Carl Grossmann was arrested on August 21, 1921, in his room in a crowded building near the Silesian Station in eastern Berlin. Two police officers forced the door after a neighbor heard screams, and they found the body of Marie Nitsche, 34. He was a street peddler with a long record of earlier convictions. Under questioning he confessed to killing three women, Nitsche among them, and he once put his own total at "three, at most five."
Berlin police had been searching since the end of the war for whoever was responsible for the deaths of women whose remains had been found in the city, and investigators and newspapers soon tied many of those cases to him. His trial for three murders opened before a Berlin jury court on July 1, 1922. On July 5, before the jury could reach a verdict, he hanged himself in his cell at the Moabit remand prison. No court ever ruled on any of the killings, and he died accused, not convicted.
What is known of the case comes chiefly from the investigation file kept in the Landesarchiv Berlin, which the historian Sace Elder studied for a chapter published in 2014, and from the Berlin journalist Lutz Göllner, whose account appeared in Der Tagesspiegel in 2021. The two do not always agree.
Grossmann was born in 1863 in Neuruppin, in Brandenburg. His full name was Karl, or Carl, Friedrich Wilhelm Grossmann; both spellings of the first name appear in official records. Elder, working from the personnel papers in the prosecution file, describes him as one of seven children of a merchant. Göllner gives a different picture: the eldest of five children, with a father who drank and was violent.
The accounts also differ on his schooling. Elder writes that he went to school until he was 14 and then worked in a textile factory to help support his family. Göllner says he left school after the third grade. Both agree that he went to Berlin at 16. Elder writes that he went with a friend and took many jobs there, among them an apprenticeship in a butcher's shop; Göllner says he worked for a time for a butcher. The Berliner Kurier, in a 2023 article, dates a butcher's apprenticeship to 1876 and says he lived in Berlin from 1880. In 1922, according to Göllner, he still told an acquaintance that he was a butcher by trade.
At 19 he was called up for military service but released because of a hernia, Elder writes. For years afterward he worked as a farm laborer in Pomerania, Mecklenburg and other rural regions, coming back to Berlin between jobs.
His first sentence, at 20, was three days in jail for begging, according to the summary of his record in the prosecution file. Many short sentences followed, for begging, theft, vagrancy and offenses against decency. Göllner adds convictions for extortion and assault.
The record includes crimes against children. Elder lists a conviction at Nuremberg in 1897 for an offense against a 12-year-old girl, and a sentence in 1899 of 15 years at hard labor for crimes against two small girls, one of whom was badly injured. Göllner gives an earlier prison term over a four-year-old girl in 1887. He writes that on April 1, 1899, the day he was released from prison in Nuremberg, Grossmann attacked another four-year-old girl, who died of her injuries, and that the jury court at Bayreuth sentenced him to 15 years in a penitentiary. The Berliner Kurier says his last sentence before Berlin was for crimes against a 10-year-old and a four-year-old girl on the same day. Accounts differ on whether a child died, and none of them names the offense of which the Bayreuth court found him guilty.
Göllner writes that Grossmann was disciplined 55 times while serving that sentence. The Kurier says he came back to Berlin in 1913, and Göllner says 1914. Elder writes that he lived in Berlin for about ten years before his arrest, in a series of flats in the eastern part of the city and in a cabin in an allotment garden.
In 1919 Grossmann moved into a one-room flat on the fourth floor of a building close to the Silesian Station. Göllner describes the surrounding district, the Stralauer Vorstadt around Andreasplatz, as a rough neighborhood, and notes that the Vossische Zeitung called it "Little Chicago."
He made a living as a street peddler. Göllner writes that he sold matches, needles and shoelaces, and that he also ran a sausage stand at the Silesian Station where he sold canned meat. The Berliner Kurier also mentions the stand. Elder found that he lent money to neighbors and drank with them; one married couple on his floor owed him 58 marks.
Andreasplatz, a small park a block north of his building, was one of his regular meeting places. He was known there, Elder writes, and usually had a different woman with him. He also met women in the pubs, at the market and at the station.
To women in hard circumstances he offered food, a place to sleep, money, or work as his housekeeper. Elder's study of the file shows that the women who later gave statements were poor and nearly all unemployed, but otherwise varied. Some were registered prostitutes. Others were mothers from the neighborhood, married women, or newcomers to Berlin. Some exchanged sex for food or used clothing; one woman left her six-year-old son at home and was paid in secondhand clothes, and a neighbor who met him in the summer of 1920 traded sex for food for herself and her child. A married, unemployed woman who gave a statement in August 1921 had lived with him for a short time in 1918. Some of the women understood from the start what he expected. Others took his offer of a job or of help at face value.
Several of them described violence. An unemployed factory worker who took the housekeeping job in August 1921 was drugged and assaulted after one day's work in the flat. Other women told police that he had drugged them or hurt them badly. A prostitute named in the file only by her first name left because, she said, he was too "creepy."
None of these women had gone to the police, Elder writes. Their reasons included shame and fear. A woman suspected of prostitution could be registered with the morals police and made to undergo compulsory medical examinations, and Berlin residents were required to register their addresses; many of the women had been living in his room without registering. Grossmann exploited that position. He was a familiar figure at the local precinct, where he repeatedly reported his housekeepers for stealing from him. The police came to doubt his complaints, but one woman he had accused had the charges against her dropped only after his arrest, when she agreed to testify against him. To many of these women, Elder concludes, the police were persecutors rather than protectors, and investigators later treated their accounts as evidence of murder rather than of the violence done to the women themselves.
