In May and June of 1924, human skulls began washing up on the banks of the Leine river in Hanover. Children found the first of them. When the police dragged the river they recovered more than five hundred human bones, which the examiners later attributed to at least twenty-two separate people. The city had been losing boys and young men for years, most of them last seen at the central railway station, and suspicion fell almost at once on a man the police knew well: Fritz Haarmann, a small-time dealer with convictions for molesting children, who had been working for years as a police informer.
Friedrich Heinrich Karl Haarmann was born in Hanover on October 25, 1879, the sixth and youngest child of Johanna Haarmann, born Claudius, and her husband, Ollie, a quarrelsome, unfaithful man seven years her junior who, by the family's account, married her for her money; the son hated him all his life. He was a quiet, spoiled boy who played with his sisters' dolls, and when he was about eight a teacher molested him. He left school in 1894, apprenticed briefly as a locksmith in Neuf-Brisach, and entered a military school at Breisach in April 1895, where after five months he began to suffer blackouts that a doctor called equivalent to epilepsy. At sixteen he committed his first known sexual offenses, luring young boys into cellars, and after his arrest in July 1896 he was declared incurably deranged and committed to an asylum at Hildesheim. In January 1898 he escaped, apparently with his mother's help, to Zürich, and came home in April 1899. He served in a rifle battalion at Colmar from October 1900, later called it the happiest time of his life, and was discharged in July 1902 with a pension, which he drew until his arrest. An engagement to Erna Loewert ended in 1904, and for the next decade he lived by theft, burglary and fraud and spent most of the years from 1905 to 1912 in prison. In 1913 he was sentenced to five years for burglary and fraud, released in April 1918, and by August was renting a single room at 27 Cellerstraße in Hanover.
Hanover after the war was full of people with nowhere to go: refugees from the east, demobilized soldiers, runaways and boys who had simply drifted to the city, and the central station was where they arrived. Haarmann traded there in stolen goods and contraband meat, and he made himself useful to the police as an informer, offering to fence or store stolen property, passing the details to officers who raided his rooms at agreed times, and being arrested alongside the thieves to protect his cover. He made citizen's arrests of travelers on forged papers and posed as a detective. The police came to rely on him and let him walk the station more or less as he pleased, which gave him a reason to be seen there questioning young travelers. In 1923 alone almost six hundred teenage boys and young men were reported missing in the city.
The first victim who can be named was Friedel Rothe, seventeen, a runaway who disappeared on September 25, 1918. His friends told the police he had last been seen with Haarmann, and under pressure from Rothe's family officers went to Haarmann's rooms in October. They found him with a half-dressed thirteen-year-old boy and charged him with sexual assault and battery of a minor, for which he was sentenced to nine months. They did not find Rothe. Years later Haarmann claimed that during that visit the boy's head had been lying behind his stove, wrapped in newspaper. There is no way to test the claim, but the missed chance became one of the central charges against the Hanover police. Weeks before Rothe, a fourteen-year-old named Hermann Koch had disappeared; Haarmann had kept company with him and had written to his school to explain his absence, the police searched his rooms without result, and in 1921 the boy's father petitioned in vain for Haarmann to be tried. Nor was he ever tried for Hans Keimes, seventeen, found strangled and bound in a canal in May 1922 with a handkerchief bearing Grans's name in his throat, although Grans was in custody when the boy disappeared. Both cases are officially unsolved.
In October 1919, while he was avoiding that sentence, Haarmann met Hans Grans, an eighteen-year-old runaway from Berlin who had been sleeping rough around the station and selling old clothes. Grans later said he was heterosexual and had approached Haarmann to sell himself; Haarmann called him "like a son" and let him move in, and Grans became his lover and partner in crime, and mocked and manipulated him. Haarmann served his nine months from March to December 1920, went back to informing, and on July 1, 1921, moved with Grans into a ground-floor flat at 8 Neue Straße, an old, crowded house beside the Leine. On June 9, 1923, he took a single attic room at 2 Rote Reihe. The known killings run from February 12, 1923, when Fritz Franke, a seventeen-year-old pianist from Berlin, went home with him from the station, to June 14, 1924. The victims ranged from ten to twenty-two, most of them in their mid to late teens: Wilhelm Schulze, an apprentice; Roland Huch, who meant to run away and join the navy; Ernst Ehrenberg, thirteen, his neighbor's son, sent on an errand; Heinrich Struß, eighteen, an office clerk; Paul Bronischewski, on his way home to Bochum; Wilhelm Erdner, sixteen, who had met a "Detective Fritz Honnerbrock" and whose bicycle Haarmann and Grans sold; Heinz Brinkmann, thirteen, who had missed his train to Clausthal; Robert Witzel, eighteen, who went to a traveling circus with an "official from the railway station"; Friedrich Abeling, ten, playing truant from school; and Erich de Vries, seventeen, the last, whose remains Haarmann carried in four trips to a lake at the entrance to the Herrenhausen Gardens. He lured them with the promise of help, a bed or work, or under pretense of arrest, gave them food and drink, and killed most of them, by his own account, by biting into or through the throat while he strangled them. He dismembered the bodies, a job he said made him ill after the first time and could take two days, threw most of the remains into the Leine, and kept, sold or gave away the clothing and belongings, often through Grans or his landlady.
