Fritz Honka was a night watchman who lived alone in an attic flat in Ottensen, a working-class district of Hamburg, Germany. Between December 1970 and January 1975 he killed four women he had met in the bars of St. Pauli, the city's nightlife district near the harbor. Gertraud Bräuer, Anna Beuschel, Frieda Roblick and Ruth Schult were all middle-aged or older, poor and largely without settled homes. Each was strangled in his flat. He hid what remained of them, and for years no one connected their disappearances.
The case came to light by chance. On July 17, 1975, fire broke out in his building, and firefighters working through his flat found human remains. Honka, who was out at the time, came home while police were there and said he knew nothing about it. He confessed on July 29. In December 1976 the Hamburg Regional Court convicted him of murder in one case and manslaughter in three, found that his criminal responsibility had been diminished, and sentenced him to 15 years with committal to a psychiatric hospital. He was released in 1993, lived for some years under another name, and died in a Hamburg psychiatric ward in 1998.
For decades the case was remembered for its setting and its killer. Since 2025 a Hamburg historian, Frauke Steinhäuser, working from police files in the Hamburg State Archive and from records of the Nazi camp system, has reconstructed the lives of the four women, and a memorial stone with their names now stands in Ohlsdorf Cemetery.
Honka was born in Leipzig in 1935, according to the Magdeburg newspaper Volksstimme. He was one of many children, and he grew up partly in children's homes; the paper says his mother could not cope with raising him and his siblings. The novelist Heinz Strunk, who studied the case for his 2016 novel, said in an interview with the taz that Honka had a brother but that little is known about him.
In 1951 Honka left the German Democratic Republic for the West, apparently in a hurry, Volksstimme reports. He worked as a farm laborer in a village on the Lüneburg Heath in Lower Saxony, where locals gave him a mocking nickname. An affair there produced a child, and the need to pay child support was one reason he left. In 1956 he moved to Hamburg.
He was a small man, 1.68 meters tall. He had a speech impediment and a pronounced squint, and his face had been disfigured by work accidents and fights, according to Volksstimme. He drank heavily. Strunk, describing what he had learned from the records, spoke of a hard life marked by abuse, forced farm labor in the 1950s, a skin condition caused by cement and beatings that had broken his jaw three times. Those points come from the novelist's account in the interview.
By the 1970s Honka worked as a night watchman, and he lived in a small attic flat in Ottensen, in the borough of Altona, near Altona railway station. The district was then run down. He spent his free time in the bars of St. Pauli, a short distance away, among drinkers, sex workers and people who had fallen out of ordinary life. Steinhäuser's research notes that he often appeared in those bars in the black uniform of a security guard, a uniform she says could call to mind the SS.
His steady wage set him apart in that world. Karl Pries, a former Hamburg police investigator who arrested him, told ZDF in 2025 that the regular income made him attractive to women who had little or nothing, and suggested that clothing and jewelry in the flat may have helped draw women there. Several women moved into his flat for days or weeks. Steinhäuser writes that Honka saw the lodging he provided as something that entitled him to services in return.
Some women got away. Pries recalled that women had fled the flat, having apparently realized what he wanted from them. One such episode reached the courts. In 1972 Honka was charged with the attempted rape of a woman who had been in his flat, and in 1975 he was fined, Volksstimme reports. That woman survived.
Gertraud Bräuer, known as Susi, was born on October 30, 1928, in Großenhain, in Saxony. Her father was a laborer. Her parents separated when she was about four, and her mother remarried in 1939 and divorced again in 1949. She had an older brother. She trained as a hairdresser.
In 1948 she moved to Hamburg, and over the following years she lived in Munich, Hagen and Dortmund, often without a fixed address. Steinhäuser writes that sex work was often her only means of survival. She was convicted at least twice of theft, fraud and embezzlement and served prison terms of several months.
In the mid-1950s she returned to Hamburg. She lived with an uncle on a houseboat and then in an emergency dwelling in Waltershof, in the port, and worked in a tea-packing plant in Eimsbüttel. There she met a Polish man who had been brought to Germany as a forced laborer in 1941. When her uncle died in 1965, he lent her money to take over the house, and the two talked of marriage. She sold the house without telling him and went to the Rhineland, where she was jailed again.
