training as a cook; several accounts describe him as an apprentice with Mitropa, the East German company that ran station restaurants and dining cars.
The forensic psychiatrist Stefan Orlob, who has written a detailed account of the case drawing on the psychiatric reports, describes a cold and emotionally distant home in which his parents pressed him to become "something special." At school he was a loner and socially isolated. He developed violent fantasies early, Orlob writes, and acted them out on animals before he turned on children. He had built a hut near the housing area where he lived and took boys there.
His family was outwardly respectable. The journalist Marko Kregel, who reinvestigated the case for a book published in 2022, found a diary kept by Hagedorn's parents from his arrest until his execution. According to the Nordkurier's account of Kregel's research, the diary describes how a family that had been held up in Eberswalde as a model socialist household was shunned and isolated once the truth came out.
Henry S. and Mario L. were nine years old and lived in Eberswalde. They were friends. On Saturday, May 31, 1969, they set off together on their bicycles for a ride in the woods near the town, a large forest that bordered their neighborhood.
They did not come home that evening, and their parents called the police. The search that followed was large; Orlob describes lines of searchers combing the area. It found nothing. On June 12, 1969, the police took the unusual step, for the GDR, of appealing to the public in the regional newspaper. A police poster issued that year named both boys and offered a reward of 2,000 marks for information leading to the killer, and the Eberswalde police circulated a composite sketch of a suspect.
On June 13, 1969, forestry workers found both boys in the woods, about 500 meters apart and some five kilometers from home. Their bicycles were found nearby. Both had been killed with a knife.
Little has been published about the two boys as individuals. Their school friends, then children themselves, spoke on camera about them for the first time in the ARD documentary series "Angst in den Augen" in 2023, and again in the ZDF documentary "XY history: Der Mörder aus der Nachbarschaft" in 2026.
The killings were investigated jointly by the Volkspolizei and the Stasi. ZDF has described the search as unprecedented in the GDR. The deaths of two children at the hands of an unknown sadist were not supposed to happen under socialism, and the authorities were under pressure to find the killer quickly.
Forensic work by both agencies produced no breakthrough. The investigators then turned to Hans Szewczyk, a psychiatrist and psychologist who had headed the forensic psychiatry department at the Charité since 1961. He was asked to write a hypothesis about the perpetrator. Orlob, who reviewed the literature, regards it as the earliest documented scientific offender hypothesis in German-language criminology, and both ZDF and the ARTE Magazin describe it as the first offender profile in East German police history.
Szewczyk predicted a fairly young man from an orderly, not an antisocial, background. He told investigators that sadism of this kind could not be cured and that the risk of the killer striking again would not go away. To study comparable cases, the Stasi obtained the West German files on Jürgen Bartsch, who had abused and killed four children between 1962 and 1966 and whose case had caused a public stir in the Federal Republic.
None of this produced a suspect. According to ZDF, the case was kept largely under wraps for political reasons, and in time the police suspended the search.
Kregel's research turned up a side case from the years when the killer was still unknown. A mother in the area tried to kill her own daughter and attempted to blame the unknown child murderer, the Nordkurier reported in 2023. The episode shows how widely the fear had spread, and how the unsolved case could be used as cover.
Ronald W. was 12 and lived in the same part of Eberswalde. He went to school with boys who still remembered him half a century later and who were interviewed for the 2023 ARD series.
In October 1971, more than two years after the first killings, Ronald disappeared in the same woods. ZDF dates his disappearance to the Day of the Republic, the GDR's national holiday; Orlob gives the date as October 9, 1971. Orlob records that he was reported as having been followed by a stranger. He was found dead about 500 meters from his home, a day later according to funk, the ARD and ZDF online network. He too had been killed with a knife.
The third killing changed the investigation. Eberswalde, ZDF reported, was thrown into a state of emergency. Parents stopped letting their children go out alone, children were escorted to and from school, and a whole district of the town was placed under police watch.
Szewczyk was brought back. This time he compared the Eberswalde killings closely with the Bartsch case, and he developed the idea that would prove decisive. Before killing, he reasoned, the perpetrator had very probably attacked or approached other children, and those attacks had most likely never been reported, either because the children were frightened or ashamed, or because no one had recognized what had happened as a crime.
