Friedrich Heinrich Karl Haarmann was born in Hanover on October 25, 1879, the sixth child of a bad-tempered locomotive stoker. He was declared unfit for military service, spent time in an asylum from which he escaped, and had convictions for indecency with children, theft and fraud going back to 1898.
Hanover after 1918 was full of people with nowhere to go. The railway station was crowded with refugees from the east, demobilised soldiers, and boys who had run from home or lost it, and the city had a busy black market in which Haarmann traded meat and second-hand clothes. He also worked as an informer for the Hanover police, which gave him standing at the station, and he sometimes wore a semblance of a uniform and took boys away in the character of a detective. The German press called him the Butcher of Hanover and the Vampire of Hanover.
From 1918 to 1924 he took at least twenty-four of them back to his rooms, first at Cellerstrasse and later at Rote Reihe. He killed them by biting through the throat, which is how the case got its name, dismembered the bodies, threw what he could into the Leine, and sold the clothing and belongings on the market. He lived for part of this period with a younger man, Hans Grans, who took the pick of the clothes.
In May 1924 boys playing by the Leine found a skull, and then more. In July the river was dredged and over five hundred human bones were recovered. Haarmann had already been arrested on June 22 after a fight with a boy at the station, and the search of his rooms found bloodstained walls and clothing belonging to the missing.
He was tried at Hanover in December 1924 in a case that ran two weeks and produced a national sensation. He confessed volubly and was frequently ejected for interrupting. He was convicted of twenty-four murders and beheaded by sword at Hanover on April 15, 1925. Grans was convicted as an accessory and served twelve years. The long-repeated claim that Haarmann sold human meat on the market was raised at the time, was never proved, and remains unproven.