Friedrich Schumann was a locksmith from Spandau, on the western edge of Berlin, who was arrested in August 1919 after a forest supervisor he had shot managed to wound him and describe him before dying. Schumann confessed, piece by piece, to a series of killings and attempted killings in the woods around the Falkenhagener See, a lake northwest of Spandau. In July 1920 a court in Berlin-Moabit tried him on six counts of murder and eleven of attempted murder, along with other charges, and sentenced him to death six times. He was beheaded at Plötzensee prison on August 27, 1921.
Daily newspapers of the time called him the "mass murderer of the Falkenhagener See," according to Werner Sabitzer, who wrote about the case in 2021 for Öffentliche Sicherheit, the magazine of the Austrian Interior Ministry, on the hundredth anniversary of the execution. Sabitzer described Schumann as the first serial killer of the Weimar Republic. His defense lawyer, Erich Frey, a well-known Berlin defense lawyer, wrote in his memoirs that Schumann told him before the execution that he had killed 25 people in all.
Schumann was born on February 1, 1893, in Spandau. He grew up in bleak circumstances, Sabitzer wrote, with a father who drank and had a criminal record.
He was still a teenager when he first shot someone. On May 14, 1908, during a walk in the woods, he shot his 15-year-old cousin. He said it had been an accident and that he had taken her for a deer. He was believed. He was not convicted of murder and spent only a short time in a reform institution, according to Sabitzer. Frey's memoir, as summarized in a 2019 review by the legal scholar Susanne Benöhr-Laqueur and Daniel Bußmann, also records that Schumann shot his cousin at 16 and was able to present it as an accident.
In 1911, in Spandau, he shot a woman. He was sentenced to nine months in prison, and again his version of events was accepted. Only eight years later, after his arrest in 1919, did he admit that he had robbed her, Sabitzer wrote.
Schumann trained as a locksmith. He served in the army in the First World War. Frey's memoir, as the 2019 review describes it, says he was awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class, for bravery, and that he never settled back into a stable life after the war. After his discharge he went back to Spandau and worked as a locksmith for the Deutsche Reichsbahn, the German railways. He married.
Falkenhagen lay northwest of Spandau, where a forest surrounded the Falkenhagener See. Schumann kept roaming those woods, Sabitzer wrote, and a series of attacks there frightened the people of the area.
Sabitzer's account lists the attacks in order. In September 1916 Schumann shot at a hunter and missed. In May 1917 he shot and killed a night watchman in Falkenhagen. On July 4, 1917, he shot and killed two gendarmes from Falkenhagen. On his wanderings through the forest, according to the same account, he watched for couples and attacked them, and killed the women as well as the men. Hunters, foresters, walkers and day-trippers were also among his victims.
Frey, as the review of his memoir puts it, came to see the lake as the ground Schumann claimed for himself. Schumann treated the Falkenhagener See as his own territory, and he killed walkers, couples, cyclists and a district forester because, in Frey's telling, they disturbed the peace of the woods.
The published accounts do not name the people he killed, and they do not set out which of the attacks were among the six murders for which he was later sentenced. The killings of the night watchman and the two gendarmes are described by Sabitzer, but his article does not say whether they were part of the charges in 1920.
On the evening of August 18, 1919, a forest supervisor from Spandau met a man in the forest and approached him. The man drew a pistol and shot him. Badly wounded, the forest supervisor fired back with his shotgun and wounded the man. Before he died in a hospital that night, he described the man who had shot him.
The description was enough. Two days later, detectives arrested a man who matched it at a doctor's practice in Spandau, where he had gone to have his shotgun wound treated. He was Friedrich Schumann, 26, of Spandau.
Under questioning he confessed, bit by bit, to a series of murders and attempted murders, according to Sabitzer. The daily papers took up the case, and the name they gave him, the mass murderer of the Falkenhagener See, followed him to trial.
Schumann was tried from July 5 to July 13, 1920, before Landgericht III, the regional court in Berlin-Moabit. He faced six counts of murder, eleven counts of attempted murder, and other charges.
He was sentenced to death six times, once for each of the six murders, Sabitzer wrote.
Frey defended him. Frey later wrote that, before the execution, Schumann told him he had taken not six lives but 25. According to the 2019 review of the memoir, Frey could not use that admission to argue that his client's responsibility was diminished, a line of defense that would have meant commitment to a psychiatric institution instead of execution, because Schumann had forbidden him to do so. In Sabitzer's version of Frey's account, Schumann made the admission on the night before his execution and asked Frey not to tell the court, because he did not want another trial.
The death sentences were not carried out for more than a year. The Prussian justice minister, who had to decide whether to commute them, took his time, Sabitzer wrote, and the execution was delayed.
Friedrich Schumann was beheaded at Plötzensee prison in Berlin at six in the morning on August 27, 1921.
Six days before, on August 21, 1921, police had arrested Carl Großmann, whose victims were estimated at no fewer than 20 and who hanged himself in his cell before his trial ended. Sabitzer wrote about both men in the same article, and Frey's memoir covers the cases of three clients he defended, Schumann, Großmann and Fritz Haarmann, according to the 2019 review, which places the Schumann chapter in a section titled "The compulsion to kill."
The court sentenced Schumann for six murders. Everything beyond that rests on his own statements and on later accounts.
The figure of 25 killings comes from Erich Frey, who said Schumann admitted it to him before the execution. No court tested that claim, and the published accounts do not name the additional victims or say when and where they died. The two versions of Frey's account summarized in later writing also differ in detail: in one, Schumann forbade Frey to use the admission in a plea of diminished responsibility; in the other, Schumann asked that the court not be told because he did not want to face another trial.
The death of his cousin in 1908 was accepted at the time as an accident, and Schumann was not convicted of murder. Sabitzer's article counts it as his first murder. Frey's memoir, in the 2019 summary of it, gives his age at the time as 16; Sabitzer gives the date as May 14, 1908, and the cousin's age as 15.
The killings of a night watchman and two gendarmes in 1917 appear in Sabitzer's account in its own voice, but his article does not say whether they were among the six murders on which Schumann was sentenced.
Frey's account of an Iron Cross, Second Class, awarded for bravery, appears in the 2019 summary of his memoir; Sabitzer's article says only that Schumann served in the army in the First World War.
February 1, 1893: Friedrich Schumann is born in Spandau.
May 14, 1908: He shoots his 15-year-old cousin during a walk in the woods, says it was an accident, and is sent briefly to a reform institution; he is not convicted of murder.
1911: He shoots a woman in Spandau and is sentenced to nine months in prison.
September 1916: A hunter is shot at and not hit (attributed to Schumann).
May 1917: A night watchman is shot dead in Falkenhagen (attributed to Schumann).
July 4, 1917: Two Falkenhagen gendarmes are shot dead (attributed to Schumann).
August 18, 1919: A forest supervisor from Spandau is shot in the Falkenhagen forest, wounds his attacker, and dies in hospital that night after describing him.
August 1919, two days later: Schumann is arrested at a Spandau doctor's practice while having a shotgun wound treated, and begins to confess.
July 5 to 13, 1920: Trial before Landgericht III in Berlin-Moabit on six counts of murder, eleven of attempted murder and other charges; six death sentences, one for each murder.
After the verdict: The Prussian justice minister is slow to decide on clemency, and the execution is delayed.
August 21, 1921: Carl Großmann is arrested.
August 27, 1921, 6 a.m.: Schumann is beheaded at Plötzensee prison, Berlin. Before the execution, according to his lawyer Erich Frey, he had said he killed 25 people.