Between September 1918 and June 1924, at least 24 boys and young men disappeared in Hanover after meeting Fritz Haarmann. Most were teenagers. Many had run away from home, or were passing through the city's main railway station on their way somewhere else, at a time when Hanover, a city of about 450,000 people, was full of young people with no fixed place to stay. Haarmann, then in his forties, was a convicted thief and sex offender who traded in meat and secondhand clothing. He was also a police informer, and he used that standing to approach young travelers in the station's waiting rooms.
The killings came to light only in 1924, after children found a human skull on the bank of the Leine. Haarmann was arrested in June, confessed under heavy pressure, and was tried with his former companion Hans Grans before a jury court in December. He was convicted of 24 murders and acquitted of three, sentenced to death and guillotined in April 1925. The case raised questions that were never fully answered: how many people he killed, why the police ignored years of warnings, whether he was legally responsible, and whether Grans was guilty at all. The philosopher Theodor Lessing, who covered the trial and attacked the role of the police, was removed from the courtroom and later hounded out of his teaching post. A century later, the case still draws visitors to archives and museums in Lower Saxony.
Friedrich Heinrich Karl Haarmann was born in Hanover on October 25, 1879, the youngest of six children. The fullest early account is Theodor Lessing's book of 1925, which drew on the trial record. Lessing describes the father as a former locomotive stoker who left the railway in 1886 and founded a small cigar factory in 1888, a quarrelsome and hard-drinking man. Fritz's mother, Johanne, born Claudius, was seven years older than her husband and about 41 when her last child was born. Fritz was devoted to her; she died on April 5, 1901. Of his siblings, Lessing names a brother, Adolf, who became a foreman at the Continental works; another brother, Wilhelm; and three sisters, of whom Emma stayed closest to Fritz.
Lessing describes a boy who played with dolls, dressed in his sisters' clothes and liked to frighten them. He entered a local school at Easter 1886, repeated a year twice, in 1888 and 1890, and was confirmed in 1894. The forensic psychiatrist Christine Pozsár, who studied his 1924 psychiatric interviews in the 1990s, recorded a humiliating relationship with his father, a possible sexual assault by him, and abuse by an older brother from about the age of six. None of this, she found, was taken into account by the psychiatrist who assessed him in 1924.
After failing as an apprentice locksmith, Haarmann was sent to a military school for future noncommissioned officers at Neu-Breisach in Alsace, arriving on April 4, 1895. Within months he was in the garrison hospital with what doctors called signs of mental disturbance; on readmission in October 1895 the diagnosis was an "epileptic equivalent." He asked to leave and was sent home on November 3, 1895.
In July 1896, at 16, he faced his first criminal proceedings, for indecent acts with young children. The state archive's summary says he was held from March to December 1897 in several provincial psychiatric institutions. Lessing gives the details: in February 1897 he was sent to the asylum at Hildesheim for observation and diagnosed with congenital feeblemindedness; after a spell in a Hanover city hospital he was sent back to Hildesheim in May 1897, where a doctor called the condition incurable. The criminal case was dropped on grounds of insanity. Around Christmas 1897 he was moved to the asylum at Langenhagen, and on December 25 he escaped and went to Switzerland, probably with his family's help. He worked near Zürich, at a shipyard and then for a pharmacist, and came home in April 1899.
The experience marked him. He later said he would rather be beheaded than returned to an asylum, and in Göttingen in 1924 he told the psychiatrist examining him that the asylum was full of madmen. The Ärzte Zeitung, reviewing the case in 2024, noted that he accepted the death penalty partly out of fear of being committed again.
In 1899 Haarmann became engaged to a young woman from a working family in Hanover. On October 12, 1900, he enlisted in the 10th Jäger Battalion, stationed at Bitsch, and later called his army service the best time of his life. He collapsed on a march during maneuvers in 1901, was treated for "neurasthenia," and on July 28, 1902, was discharged as permanently unfit, with a pension of 21 marks a month, later raised to 24.