The press gave him a string of names, among them the Butcher of Hanover, the Vampire of Hanover and the Wolf Man. The rumor that he sold human flesh as meat on the black market spread through the city at the time. He did trade in boneless, diced contraband meat, and neighbors testified to buying brawn and mince from him, but a medical expert told the court that none of the meat found in his rooms was human, and the rumor was never proved.
Once the bones had begun to surface, suspicion fell on Haarmann, who had fifteen previous convictions going back to 1896. Because the Hanover officers all knew him, two young policemen were brought from Berlin to watch him at the station from June 18. On the night of June 22 they saw him quarreling with a fifteen-year-old, Karl Fromm, and then demanding that the police arrest the boy for traveling on forged papers. Fromm told the officers he had been living with Haarmann for four days and had been raped repeatedly, sometimes with a knife at his throat, and Haarmann was taken in on a charge of sexual assault. His attic room was found soaked in blood, which he put down to the meat trade. The clothing in his rooms and among his acquaintances was laid out at the police station for families from across Germany to look at, and item after item was recognized; of some four hundred pieces of clothing, about a hundred were identified as belonging to known victims. On June 29 clothes, boots and keys were identified as Robert Witzel's, and a friend of Witzel's named Haarmann as the "official" he had gone to the circus with. Haarmann broke down and, urged by his sister, began to confess. On the strength of his statements Grans was arrested on July 8. On August 16 Haarmann was sent to Göttingen for psychiatric examination, and on September 25 he was found fit for trial.
His trial opened before the Hanover assize court on December 4, 1924, and lasted about two weeks. He insisted on conducting his own defense. By the third day the judge had cleared the public from the courtroom. Some 190 witnesses were heard by one count, more than two hundred by another, many of them the parents of the missing. Haarmann admitted a great many of the killings, disputed others, and said when asked that he did not know how many there had been, putting the number somewhere between fifty and seventy. He had asked to be condemned to death. On December 19, 1924, the court convicted him of twenty-four of the twenty-seven murders with which he was charged and sentenced him to death. He was acquitted of the three he denied, even though belongings of some of those boys had been found with him or among his acquaintances. He did not appeal, and said that if he were free he would probably kill again. The three acquittals were for Adolf Hennies, Hermann Wolf and Hermann Bock, and in each the circumstantial evidence was strong: Haarmann was wearing Bock's suit when he was arrested.
He was executed by guillotine in the yard of the Hanover prison at six in the morning on April 15, 1925, at the age of forty-five, by the executioner Carl Gröpler, after a night with his pastor, a cigar and Brazilian coffee. "I repent, but I do not fear death," he is reported to have said. His head was preserved in formalin at the University of Göttingen until it was cremated in 2014. The recovered remains of his victims were buried together in a common grave in the Stöcken cemetery in February 1925, and in April 1928 a granite memorial carrying their names and ages was raised over it.
Grans's case did not end with the trial. The court found him guilty of inciting the murder of Adolf Hannappel, on witness evidence that he had pointed the boy out to Haarmann, at the station on November 10, 1923, and sentenced him to death, with twelve more years for Fritz Wittig, on a note signed by both men agreeing that Grans would pay twenty gold marks for the boy's suit. His appeal was rejected on February 6, 1925. Then a letter from Haarmann, dated February 5, 1925, and addressed to Grans's father, came to light, saying that Grans had no idea he killed and that he had accused him out of revenge and under duress, and a retrial was ordered. On January 19, 1926, Grans was convicted again of aiding and abetting both murders and sentenced to two concurrent terms of twelve years. Critics at the time, including the writer Theodor Lessing, argued that the court had never proved that he intended murder or even knew for certain of the killings, and later scholarship has also found the evidence against him weak. He served his sentence in Celle and was not released when it ended: in 1937 he was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he remained until its liberation in April 1945, and he was freed from Celle in January 1946. He lived in Hanover until his death in 1975.
The case forced an argument in Weimar Germany about the police, who had used a known sex offender as an informer and failed to search his rooms when a missing boy was traced to him, and about the treatment of homosexuality, which the law punished and which the prosecution and the press folded into their account of the murders. It did not settle how many young men Haarmann killed. The court's figure was twenty-four. The river held the remains of at least twenty-two people, and his own estimates ran far higher.