At about eight in the evening of August 18, 1919, Wilhelm Nielbock, a fifty-two-year-old forest warden from Spandau, came upon a man in the Falkenhagen Forest on the western edge of Berlin and spoke to him. The man shot him twice in the chest with a Parabellum pistol and ran. Nielbock got off a round from his shotgun and hit him. He died in the hospital that night, but not before he had described his killer: slim, of medium height, fair-haired, in field-gray clothes, with shot in his shoulder.
Two days later, on August 20, police arrested Friedrich Schumann in the surgery of a Spandau doctor, Georg Tepling, where he had gone to have the wound treated. He was twenty-six, born in Spandau on February 1, 1893, a trained locksmith who had fought in the First World War and won the Iron Cross, second class, for his marksmanship.
Nielbock was only the last. For years, investigators found, Schumann had watched couples in the Falkenhagen Forest, shot the men and then raped and killed the women. He also killed at random: foresters, maids, walkers, members of hunting parties, train drivers and people who lived nearby. English-language accounts credit him with seven murders, fifteen attempted murders, five arsons and eleven rapes after the war, along with thefts and robberies, and put the possible total of dead as high as twenty-five. As a teenager, according to the same accounts, he had shot and killed a female cousin, said the gun had gone off by accident while he was playing with it, and been sent to a correctional institution. His father had a long criminal record and drank, and his grandfather had been convicted of sexual offenses against children.
He was tried before the assize chamber of the Berlin III regional court in Moabit from July 5 to July 13, 1920. The Berlin papers called the case almost without precedent in the history of criminal justice. Only part of what he had done was put to the court. He was convicted of six murders and eleven attempted murders as well as rapes, and was sentenced to death six times over, to life in the penitentiary and to numerous further penalties; some English-language accounts say seven death sentences.
Almost ten months after the verdict, as the execution still waited, the press reported that he was demanding his own death, preferring to die at once rather than not know what would become of him. He was executed in the courtyard of Plötzensee prison at six in the morning on August 27, 1921. He was twenty-eight. English-language sources say the Prussian executioner Carl Gröpler beheaded him with an axe; the German register of executions records the guillotine.
None of his victims other than Wilhelm Nielbock is named in the published record.