Back in Hanover he sued his father for maintenance and lost; his father in turn accused him of threats and tried to have him committed, but a district medical officer found in May 1903 that he was morally deficient, not legally insane. A fish shop, set up in 1904 with a loan from his father, failed, and the engagement ended. From then on he lived largely by theft, fraud and embezzlement. He was convicted four times in 1904, served a combined 13 months in 1905, and in 1906 received a month for assaulting his father. Lessing records further cases under Paragraph 175, the law that criminalized sex between men, including one dropped in 1911, and a conviction in 1912 for trying to lure a 13-year-old boy. The state archive lists convictions for sexual offenses in 1912 and 1918.
In 1913 he was sentenced to five years' penitentiary for a series of cellar burglaries. He served the term during the First World War in prisons at Celle, Lüneburg, Rendsburg and Rawitsch, part of it as a laborer on an estate, and was released in April 1918.
Haarmann came out of prison into a city in upheaval. Lessing describes Hanover after the war as a center of black-market trading and theft, with the main station and the old town at its heart. In 1923 alone almost 600 people were reported missing in the city, most of them boys and young men between 14 and 18.
From 1918 Haarmann worked for the Hanover criminal police as an informer, passing on what he learned in the city's underworld. The state archive describes him as a small-time crook whom the police pressured into this work, and says it was the reason earlier suspicions against him were not pursued and missing-person reports were handled only after long delays. He carried an official police pass, which let him move freely through the station and its waiting rooms. Boys he approached there took him for a plainclothes detective, and in at least one case he introduced himself to a missing boy's family as a criminal investigator. Lessing argued that his police connections both opened doors for him and shielded him for years.
He also had a trade. In April 1918 he rented a shop with a back room at Cellerstraße 27, where black-market meat and goods changed hands. In later years he dealt in secondhand clothing and in meat, including horse meat, according to the archive. That trade became the source of the case's most persistent legend.
The first killing for which Haarmann was convicted was that of Friedel Rothe, a 17-year-old schoolboy, the son of an innkeeper. In the hungry last year of the war his father was at the front and his mother was struggling to manage him. On September 25, 1918, after a quarrel at home, he went missing. Two days later his mother received a postcard from him saying he would come home when she was in a better mood. His father returned from the front that same day.
The parents searched for him themselves. Through Friedel's friends they learned that he had met a well-dressed man who said he was a police detective, gave the boys presents and had taken Friedel to his rooms. Two of the friends tracked the rooms down to Cellerstraße 27. The parents went to the police, and in October 1918 an officer named Brauns went to the address at night. He found Haarmann with another boy and took them both away. Haarmann was later sentenced to nine months for the offense against that boy. But Brauns did not search the rooms. Asked about it afterward, he said he had had no orders to do so.
Friedel Rothe was not found. When the case reopened in 1924, Haarmann told police that the boy's body had been in the rooms at the time of the search. The state archive's summary records this admission; it is the plainest single example of the police failure that ran through the case. Lessing also believed that a second boy, Hermann Koch, 14, the son of a bicycle dealer, was killed in the Cellerstraße rooms in 1918. Suspicion against Haarmann in that case was raised and then dropped, and he was never charged with it.
Haarmann's whereabouts in the years after 1918 are well documented, because he was so often in custody. He moved several times, was held in custody from June 2 to July 19, 1919, on another Paragraph 175 case that collapsed when the boys withdrew their statements, and was examined that June by a doctor who found him fully responsible for his actions; he had concealed his earlier asylum stays. In December 1919 he was jailed to serve the nine-month sentence from the Rothe search, and was released on December 3, 1920. In 1921 he served three weeks for begging and then six months, from November 1921 to March 1922, at the Jägerheide labor colony near Celle, for stealing laundry.
In October 1919 he met Hans Grans at the station. Grans was born in Hanover on July 7, 1901; Lessing describes his father as running a small paper and bookbinding shop with a lending library in the old town. Grans had left school, lost a job for embezzlement and been discharged from the army. The historian Dagmar Lieske, in a 2016 study of Grans, places their meeting in Hanover's street prostitution scene. The two men lived together on and off for about four years and made a living mainly by selling stolen clothes and laundry. Lessing, who saw them both in court, described a relationship that was sexual but also one of mutual dependence and control. By 1921 they had moved to rooms in the Neue Straße in the old town, close to the Leine, and Haarmann later took an attic room in the Rote Reihe.