After she came back in 1966 she was dependent on alcohol and lived in St. Pauli bars or with men. Her partner in the late 1960s was beaten to death by a neighbor on January 19, 1970, while she was present. She went into hiding afterward and did not attend a police hearing. Among the investigation files, Steinhäuser told the taz in 2025, is a postcard signed, in German, "your drunkard Susi."
At the end of December 1970, a woman acting for Honka met Gertraud Bräuer in a bar and brought her to his flat. According to Steinhäuser's account from the police files, he attacked her and strangled her. She was 42. No one reported her missing.
In November 1971 parts of her remains were found in a courtyard close to his building. Police could not identify her, and the case went cold. The rest of her remains were found in his flat in July 1975. Her burial place could not be determined.
Anna Beuschel, born Anna Hahn and known as Anni, was born on October 8, 1919, in Aschersleben, in what was then the Prussian province of Saxony. On August 1, 1942, at the age of 23, she was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp after the Nazi authorities labeled her "asocial." In the camp she wore the black triangle given to prisoners in that category and did forced labor in the SS tailoring workshop. A prisoner number from Auschwitz was later removed from her arm. In 1944 she survived an ear operation carried out in poor conditions.
She was then sent to the Graslitz subcamp, where prisoners worked for an aircraft equipment firm that was a Siemens subsidiary. From September 1, 1944, the camp came under Flossenbürg. In April 1945 the SS forced the prisoners onto a march, and American troops freed the survivors.
After the war she had a relationship with an American soldier and gave birth to twins. The father took the children to the United States, and they were never able to find her. She lived in Hamburg from 1947, did sex work, and suffered from headaches and epileptic seizures. In 1968 she had a major stomach operation.
In 1969 she met a man 17 years younger than herself, and they married on April 15, 1971. They lived in Bramfeld and later in an emergency housing camp in Finkenwerder, on the south bank of the Elbe. Her husband later described her as kind, especially with children, when she was sober, and said that drink made her lose control.
In early September 1974 Honka met her in a St. Pauli bar. She stayed with him. In October he attacked her and strangled her, according to Steinhäuser's reconstruction. Volksstimme gives her age as 54. He hid her body in the roof space. Her husband reported her missing, about four weeks after she had last been seen; Steinhäuser dates the report to late August 1974, which does not fit the September meeting, and the gap is noted, not resolved. She was the only one of the four women anyone reported missing.
Frieda Elisabeth Martha Roblick was born on April 25, 1917, in Sommerfeld in Lower Lusatia, today Lubsko in Poland. Her father was a locksmith. She had an older and a younger sister. In 1935 she received a four-day jail sentence for theft, and in 1937 a local court in Guben gave her a combined sentence of almost six months for theft and fraud.
Hamburg police later wrote that she had been sent to a concentration camp as a prostitute in 1937. Steinhäuser found no evidence for that. In her reading of the records, Frieda Roblick was most likely one of 44 women sent from Ravensbrück to the Riga-Kaiserwald camp in October 1943, a group made up mainly of women the Nazis classed as "professional criminals" or "asocial." She was moved back to Ravensbrück in June 1944, then to Sachsenhausen, and returned to Ravensbrück in October 1944. She survived. Her father died in May 1945 in a Soviet prisoner of war camp.
From 1947 she was arrested and jailed repeatedly. In 1952 a Munich court recognized that her offenses arose from need, but the criminal police went on classing her as a "professional and habitual criminal," a label Steinhäuser describes as a continuation of Nazi categories. She lived in many cities, in Hamburg from 1955 to 1961, and came back to Hamburg in 1969, settling first in the Neustadt and then in St. Pauli. She called herself Rita, took care over her appearance and wore wigs. From 1973 to early 1974 she rented a room in Bramfeld and worked briefly for a mail-order company. After that she did cleaning work in a St. Pauli bar where she had a regular table.