Working with the criminologist Herbert Grieschat, whom Orlob credits with the original idea of bringing in a forensic psychiatrist, Szewczyk designed a large-scale program of interviews with Eberswalde schoolchildren, concentrated in the Westend district, where the victims had lived. Small teams from Szewczyk's own staff carried out the interviews, which were meant to be psychologically sensitive rather than interrogations. All of the information gathered was processed by computer, something Orlob describes as new for a GDR murder inquiry.
On November 11, 1971, a boy told the interviewers that a man had assaulted him in 1968, a year before the first murders. He had kept silent for years out of shame and fear, the Nordkurier reported. He was able to show the investigators where the man lived. He has spoken publicly about it as an adult; he is not named here because he was a child victim.
On November 12, 1971, the police took Erwin Hagedorn, then 19, to the police station.
Early accounts of the case describe a quick, emotionless confession. Orlob writes that Hagedorn confessed without coercion and gave detailed accounts of what he had done. A 2015 review of a television film about the case described him in interrogation as forthcoming, polite and impersonal.
Kregel's research complicates that picture. He listened to 60 audio tapes of Hagedorn's interrogations that had never been evaluated, and found that the full confession came only after weeks of questioning, during which Hagedorn lied, held back information, refused to cooperate, wept and protested.
After his arrest, criminologists from the GDR Interior Ministry made an instructional film in which Hagedorn re-enacted his crimes at the scenes; children of investigators stood in for the victims. The film was later shown to the makers of the Polizeiruf 110 episode based on the case.
In December 1971 the prosecutor, Dr. Kuschel, commissioned Szewczyk and a second psychiatrist, Dr. Ochernal, to assess whether Hagedorn could be held criminally responsible. Szewczyk's report, as Orlob summarizes it, described a highly abnormal personality marked by grandiosity, feelings of inferiority, a limited capacity for attachment and flattened emotions. But he found that Hagedorn was accountable for his actions: he was able to control his impulses and had built up his violent arousal deliberately, and he had no disorder that reduced his responsibility. Ochernal reached the same conclusion.
Orlob questions how independent that assessment could be, since Szewczyk had been deeply involved in the hunt for the killer under heavy public pressure before he was asked to assess the man who was caught. He draws a parallel with the role of the psychiatrist Ernst Schultze in the Haarmann case in Hanover in 1924. The critic Jan Sternberg went further in a 2015 review, writing that Hagedorn was very probably not criminally responsible and that the GDR justice system ignored this. That is a critic's judgment, not a finding of any court.
The trial opened on May 9, 1972, before the 1st Criminal Senate of the Bezirksgericht Frankfurt (Oder), the district court for the region that included Eberswalde. The presiding judge was named Nassaroff. After three days of hearings, the court found Hagedorn fully responsible for his actions.
On May 15, 1972, it sentenced him to death. According to Orlob's account of the judgment, the conviction covered three completed murders and eight attempted or prepared murders, together with sexual offenses against children.
Hagedorn appealed. The 5th Senate of the Supreme Court of the GDR upheld the verdict.
Hagedorn was 17 when he killed Henry S. and Mario L. Orlob notes that the GDR did not impose the death penalty on juveniles. He was 19 when he was arrested, weeks after Ronald W.'s death, and under GDR law, the German Spy Museum and the ARTE Magazin both point out, there were no special provisions for young adults of that age, so a death sentence was legally open to the court.
His age became part of the later controversy. In 2011 German newspapers reporting on the banned television episode recalled that it was the West German journalist Friedhelm Werremeier who had established that Hagedorn was a minor at the time of the first murders, and that the GDR leadership feared what Western coverage of that fact, and of the execution, would do.
In summer 1972 a petition for clemency reached Walter Ulbricht, chairman of the GDR's Council of State. Ulbricht rejected it, Orlob records.
On September 14, 1972, Hagedorn was moved to Torgau, and on September 15 to Leipzig. He was executed there that day by a single shot to the back of the neck, at about 10 a.m. according to Orlob and at midday according to the Berliner Kurier. The critic Jan Sternberg gives his age at death as 20.