After Friedel Rothe, the next killing for which Haarmann was convicted came in February 1923; all the others for which he was convicted followed by June 1924. A 2023 t-online account, drawing on the case history, describes a pace of roughly one a month from February 1923 and roughly one a week from October 1923 to April 1924. The Lower Saxony State Archive's case summary gives the victims' names, ages and occupations; Lessing's account of the trial evidence gives the dates and details. The German archive and press have named the victims in full for a century.
Fritz Franke, 16, an apprentice from Berlin, the son of an innkeeper, had come to Hanover with a friend and disappeared on February 12, 1923. Haarmann met them in a station waiting room, sent the friend to a shelter and took Franke home; he later told the friend that Franke had gone on to Hamburg. Two women from Haarmann's circle took a parcel of meat from his rooms to the police, who had it looked at by the police doctor; he declared it pork, without examining it under a microscope, and a search of the rooms found nothing.
Wilhelm Schulze, 16, an office apprentice and the son of a railway carpenter who had died, vanished on his way to work on March 20, 1923. Roland Huch, 15, the only son of a pharmacist and a pupil at a Hanover grammar school, wanted to go to sea; he packed a case while his parents were at a concert and disappeared on May 23, 1923. When his parents went to the station police, the officer on duty told them he could not set the whole apparatus in motion over a runaway boy, and their report was never passed on. Hans Sonnenfeld, 18, the son of a Hanover merchant, had worked in a factory in Limmer; he disappeared at the end of May 1923.
Ernst Ehrenberg, 14, was the son of a shoemaker who lived near Haarmann. On June 25, 1923, he was sent to deliver a pair of mended shoes and did not come home. A year later a small boy brought the police a school cap Haarmann had given him, and among Haarmann's belongings officers found a pair of suspenders Ernst's father had sewn. Heinrich Struß, 18, from Egestorf, an office clerk who lived with his aunt in Hanover, disappeared on August 24, 1923.
Paul Bronischewski, 15, an apprentice from Bochum, was traveling to visit an uncle and got off the train in Hanover on September 24, 1923. Richard Gräf, 17, one of five children cared for by an older brother after their mother left and their father fell ill, disappeared at the end of September 1923 after an attempt to emigrate to America came to nothing. Wilhelm Erdner, 16, the son of a locksmith in Gehrden, who rode his bicycle to work at a machine factory, disappeared on October 12, 1923; his bicycle was later sold through Grans. Heinz Brinkmann, 13, from Clausthal, the son of a widow, was on his way to visit his brother, a soldier in Hanover, and disappeared on October 27, 1923.
Adolf Hannappel, 17, a carpenter's son from Düsseldorf who had been working on a farm near Lippstadt, disappeared on St. Martin's Day, November 10, 1923. Witnesses said Grans had pointed him out to Haarmann at the station and helped carry his trunk; this case became the basis of Grans's death sentence.
The killings continued into 1924. Ernst Spieker, 17, a locksmith, disappeared on January 5, 1924, after giving evidence in court that day; items from his wardrobe later surfaced with Haarmann and Grans. Heinrich Koch, 20, a laborer from a quiet family who had run away from home, disappeared on January 15. Willi Senger, 19, a laborer who had spent years around the station, disappeared on February 2; Haarmann denied knowing him, but his coat was found in Haarmann's possession. Hermann Speichert, 15, an apprentice electrician, was last seen with his sister in Linden and disappeared on February 8; clothing with his monogram was found in Haarmann's rooms.
Alfred Hogrefe, 16, a mechanic's apprentice from Lehrte, disappeared on April 6, 1924; several acquaintances had seen him with Haarmann. Wilhelm Apel, 15, an apprentice from Leinhausen who commuted through the station, disappeared on April 17; clothing his mother had made for him was found among Haarmann's things. Robert Witzel, 18, disappeared on April 26, 1924. His mother's recognition of his suit would later break the case.
Heinz Martin, 14, from Chemnitz, who dreamed of going to sea, disappeared on May 9, 1924; his monogrammed cap was traced through its maker. Fritz Wittig, 17, from Kassel, who had left home after a quarrel with his father and taken work as a traveling salesman, disappeared on May 26; his case was the second for which Grans was convicted. Friedrich Abeling, 10, the youngest of the victims, a schoolboy who had been punished for skipping school, disappeared the same day after telling his family a story about a class trip. Friedrich Koch, 16, an apprentice from Herrenhausen, disappeared on June 5, 1924; two classmates saw a man they identified as Haarmann stop him in the street. Only his school bag and a dictionary were recovered.