In mid-December 1974 Honka met her in another St. Pauli bar. She stayed with him for a few days. He then attacked her and strangled her, Steinhäuser writes. Volksstimme gives her age as 57. Firefighters found her body in the flat in July 1975. No one had reported her missing. One of her sisters had not seen her for about 20 years and the other for about four, and they declined to pay for her funeral. She was buried in Öjendorf Cemetery in Hamburg; the grave no longer exists.
Ruth Margarethe Schult, born Ruth Bieber, was born on July 7, 1923, in Buer-Resse, today part of Gelsenkirchen. Little is recorded about her childhood or schooling. From the age of 18 she was arrested and jailed repeatedly, for offenses that included attempted arson, fraud, forgery, insult and theft, and also for having no fixed address or identity papers.
She first lived in Hamburg in 1948 and later that year registered as a sex worker in Lübeck. In 1952 she married a shoemaker almost 30 years older than she was; the marriage ended in divorce after a few years. In July 1958 she registered again in Lübeck but stayed less than two weeks, and her trail goes cold until the mid-1960s.
By the early 1970s she was registered with the central clinic for sexually transmitted diseases in Altona and kept her required checkups. She rented a room in St. Pauli and later stayed with clients; from about 1972 she had no room of her own. The landlady of a bar she visited almost every day described her as good-natured and trusting. Her last checkup was on November 27, 1974.
In mid-December 1974 she met Honka outside a cinema in St. Pauli and went home with him. She stayed about two weeks. He then attacked her and strangled her, according to Steinhäuser. She died in January 1975. Volksstimme gives her age as 52. In mid-January 1975, because she had missed her checkups, the health authority issued an order to find her; Steinhäuser notes that by then she was already dead. Her mother refused to arrange her burial. She was buried in Öjendorf Cemetery; that grave, too, no longer exists.
What the four women had in common, Steinhäuser found, was the condition of their lives more than any single place. Three of them had been young women under the Nazi regime, and two had been held in concentration camps as so-called "asocials." They were often without money and without a fixed room, moving from one address to another. Two had tried, through marriage, to build a more settled life. As registered sex workers they were subject to compulsory checkups two or three times a week, under a 1953 federal law on venereal disease that, Steinhäuser notes, allowed mere suspicion of prostitution to trigger compulsory examinations and police searches.
Their families were distant. Relatives came forward late or not at all, and several refused to pay for burials. Steinhäuser suggests that shame and fear of stigma played a part, and that this fear may still discourage relatives from coming forward today. In her 2025 interview with the taz she described the clothing preserved in the investigation files, among them a red trouser suit with white shoes and a pair of gold sandals, as evidence of a wish for a little glamour, and said the women had tried to keep their dignity in hard conditions.
Only one of the four, Anna Beuschel, was reported missing at all. For the others, their absence from the bars and the clinic went unremarked, and in Ruth Schult's case the only official reaction was the health authority's order to find her for missing an examination.
Honka kept the remains of three of the women in his flat and the roof space for months and, in Anna Beuschel's case, for most of a year. He tried to cover the smell with scented blocks, according to Volksstimme, and ZDF lists odor spray among the objects from the flat now held by the Hamburg Police Museum. Neighbors noticed a foul odor, one of them told ZDF; Karl Pries said in 2025 that how the killings stayed hidden so long had never been fully explained. Anna Franklin, reviewing the 2019 film for Film New Europe, wrote that the real Honka blamed the smell on a neighboring family.
On July 17, 1975, fire broke out in the residential building near Altona station where Honka lived. He was not at home. Firefighters working through his attic flat found the bodies of two women, and police then found the remains of two more women hidden in the roof space, ZDFheute reported in 2025, drawing on the recollections of Karl Pries.
Honka came home while police were still at the building. Pries recalled that he seemed indignant and asked what the police were doing there. Confronted with the bodies, he said, "Davon weiß ich nichts," I know nothing about that. Pries said the scene in the flat was not a pretty sight.
Honka was taken into custody, and the questioning was hard going. He told investigators he could not remember how he had killed the women and could not name them. Steinhäuser quotes a line he repeated to investigators, "Ich wusste nicht den Namen dieser Frau," I did not know this woman's name.
