At about half past nine on the night of August 21, 1921, the wife of a laborer named Robert Iglitzki heard screaming and banging from the flat above theirs at Lange Strasse 88, near the Silesian Station in Berlin, and then silence. She sent her husband to the 50th precinct station, and he came back with two officers, Karl Klähn and Ernst Engesser. The lodger would not open the door, so they broke it in. Carl Grossmann stood there with blood on his hands, lifting a cup of ersatz coffee laced with cyanide, and Klähn knocked it out of his hand. On the bed lay a naked woman who was still alive when the officers reached her and died seconds later. She was Marie Nitsche, thirty-four, born Paul, an unemployed cook from Dresden who sometimes sold sex and had been let out of the Moabit jail that same day. Grossmann had picked her up on Koppenstrasse, and they had spent the evening at a carnival, riding the rides and drinking beer.
Within an hour hundreds of people had gathered outside the building. When the officers walked him to the station at midnight, they had to hold back armed civilians who wanted to kill him.
He was fifty-seven, born Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Grossmann on December 13, 1863, in Alt Ruppin, now part of Neuruppin, one of seven children of a rag picker who drank and beat his wife and children with a fire poker. In 1876 he was apprenticed to a butcher, Ferdinand Kliefoth, who dismissed him in 1879 after he tried to rape Kliefoth's wife. From his first conviction in 1882, for vagrancy, his record ran through theft, blackmail, assault and a rape that ended his army service, and on through the courts of Baden, Württemberg and Bavaria. In 1897 he served fifteen months in Nuremberg for molesting a twelve-year-old girl. Two years later he molested a ten-year-old and raped a four-year-old, and on October 4, 1899, a court at Bayreuth sentenced him to fifteen years in prison. The younger girl died of her injuries shortly after the judgment.
He came back to Berlin on his release, in August 1914 by the English accounts and 1913 by the German, and rented the kitchen room in the apartment of Mannheim Itzig, a family that was seldom home. He peddled, sold meat on the black market and ran a sausage stand on the Andreasplatz outside the station. From at least 1918 he met women coming off the trains from the countryside, and poor women from the neighborhood, and offered them work as his housekeeper. Some took it as a code for sex work and some believed it. In the room he tied them to the bed and raped them, sometimes on the first night and sometimes after they had kept house for days or weeks, and he drugged some of them. Some he let go after they promised not to report him. The others he killed, and he carried their remains to the Luisenstadt Canal and the Engelbecken basin. After each woman left or died, he went to the police and reported her as a thief who had run off.
The police had him in front of them more than once. On March 24, 1920, a downstairs neighbor, Gertrud Grabowski, called a social worker after hearing a child crying in his room, and a fifteen-year-old runaway was found there. The girl did not press charges, and the officers ignored the social worker when she pointed out the women's clothing in the room. In October 1920 a woman named Martha Baltzer accused him of killing her friend Frieda Schubert, thirty-three, who had disappeared on October 2; the police searched the flat and found nothing. In early August 1921 the landlord's wife, Helene Itzig, walked in on him beside a woman with a broken nose who was no longer moving, and left with fifty marks. The woman, whom he knew only as Martha, has since been identified as Elisabeth Barthel, thirty. On August 14 he was booked for a fight with the brother of Johanna Sosnowski, twenty-nine, who had come looking for his sister. Grossmann had killed her on August 3. He was released.
Since the spring of 1920 human remains had been coming out of the Spree and the Luisenstadt Canal almost daily. They belonged to at least twenty-three women, but only Schubert and Sosnowski were ever identified, and the count was muddied by the bodies of soldiers thrown into the river during the Kapp Putsch. Some investigators thought the true number could reach a hundred.
After his arrest the survivors came forward, beginning with Gertrud Haag on August 22, who said he had drugged and raped her. Investigators estimated that about fifty women had gone into the room and come out alive; neighbors thought they had seen him with a hundred and fifty. The earliest identified, Marie Felz, had met him on January 1, 1918. Sex workers in the district called him Mysterious Karl and warned newcomers off his handouts.
For two weeks he insisted he had killed Nitsche because she robbed him, and he pressed to have the charge reduced to manslaughter. The detective Ludwig Werneburg got further by letting him see Hänschen, the pet siskin he had kept in the flat. Grossmann then admitted killing Nitsche, Barthel and Sosnowski, and when asked whether they had stolen from him said that "in the end, it was all just because I can't control myself around a girl." Confronted with Frieda Schubert's purse, found among his things, he confessed to her murder, and on September 15 to that of Albertine Asche. On September 24, 1921, he was formally charged at Charlottenburg with the murders of Nitsche, Sosnowski and Asche; Barthel's name was not yet known. His lawyer was Erich Frey. In custody he tried to strangle a guard and began an autobiography calling his victims surplus women.
The newspapers said the meat he sold had come from the women. The police at the time and historians since have found nothing to support it, and the story, known in Berlin by a crude rhyme about a bride on a slice of bread, is regarded as an invention of the popular press.
His trial opened on July 3, 1922, at the Moabit criminal court before Judge Walter Böhmert. More than a dozen survivors testified, and some of them tried to reach him in the dock; one witness threw a ring of keys at him. Grossmann had withdrawn his confessions and called the witnesses liars who were ungrateful for his hospitality. On the morning of July 5, the third day, guards came to take him to court and found him hanged in his cell at Moabit with a noose made from his bedsheet and tied to a nail in the door frame. Böhmert told the court that the defendant had ended his own life, that he had shown no remorse, and that the proceedings were closed. No verdict was ever given. A death mask taken afterward was kept by the police and is presumed destroyed in the bombing of Berlin. Fritz Lang later named him among the killers loose in Germany when he began work on M.