The last victim was Erich de Vries, 17, a baker's journeyman, who had come home to visit his parents at Pentecost. He was last seen on the morning of June 14, 1924, going swimming. His clothes were later found in Haarmann's rooms. Days later Haarmann was under arrest.
The indictment named 27 victims. The court found three of the cases not proven and acquitted Haarmann of them. Hermann Wolf, 14, a locksmith's son, disappeared in late October 1923 while out with his older brother. Adolf Hennies, 19, the son of a widow, disappeared on December 6, 1923; his mother, his landlord, his brother and a friend identified a coat that Grans said he had bought from Haarmann. Haarmann denied killing him and blamed Grans and another man. Hermann Bock, 22, who did odd jobs and small deals with Haarmann and sometimes slept at his rooms, disappeared in mid-April 1924; after he vanished, a suit Haarmann was wearing was identified as his. In each case there was evidence that the young man had been with Haarmann or that his belongings had passed through Haarmann's hands. But the court did not find the killings proven.
On May 17, 1924, children playing by the Leine near the Herrenhausen waterworks found a human skull. On May 29 a second skull washed up at the Brückmühle, a mill on a side channel. On June 13 two more were found, one of them belonging to a boy of about 11 to 13. Over Pentecost crowds combed the riverbanks of the old town. Forensic examiners put the age of most of the skulls at 18 to 20. Later finds included a skull near Garbsen on July 24 and a sack of bones in the Döhrener Masch meadows.
On July 5 the police dammed off a section of the river from the Brückmühle to the Clevertor bridge and searched the bed. Lessing reported more than 500 human remains from at least 22 people, about a third of them aged between 15 and 20. The state archive's summary counts 285 separate skeletal parts from more than 20 young men. Both figures appear in the sources, and neither reached the 27 named in the indictment; many victims were never found.
Suspicion settled on Haarmann quickly. He had 15 previous convictions and was known to the police as a man who had relations with young men. A t-online history of the case says he was one of about 80 men the police knew as homosexual and that he was placed under watch.
The arrest itself, the state archive says, came about largely by chance. On June 22, 1924, at the station, Haarmann became involved in a dispute with a 15-year-old boy and reported him to the station police; the boy in turn accused Haarmann of having threatened him with a knife and sexually assaulted him during the days he had stayed with him. Haarmann was taken into custody and on June 23 moved to the court prison.
The search of Haarmann's attic room in the Rote Reihe on June 23 found bloodstains and bloodied clothing belonging to young men, but nothing he could not explain away by his trade. The police then collected clothing and belongings from Haarmann's rooms and his circle and asked the public for help.
The breakthrough came at police headquarters. Robert Witzel's mother, called in about her missing son, met Haarmann's last landlady, named in the archive's summary as Frau Engel, who was there as a witness with her stepson. Mrs. Witzel recognized the suit the young man was wearing as her son's, with absolute certainty, the archive's summary says. Frau Engel had bought it from Haarmann. Confronted with this, and under the pressure of police questioning, Haarmann broke down and began to confess, first to Robert Witzel's death and then to others. Two news accounts date his first confession to July 1, 1924. Lessing credits a young detective inspector, Retz (spelled Rätz in other accounts), whom he called a friendly young giant, with driving the investigation forward.
How hard the police pushed is disputed, and it matters. According to the state archive's summary, detectives beat Haarmann and chained him in a cell they had staged with skulls and a sack of bones, and told him the souls of the dead were coming for him unless he confessed. The archive says these methods became public only in the early 1960s. A 2023 t-online account, citing the public broadcaster NDR, says they became known through the private notes of the lead investigator, made public in the 1990s. Dirk Götting, scientific director of the Lower Saxony Police Museum, has said such methods were already forbidden at the time and that Haarmann was tortured. Lessing argued in 1925 that Haarmann's statements were made under police pressure, and that the court then relied on doctors who had already been part of the police investigation.
Grans was arrested in the investigation and charged as an accomplice. In custody Haarmann accused him of picking out victims and inciting the killings, and also of committing one himself, the death of Adolf Hennies. Grans denied knowing anything about the killings, then and for the rest of his life, and admitted only to dealing in the goods Haarmann gave him. He was charged with incitement to murder in two cases and, until that charge was dropped, with fencing stolen goods as a business.