Investigators turned to the remains found nearly four years earlier in a courtyard nearby. Using what ZDFheute describes as a then-new method, they reconstructed the face of the unidentified woman from 1971, and the earlier remains matched remains found in Honka's flat. She was Gertraud Bräuer. Records showed that she had been registered as a sex worker, and from there police were able to identify all four women, each of whom already appeared in police files.
On July 29, 1975, Honka confessed to the killings, Volksstimme reports.
The police files are the largest surviving source on the women, and Steinhäuser has criticized their language. In them the women appear as "verwahrlost" and "unsauber," neglected and dirty, and police reports used the phrase "asoziale Elemente," antisocial elements, a term she links to Nazi-era thinking. In her reading the language implied that the victims shared the blame for their own deaths. The files also included police identification photographs of the women, taken under compulsion; Steinhäuser has used them as a historical source that, she argues, shows the women's humiliation.
The press coverage of 1975 and 1976, she writes, showed sympathy for Honka, who was said to have had it "nicht leicht," not easy, and offered readers fascination with him alongside disgust for the women. The Süddeutsche Zeitung's critic, reviewing Strunk's novel in 2016, noted that the tabloids of the 1970s had turned Honka into a specter of horror and Strunk told the taz how the tabloid press of the time had labeled him.
Honka's trial opened on November 12, 1976, before a jury court (Schwurgericht) of the Hamburg Regional Court, ZDF reported. The case drew wide attention in the German press. He was defended by Rolf Bossi, who, according to Strunk, told the court that Honka was not only the poorest of men but had also had the bad luck to become a killer.
The central question was Honka's mental state. A psychologist testified that in the women he took home Honka had at first been looking for a clean housewife, ZDFheute reported. The film critic Brigitte Häring, writing for Swiss public broadcaster SRF in 2019, recalled that Honka had told the court he was attracted to older women.
On December 20, 1976, the court convicted Honka of murder in one case and of manslaughter (Totschlag) in three cases. It found that he had acted with diminished criminal responsibility because of a severe psychological disorder, and it imposed a combined sentence of 15 years together with committal to a psychiatric hospital, ZDFheute and Volksstimme reported. Volksstimme reports that only the killing of Gertraud Bräuer was classed as murder; the deaths of Anna Beuschel, Frieda Roblick and Ruth Schult were classed as manslaughter.
The reports do not set out the court's reasoning for each count, and none records an appeal or names the presiding judge. The prosecution had asked for life imprisonment, according to the web portal web.de's 2019 account of the case.
After the verdict Honka was placed in a psychiatric hospital, ZDFheute and ZDF's hallo deutschland reported. Little has been published about his years there.
In 1993 Honka was released from psychiatric care. Through his defense lawyer he obtained a change of name, and he lived as Peter Jensen, Volksstimme reports. He spent his last years in a care home at Scharbeutz, on the Baltic coast of Schleswig-Holstein, where no one knew who he was.
His mental condition worsened. ZDFheute reports that he became increasingly confused and was returned to psychiatric care.
Honka died in October 1998, aged 63. ZDFheute gives the date as October 19, 1998, and the causes as asthma and heart failure, in psychiatric care. Volksstimme says he died in a hospital, probably from the effects of heavy drinking and smoking, and a photo caption in the same article places the death in the night of October 20, 1998, in the psychiatric ward of the Ochsenzoll hospital.
In 2016 the writer Heinz Strunk published the novel Der goldene Handschuh (Rowohlt), named for the St. Pauli bar where Honka drank. It was reviewed widely, in Die Zeit, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the taz, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Frankfurter Rundschau, and drew renewed attention to the case. Strunk told the taz that he had read files in the Hamburg State Archive, about one page for each killing, that he found no living witnesses, and that many of his characters were invented. The novel is fiction.
Fatih Akin's film of the novel premiered in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival on February 9, 2019, and opened in German cinemas on February 21, 2019, with Jonas Dassler as Honka. Critics noted that it left the women nameless, a point SRF's reviewer made in 2019.
The Hamburg Police Museum displays material from the case, and its director, Björn Wiechmann, told ZDF in 2025 that visitors still ask for it, 50 years on.