The place of execution was the GDR's central execution site, in a closed-off section of the prison on Alfred-Kästner-Straße in Leipzig's Südvorstadt. It was in use from 1960 until the death penalty was abolished in 1987. According to the Bürgerkomitee Leipzig, which runs the memorial at the former Stasi headquarters known as the Runde Ecke, 64 people were executed there. At first executions were carried out by guillotine; from 1968 the method was an unannounced shot to the back of the head. Only a small circle of officials was present. The bodies were cremated at the crematorium of the Südfriedhof and recorded anonymously as anatomical specimens, and death certificates were falsified to hide the cause and place of death. The historian Jörn-Michael Goll has said that executions in the GDR had been carried out in secret since the 1960s. In all, the GDR handed down 231 death sentences and carried out 166.
How Hagedorn's own death was recorded, and how the families of the victims learned of it, has not been described in the reporting.
In the GDR the case was handled with great caution. The ARTE Magazin, summarizing the work of historians and former investigators, notes that Marxist-Leninist thinking had no room for this kind of abnormal behavior: people were seen as products of their society, so a crime like this reflected on the state. Such cases were kept quiet where possible to avoid public unrest, sensational coverage was avoided, and information was released only when it could not be held back. Officials spoke of "Brennpunkte," trouble spots, rather than of serial killers.
The Eberswalde case was an exception in one respect. Because the investigators needed help from the public, the Volkspolizei and the Stasi put up posters and placed appeals in newspapers, an unusual step for East German police. Once Hagedorn was caught, the case receded from view. The television columnist Tilmann P. Gangloff has written that the ruling party regarded child murderers of this kind as incompatible with socialism, and that the case never caused the public debate in the East that the Bartsch case had caused in the West. The critic Jan Sternberg disputed one part of that picture, writing in 2015 that there was no evidence the Stasi or police had ever denied that such offenders could exist in the GDR.
In the West the execution drew protests, Gangloff wrote. Friedhelm Werremeier, a West German writer and screenwriter best known as the creator of Trimmel, the first commissar of the Tatort crime series, researched the case and published a book on it, "Der Fall Heckenrose." In East Germany, Herbert Grieschat published an account of the investigation in the professional journal Forum der Kriminalistik in 1973, which, Orlob writes, first brought the case to wider professional attention.
Polizeiruf 110, the crime series of East German state television, was overseen closely by the Interior Ministry, which controlled the Volkspolizei. In 1974 the Cottbus writer Dorothea Kleine wrote a treatment based on the Hagedorn case, working title "Am hellerlichten Tag." The director Heinz Seibert reworked it into a screenplay, and the film was shot from September to November 1974 in Berlin and Brandenburg under the title "Im Alter von ..." Peter Borgelt and Jürgen Frohriep played the series' regular investigators. The story was moved away from the real case: a boy disappears after a swimming outing, and the killer takes his own life before he can be arrested.
The production never reached the screen. Television programmers judged the subject too close to a crime that, officially, should not exist in the GDR. A ban order dated April 4, 1975, stopped the film at the rough-cut stage and directed that all material be destroyed. No official reason was ever given. Newspaper reports in 2011 linked the decision to fear of Western coverage after Werremeier's reporting.
A silent camera negative survived by chance. It was found in 2009 at the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv in Babelsberg, according to the Berliner Kurier under a cellar staircase. In the same year the writer Thomas Gaevert found a copy of the script. Because the soundtrack was lost and several of the original actors had died, MDR completed the film with the director Hans Werner, with current Polizeiruf actors dubbing the original cast from the script. It was broadcast for the first time on June 23, 2011, on MDR.
ARD told the case in 2001 in "Tod einer Bestie: Der Fall Hagedorn," an episode of its series "Die großen Kriminalfälle."
On January 30, 2013, ARD broadcast "Mord in Eberswalde," a drama produced by WDR and Westside Filmproduktion, written by Holger Karsten Schmidt and directed by Stephan Wagner. Ronald Zehrfeld played a fictional Volkspolizei investigator, Heinz Gödicke, and Sergius Buckmeier played Hagedorn. The first broadcast drew 5.23 million viewers, and the film won a Grimme Prize, with awards for its writer, director, production designer and two of its actors. Reviewers noted that it invented a rivalry between police and Stasi investigators and drew on the Bartsch case as well.
Kregel's book "Blutrausch: Der Fall Erwin Hagedorn" appeared in 2022. Besides the interrogation tapes and the parents' diary, he examined more than 600 files on unofficial informants of the Stasi held in the Stasi Records Archive in Berlin, now part of the Bundesarchiv. Readings and promotional material for the book highlighted the Stasi's influence on the investigation as one of the aspects earlier accounts had neglected. The former investigator Hans Thiers covered the case among about a dozen serial cases in his 2018 book "Serienmörder der DDR."