The decisive question for the court was whether Haarmann was responsible for his actions. The psychiatric assessment went to Ernst Schultze (1865 to 1938), professor of psychiatry and since 1912 director of the provincial asylum at Göttingen. Schultze held his first conversations with Haarmann in the Hanover remand prison. On August 16, 1924, Haarmann was moved to the asylum's secure house for dangerous patients, and he stayed six weeks. A stenographer took down the sessions word for word; the archive dates the recorded interviews from August 18 to September 25, 1924.
The transcripts survive in the asylum's files at the state archive, and they are the closest thing there is to Haarmann's own voice. In them he said he should have killed many more, called himself "a man with two souls," said he felt truly ill, spoke of wanting to be beheaded, and boasted that the victims' grave would still be a sight to see in a thousand years. On October 1, 1924, Schultze declared him fully responsible. That opened the way to a trial and a death sentence.
The court's experts, Lessing reported, concluded that Haarmann had a pathological personality but did not lack free will or the capacity for responsibility; they ruled out epilepsy, manic-depressive illness, feeblemindedness and other diagnoses. Lessing rejected their reasoning, and objected that Schultze had read the earlier police doctors' reports before writing his own.
Seventy years later the forensic psychiatrist Christine Pozsár (1959 to 2001), a senior physician at the Göttingen state hospital, analyzed the shorthand transcripts and published them in 1996 with Michael Farin as Die Haarmann-Protokolle. She found that Schultze had not kept a neutral stance. The sessions often resembled an interrogation more than a medical examination; at times he behaved like an angry prosecutor and insulted the man in front of him, calling him a pig. His religious and moral views shaped his judgment. He ignored Haarmann's childhood, and he wrote at the end of his report that he had deliberately not gone into Haarmann's sex life, which Pozsár considered central to the case. Haarmann's seizures and possible damage after meningitis were barely raised at trial, she noted; a later examination of his skull showed changes consistent with meningitis. Her conclusion was that a serious and complex disorder had probably at least substantially impaired his self-control, and that under the law of the time, doubts about his responsibility should have ruled out a death sentence.
The trial opened on December 4, 1924, before the Schwurgericht, the jury court, at the Landgericht Hannover. It lasted 14 hearing days. The presiding judge was Landgerichtsdirektor Dr. Bökelmann, with two professional associate judges and six lay jurors; the prosecution was led by Chief Prosecutor Dr. Wilde. Haarmann was defended by Justizrat Benfey and Grans by the lawyer Lotze; Lessing thought neither did enough. The courtroom held about 150 people, with 80 public seats a day. The court admitted 21 journalists from local, national and international papers, among them an American and a French correspondent.
About 200 witnesses gave evidence, many of them parents of the missing, as well as neighbors, dealers and customers who had bought clothes from Haarmann or Grans. Experts included chemists from Göttingen and the three psychiatric and medical assessors, Schultze, the police doctor Alex Schackwitz and Dr. Brandt. Haarmann admitted many of the killings, disputed others, and could not say how many there had been. Lessing quoted him: "It could be thirty, it could be forty; I don't know." He wept in court, quoted the Bible, and blamed his crimes on his circumstances. He also repeated his accusations against Grans, which the court accepted.
The sources count his confessions differently. The state archive says he confessed to 21 killings. The city of Hanover's 2024 summary says that of the 27 charged he confessed to nine, considered twelve more possible and denied six, of which five were nonetheless found proven.
Theodor Lessing was a Jewish philosopher and lecturer at the Technische Hochschule Hannover, a pacifist and a well-known political commentator. He attended the trial as a press representative and wrote critically about it, especially about the police, whose use of Haarmann as an informer he made public, and about the court's refusal to look at wider causes.
On the eleventh day of the trial, by Lessing's own account, the expert witnesses refused to present their opinions while he was in the room, the prosecution complained about his reports, and the defense took offense. The presiding judge told him he had been admitted as a reporter, not as a writer, and he was removed from the courtroom and barred from further coverage. The taz, writing in 1992, also dates his expulsion to the eleventh day.