For the women, there was long no memorial. In 2025 the association Garten der Frauen, which runs a memorial garden for women in Ohlsdorf Cemetery, set up a memorial stone bearing their names and photographs, at the initiative of Rita Bake. The stone, of travertine and shaped after a Möbius strip, was dedicated on May 18, 2025, the taz reported; 60 to 70 people attended. Frauke Steinhäuser, a historian and former director of the Ottensen district archive, which stands on the same street where Honka lived, wrote the accompanying brochure, "Getötet, weil sie Frauen waren," Killed because they were women. She said she had begun the work because she could not accept that no one cared about the victims, and she hoped the brochure would lead relatives or acquaintances to come forward.
The association's text for the stone says the women's names did not interest Honka, and calls for their stories to be told and for them to be given back the dignity that society, the killer, the police, the court and some of the media had denied them.
Which killing was murder. Volksstimme states that only the killing of Gertraud Bräuer was classed as murder. A web portal account of the case, published in 2019, says the murder conviction concerned Anna Beuschel.
The date of death. ZDFheute gives October 19, 1998; a Volksstimme photo caption gives the night of October 20, 1998.
Frieda Roblick's camp history. Hamburg police in the 1970s wrote that she was sent to a concentration camp as a prostitute in 1937. Steinhäuser found no evidence of that and places her deportation in 1943.
Anna Beuschel's missing person report. Steinhäuser dates the report to late August 1974 but also records that Honka met her in early September 1974. The discrepancy is unresolved.
Honka's early life. Many popular accounts give details of his family and childhood, including claims about his father's imprisonment in a concentration camp and his own detention as a child. None of these claims was confirmed in reliable reporting.
1917, April 25: Frieda Roblick born in Sommerfeld, Lower Lusatia.
1919, October 8: Anna Hahn (later Beuschel) born in Aschersleben.
1923, July 7: Ruth Bieber (later Schult) born in Buer-Resse.
1928, October 30: Gertraud Bräuer born in Großenhain, Saxony.
1935: Fritz Honka born in Leipzig.
1942, August 1: Anna Hahn sent to Ravensbrück.
1943, October: Frieda Roblick most likely sent from Ravensbrück to Riga-Kaiserwald.
1945, April: Anna Hahn freed by American troops after a forced march.
1951: Honka leaves East Germany for the West.
1956: Honka moves to Hamburg.
1970, January 19: Gertraud Bräuer's partner is killed by a neighbor in her presence.
1970, late December: Honka kills Gertraud Bräuer in his flat in Ottensen.
1971, April 15: Anna Hahn marries and becomes Anna Beuschel.
1971, November: parts of Gertraud Bräuer's remains found in a nearby courtyard; she is not identified.
1972: Honka charged with the attempted rape of another woman.
1974, early September: Honka meets Anna Beuschel in a St. Pauli bar.
1974, early October: Honka kills Anna Beuschel.
1974, November 27: Ruth Schult's last health checkup.
1974, mid-December: Honka meets Frieda Roblick and, separately, Ruth Schult.
1974, December: Honka kills Frieda Roblick.
1975, January: Honka kills Ruth Schult; in mid-January the health authority orders a search for her.
1975: Honka fined over the 1972 charge.
1975, July 17: fire in his building; firefighters find the remains; Honka arrested.
1975, July 29: Honka confesses.
1976, November 12: trial opens before a jury court of the Hamburg Regional Court.
1976, December 20: convicted of one murder and three counts of manslaughter with diminished responsibility; 15 years and committal to a psychiatric hospital.
1993: released from psychiatric care; later lives as Peter Jensen in a care home at Scharbeutz.
1998, October: dies in psychiatric care in Hamburg, aged 63.
2016: Heinz Strunk's novel Der goldene Handschuh published.
2019, February 9: Fatih Akin's film premieres at the Berlin festival.
2025, May 18: memorial stone for the four women dedicated in Ohlsdorf Cemetery.
2026: Steinhäuser's brochure "Getötet, weil sie Frauen waren" published by Garten der Frauen.