Georg Karl Grossmann was born in 1863 and had convictions for theft and for sexual offences against children going back to his twenties. He lived in a one-room flat near the Silesian railway station in Berlin, with a door onto the back stairs.
He met women at the station, most of them destitute, refugees, or working as prostitutes in a city that in 1918 and after was full of all three, and offered them work as housekeepers. Between 1913 and 1921 he killed an unknown number of them there, and butchered the bodies. He sold meat from a stall, and Berlin during the blockade and the inflation was a city where the provenance of meat was not enquired into. Estimates run from twenty-six to over fifty. The Berlin press called him the Berlin Butcher.
He was caught on August 21, 1921, when neighbours heard a struggle and called the police, who found the body of a woman tied to a bed frame in his room and the equipment of a butcher's shop around it.
He was tried and sentenced to death. He hanged himself in his cell at Moabit on July 5, 1922. The cannibalism and the meat-selling were reported at the time and have been repeated ever since; what was proved at trial was the killings. He is one of a group of Weimar cases, with Haarmann and Denke, that arose in the same conditions and have been read together ever since.