He turned his notes into a book, Haarmann: Die Geschichte eines Werwolfs, dated January and February 1925 and published that year in Berlin by Die Schmiede. He called the verdict unsatisfying and said the authorities had avoided showing their own share of the blame. He proposed that the victims be given a public burial and a memorial stone with the inscription "Unser aller Schuld!" ("The guilt of us all!"). The state archive describes the book as a serious work of contemporary history.
The verdict was read on December 19, 1924, at 10 in the morning. The court convicted Haarmann of 24 murders and sentenced him to death 24 times. It acquitted him in the cases of Hermann Wolf, Adolf Hennies and Hermann Bock. Haarmann accepted the verdict and did not appeal.
Grans was convicted of incitement to murder in the case of Adolf Hannappel and sentenced to death, and of aiding the murder of Fritz Wittig, for which he received 12 years' penitentiary. He lodged an appeal on points of law, which the Reichsgericht, Germany's highest criminal court, rejected; Lessing recorded that his death sentence had become final. Lessing called the verdict against Grans a miscarriage of justice, resting on the testimony of a man whom five doctors had found mentally ill.
Fritz Haarmann was beheaded by guillotine at 6 a.m. on April 15, 1925, in the prison yard of the Landgericht Hannover. The Ärzte Zeitung reported that shortly before his death he called out "Auf Wiedersehen." The publisher's description of Matthias Blazek's 2009 study of the case names the executioner as Carl Gröpler.
A letter changed Grans's fate. Lessing reprinted a four-page letter, dated February 5, 1925, in Hanover and addressed to Grans's father, the bookseller Albert Grans, which had been found in the street by a courier. In it Haarmann wrote that Grans was innocent and that he had accused him falsely, out of revenge and after mistreatment by the police. He said he did not fear the executioner and that he had given his full confession to the prison chaplain, Pastor Hauptmann.
The case was reopened. At a retrial in 1926, according to the state archive and Lieske's study, Grans was sentenced to 12 years' penitentiary for aiding murder in two cases; the death sentence fell away. He never admitted knowing of the killings. Lessing had predicted in 1925 that a retrial would show Grans guilty of little more than receiving stolen goods.
Grans served his term, but he was not freed at the end of it. Lieske's study shows that in 1936 and 1937 he was taken into police preventive custody as a person "dangerous to the community," and then held in a series of concentration camps, among them Sachsenhausen, Flossenbürg, Dachau, Mittelbau-Dora and Bergen-Belsen. After the liberation in 1945 he was returned to Celle prison, and he was released in January 1946. He later ran a jewelry business, married and settled in Hanover. A claim for compensation for his years in the camps, filed in 1953, was rejected in 1958 on the ground that he had been persecuted as a criminal, not for political or racial reasons. He died in Hanover in 1975, aged 73.
In February 1925 the recovered remains of the victims were buried together in a grave of honor at the Stöcken city cemetery in Hanover. The families and the city then disputed the wording of the gravestone until 1928. The memorial was put up in April 1928. The cemetery administration would not allow the word "ermordet," murdered, on the stone; the families had to accept "verstorben," died.
Lessing's troubles did not end with the trial. In 1925 he wrote in the Prager Tageblatt against Paul von Hindenburg's candidacy for president of the Reich, describing the old field marshal as a symbolic zero and warning that behind a zero a future Nero might hide. Hindenburg was elected, and eight years later appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor.
Soon afterward Lessing was receiving hate mail and death threats. Nationalist and antisemitic students formed a committee against him, disrupted his lectures and called for his dismissal; some called for his death. About 1,500 corps students threatened to move to the technical university in Braunschweig, and the lord mayor of Hanover also demanded his removal. On May 14, 1925, a student assembly, backed by the rector and the university senate, asked the Prussian education minister to dismiss him. The minister, Carl Heinrich Becker, partly gave way: Lessing lost his teaching duties and was given a poorly paid research post instead.
On March 1, 1933, after the Nazis came to power, Lessing and his wife Ada fled to Czechoslovakia. His books were among those burned in Hanover in May 1933. On the evening of August 30, 1933, Sudeten German National Socialists shot him through the window of his study in Marienbad. He died in the hospital in the early hours of the next day. He is remembered as the first political murder victim of the Nazis abroad. Hanover has since honored him with a plaque at his former home and memorial stones for him and his wife.