Kregel's research also fed into "Angst in den Augen," a three-part documentary series of about 30 minutes per episode for ARD's Crime Time strand, produced by MDR and released in the ARD Mediathek in April 2023. Its makers interviewed, for the first time on film, school friends of the victims, people who had known Hagedorn, former investigators and the man whose childhood statement led to the arrest. funk followed in November 2023 with a 14-minute report in its series "Der Fall," and ZDF devoted an episode of "XY history," presented by Sven Voss, to the case on September 30, 2026, with the former investigator Wolfgang Mücke, the forensic psychologist Gilda Giebel and Kregel.
Proven by final judgment: the murders of Henry S., Mario L. and Ronald W., with further attempted or prepared murders and offenses against children, as recorded in the judgment of May 15, 1972, and upheld by the GDR Supreme Court.
"The last civilian executed in the GDR": funk, the Nordkurier, evangelisch.de and others describe Hagedorn's execution this way, as the last death sentence carried out in an ordinary criminal case. Later executions in Leipzig, through 1981, were for political, espionage or Nazi-era crimes. Whether any ordinary murderer was executed after September 1972 has not been settled in the reporting, and the label remains the outlets' own.
Date of Ronald W.'s death: ZDF places his disappearance on the Day of the Republic in October 1971; Orlob gives October 9, 1971.
Criminal responsibility: two court-appointed psychiatrists found Hagedorn fully responsible. A critic writing in 2015 argued that he very probably was not. Orlob questions whether Szewczyk, who had helped hunt the killer, could assess him impartially.
The confession: some accounts describe a quick, cooperative confession; Kregel's review of the interrogation tapes found that it came only after weeks of resistance.
Werremeier's book: sources differ on the year in which "Der Fall Heckenrose" was published, and it is not settled whether his articles or the book came first.
1952: Erwin Hagedorn is born; he grows up in Eberswalde.
1968: a boy is assaulted by a man near Eberswalde; he tells no one.
May 31, 1969: Henry S. and Mario L., both 9, set off on a bicycle ride into the woods and do not return.
June 12, 1969: police appeal to the public in the regional newspaper.
June 13, 1969: forestry workers find both boys dead in the woods.
1969 to 1970: the Volkspolizei and the Stasi investigate; Hans Szewczyk writes an offender hypothesis; the Stasi obtains the West German Bartsch files; the search is eventually suspended.
October 1971: Ronald W., 12, disappears in the same woods and is found dead near his home.
October to November 1971: Eberswalde is placed under police watch; Szewczyk and Herbert Grieschat organize interviews with schoolchildren in the Westend district.
November 11, 1971: a boy reports the 1968 assault and shows investigators where the man lives.
November 12, 1971: Hagedorn, 19, is taken in by police; he later confesses.
December 1971: prosecutor Kuschel commissions psychiatric reports from Szewczyk and Ochernal; both find him responsible.
May 9, 1972: trial opens before the 1st Criminal Senate of the Bezirksgericht Frankfurt (Oder).
May 15, 1972: sentenced to death.
1972: the GDR Supreme Court upholds the verdict; in summer Walter Ulbricht rejects clemency.
September 14, 1972: moved to Torgau.
September 15, 1972: executed by a shot to the back of the neck in Leipzig.
1973: Grieschat publishes an account in Forum der Kriminalistik.
September to November 1974: the Polizeiruf 110 episode "Im Alter von ..." is filmed.
April 4, 1975: ban order; all material is to be destroyed.
1987: the GDR abolishes the death penalty.
2001: ARD broadcasts "Tod einer Bestie: Der Fall Hagedorn."
2009: the silent camera negative and a script are found.
June 23, 2011: the reconstructed episode is first broadcast on MDR.
January 30, 2013: ARD broadcasts "Mord in Eberswalde."
2018: Hans Thiers's "Serienmörder der DDR" is published.
2022: Marko Kregel's "Blutrausch: Der Fall Erwin Hagedorn" is published.
April 2023: "Angst in den Augen" is released in the ARD Mediathek.
November 7, 2023: funk releases "Todesurteil für 19-Jährigen: Der Fall Erwin Hagedorn."
September 30, 2026: ZDF broadcasts "XY history: Der Mörder aus der Nachbarschaft."