After the execution Haarmann's head was preserved in formalin and given to the University of Göttingen, where it was kept at the anthropological institute and, for decades, at the forensic medicine institute. Four slices of his brain were sent to the German Research Institute for Psychiatry in Munich. Scientists at the time studied such remains to test whether criminals could be identified by their facial features or the structure of their brains.
The head was last shown in public in the early 1960s. After the forensic medicine department moved, it was lost for years in a clinic basement. In 1991, for the city's 750th anniversary celebrations, a request came from Hanover to use the skull in a laser show; the head of the Göttingen Institute of Forensic Medicine, Klaus-Steffen Saternus, refused that and every similar request.
In January 2015 the Göttinger Tageblatt reported, and the University Medical Center Göttingen confirmed, that the head had been quietly cremated in 2014. A spokesman, Stefan Weller, said the urn had been buried the previous March in an anonymous grave field in a Göttingen cemetery. The decision followed calls for a dignified burial; the university consulted the Protestant church and tried without success to find relatives. The four brain slices sent to Munich have never been found.
The meat rumor. During and after the investigation a rumor spread through Hanover that Haarmann had sold the flesh of his victims as meat. It has never been proven. He did trade in meat, including horse meat, and the state archive notes that the source of his meat supply could not be established, but it states plainly that no proof was ever produced that he sold his victims' flesh for human consumption. Lessing criticized the police doctor's examinations of meat from Haarmann's rooms, in 1923 and 1924, as not exact enough. The rumor of cannibalism, as the dpa put it in 2025, was alleged but never proven. It belongs to the legend of the case, not to its record.
The number of victims. Proven by the court: 24. Charged: 27. Confessed: 21 by the archive's count. Remains recovered: at least 22 people by Lessing's account, more than 20 by the archive's. Haarmann himself said he did not know, perhaps thirty or forty. Lessing believed Hermann Koch was also killed in 1918, and he described the unsolved death in 1922 or 1923 of a 17-year-old named Keimes, whose family Haarmann had visited posing as a detective; the dates in Lessing's own account of that case do not agree. Dirk Götting of the Police Museum has said much suggests the true number is higher than the convictions. None of these further deaths was ever tried.
How he killed. Haarmann's descriptions changed. He said he had strangled his victims and, by his own account, bitten their throats. The method given in his confessions rests on his word.
The confession. Whether police brutality and a staged cell of skulls produced or shaped his statements is not settled; the archive and the police museum treat the abuse as fact, while the date and source of the first public account differ between sources.
His responsibility. Schultze found him fully responsible; Pozsár, reading the same transcripts in the 1990s, concluded that his self-control was probably substantially impaired and that a death sentence should have been ruled out.
Grans's guilt. Grans was convicted twice, first of incitement and then of aiding, both times largely on Haarmann's word, which Haarmann withdrew in writing before his execution. Lessing considered the first verdict a miscarriage of justice.
The case was a mass media event from the start, Götting has said, and it never stopped being one. Its traces run through German culture. A counting rhyme from the time, "Warte, warte nur ein Weilchen," sung to a popular tune of the day, threatened the listener with a visit from Haarmann. In 1926 a large police exhibition in Berlin showed the room from the Rote Reihe. When the Associated Press reported the cremation of his head in 2015, it said the trial had inspired Fritz Lang's 1931 film "M."
Uli Lommel's film "Die Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe" ("The Tenderness of Wolves") appeared in 1973. Romuald Karmakar's "Der Totmacher" ("The Deathmaker"), with Götz George as Haarmann and Jürgen Hentsch as Schultze, takes place entirely in Schultze's examination room and uses the 1924 transcripts verbatim; the Ärzte Zeitung credits Michael Farin, co-editor of the transcripts, with the screenplay, and the European Film Academy lists Karmakar as writer. It premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival on August 29, 1995, where George won the Coppa Volpi for best actor, and opened in German cinemas on November 23, 1995.
The case has been a source of argument too. In 1992 the Sprengel Museum in Hanover bought a bronze cast of Alfred Hrdlicka's 1966 relief of Haarmann, and relatives of the victims protested what they called a monument to the mass murderer. In recent years there has been a musical at the Schauspiel Hannover, a graphic novel, guided city tours and even a figure on an Advent calendar. Götting has warned that historical killers can take on a harmless image over time. His museum in Nienburg shows a replica of the Weimar-era police cell in which Haarmann was held and an axe said to have been his, though a forensic examination found no traces on it and its origin is doubtful. Many of the case files are kept by the Lower Saxony State Archive, where demand is so high that they can now be viewed only in digital form. The trial files of the prosecution and the Landgericht are not held by the archive, which works instead from the Göttingen asylum files and other substitute records.
The deeper argument, about a police force that had used a known sex offender as its informer and failed the families of the missing for six years, was the one Lessing tried to make in 1924. The families had to settle for a gravestone that said their sons had died.
October 25, 1879: Friedrich Heinrich Karl Haarmann is born in Hanover, the youngest of six children.
1886 to 1894: attends school in Hanover; confirmed in 1894.
April 4, 1895: enters the military school at Neu-Breisach; sent home on November 3, 1895, after hospital stays.
July 1896: first criminal proceedings, for indecent acts with children.
February to December 1897: held in asylums at Hildesheim, Hanover and Langenhagen; the case is dropped on grounds of insanity.
December 25, 1897: escapes from Langenhagen to Switzerland; returns to Hanover in April 1899.
October 12, 1900: enlists in the 10th Jäger Battalion; discharged as unfit on July 28, 1902, with a pension.
April 5, 1901: his mother dies.
1904 to 1913: repeated convictions for theft, fraud and embezzlement; a sexual offense conviction in 1912.
1913: sentenced to five years' penitentiary for burglary; released in April 1918.
1918: begins working as a police informer; rents rooms at Cellerstraße 27.
September 25, 1918: Friedel Rothe, 17, disappears.
October 1918: police find Haarmann with another boy but do not search the rooms; he is later sentenced to nine months.
October 1919: meets Hans Grans at the station.
December 1919 to December 3, 1920: serves the nine-month sentence.
November 1921 to March 1922: six months at the Jägerheide labor colony.
February 12, 1923: Fritz Franke disappears; further disappearances follow through 1923.
1923: almost 600 people are reported missing in Hanover.
January 5 to June 14, 1924: the 1924 killings; the last victim is Erich de Vries.
May 17, 1924: children find a skull by the Leine; more skulls follow on May 29 and June 13.
June 22, 1924: Haarmann is arrested at the station; his room is searched on June 23.
After the arrest: Robert Witzel's mother recognizes her son's suit; Haarmann's first confession is dated July 1, 1924.
July 5, 1924: the Leine is dammed and searched; remains of at least 22 people are recovered.
August 16 to late September 1924: psychiatric examination by Ernst Schultze in Göttingen.
October 1, 1924: Schultze declares him fully responsible.
December 4, 1924: trial opens before the Schwurgericht in Hanover; Lessing is removed on the eleventh day.
December 19, 1924: Haarmann convicted of 24 murders and sentenced to death 24 times; acquitted of three; Grans sentenced to death and to 12 years.
February 1925: the victims' remains are buried at the Stöcken cemetery.
February 5, 1925: Haarmann's letter declaring Grans innocent.
1925: Lessing's book is published; students campaign against him, and on May 14 a student assembly demands his dismissal.
April 15, 1925: Haarmann is guillotined in Hanover at 6 a.m.
1926: Grans is retried and sentenced to 12 years for aiding two murders.
April 1928: the memorial stone is placed on the victims' grave.
August 30, 1933: Theodor Lessing is shot in Marienbad and dies the next day.
1936 to 1945: Grans is held in police preventive custody and concentration camps.
January 1946: Grans is released from Celle prison.
1973: "Die Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe" is released.
1975: Grans dies in Hanover.
1991: the Göttingen forensic institute refuses to lend the skull for a laser show.
1992: the Sprengel Museum's purchase of the Hrdlicka relief causes protests.
1995: "Der Totmacher" premieres in Venice; Götz George wins the Coppa Volpi.
1996: Die Haarmann-Protokolle are published.
2014: Haarmann's head is cremated and the urn buried in an anonymous grave field in Göttingen; reported in January 2015.
June 2024: 100th anniversary of the arrest; December 2024: the state archive presents the Göttingen transcripts.
April 15, 2025: 100th anniversary of the execution.