The neighbors noticed a good deal. Grossmann came home late at night with women, and there was noise and a smell from his room. When one neighbor shouted at him to stop beating a woman whose screams could be heard in the corridor, he answered through the closed door that the neighbor should be quiet. Another resident later told police that what they had heard were cries of pain, not cries for help. When people asked about the smell, he blamed a chicken that had gone bad, and they accepted the explanation.
A married couple on his floor admitted that they had drilled a hole in his door so they could watch him. Elder writes that the wanted notices about murdered women in the neighborhood, which police put up in early August 1921, made them think "instinctively" of him.
Since the end of the war, Berlin police had been trying to solve the deaths of young women whose remains had been found in the city. The Berlin police, in their published history, count 23 such women in Berlin from 1918 to 1921, and Göllner gives the same number of unexplained finds from 1918 on. Elder dates the police investigations from 1919.
One who was identified was Frieda Schubert, 33, who came from Dresden. On October 16, 1920, the Berliner Morgenpost reported the discovery of her body; the next day it reported that police had identified her by her fingerprints. The paper called her a "street girl" and wrote that she had not been well liked in her neighborhood. Her death was later attributed to Grossmann.
The summer of 1921 brought more anxiety. On August 7 the Morgenpost reported that 3,425 people had been reported missing in Berlin in 1919 and 4,280 in 1921. Two days later it reported the discovery of the remains of an unidentified woman in her early twenties. Newspapers named missing women, among them Melanie Sommer and Emma Baumann, as possible victims, and Elder shows that the BZ am Mittag and the Morgenpost dressed up their stories with invented detail. In early August, police put up public notices about the latest deaths and said they believed the person responsible lived in the district around the Silesian Station. Göllner writes that more than 100 women had disappeared in the Berlin area.
On the night of August 21, 1921, according to Göllner, a worker who lived in the building heard dull blows, muffled cries and then screams from Grossmann's room, and went for the police. Oberwachtmeister Kähn and a colleague from Police Precinct 50 forced the door. Inside they found Marie Nitsche dead, and they found Grossmann holding a cup of coffee into which he had put cyanide; Göllner writes that he tried to drink it. Elder's account of the file has him found standing over her body. The Berliner Kurier says neighbors called the police after hearing screams and that he was caught in the act.
The Berlin police history gives a different version, saying that the arrest was made under the direction of Ernst Gennat, the head of the Berlin homicide squad, and printing a 1921 photograph of Grossmann with Gennat and his staff. Göllner credits the arrest to the officers from Precinct 50 and brings Gennat into the story only later.
Police found clothing and bloodstains in the room, Göllner writes, and further evidence in his allotment garden cabin in Weissensee, where some clothing was matched to women whose remains had been found.
Marie Nitsche was 34, according to Göllner; Elder describes her only as young. She had been released that day after about a month in Moabit prison and was spending her first day of freedom when she met Grossmann in the street. According to the police file as Elder summarizes it, they spent the evening drinking in local pubs and then went to his room, where he gave her coffee laced with cyanide and beat her to death.
Grossmann's own account was different. Göllner writes that he told police she had stolen 300 marks from him, that he simply "saw red," and that her death was an accident. Göllner calls his statements contradictory and in part lies.
The investigation was led by the detectives Ludwig Werneburg and Riemann, working with the state prosecutor's office, Elder writes; the questioning went on for weeks. Göllner says that Werneburg obtained a confession after about 14 days by promising to look after Grossmann's pet bird, a canary called Hänschen.
Elder writes that Grossmann confessed to three murders, including Nitsche's. At first he insisted that they were killings in anger at women who had stolen from him. Investigators and medical experts rejected that account and concluded that the killings were sexually motivated. Göllner writes that he admitted killing Nitsche and a woman named Johanna, and that he later suggested there might have been five. The phrase in which Grossmann gave his own count, as Göllner quotes it, was that there had been "three, at most five" in all.
Göllner names Elisabeth Barthel, 30, among the women whose deaths were attributed to Grossmann. Elder's chapter does not mention her.
During the questioning Grossmann accused a woman neighbor of having known about the killings and of having blackmailed him. Police took her into custody, found nothing to support the claim and released her, concluding that the accusation was an act of revenge. The Berliner Volkszeitung nonetheless printed an invented scene in which she demanded fifty marks from him under threat of turning him in.
The number of deaths attributed to him grew in the press faster than the evidence. Elder writes that an undated police report in the file speaks of six, that police in 1921 hoped to attribute as many as 27 deaths to him, and that the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger reported on September 4, 1921, that there was firm evidence of at least 15 to 20 victims. Rumor in the city put the figure at fifty. The Social Democratic paper Vorwärts reported a "great furor" over the case on September 10, 1921. The Berlin police history says that three murders could be attributed to him. The Berliner Kurier, in 2023, wrote that investigators assigned 23 victims to him and that estimates ran from 23 to 200, while noting that only three could be clearly attributed. Göllner writes that the true number was never established.
Before the trial, lurid rumors spread about what he had done with his victims' bodies. Elder traces the story in print to the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger of September 1, 1921. Göllner writes that people in the district speculated wildly about his sausage stand, but that investigators never proved any link between the stand and the killings. The Berliner Kurier repeats the story as an unconfirmed rumor. No reliable report supports it.
The newspapers drew him in different ways. Elder writes that the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger portrayed him as a degenerate and dwelt on the count of victims, while the liberal Ullstein papers, among them the Morgenpost, cast the victims as naive young women from the provinces. Neither picture, she argues, fitted the women in the file: mothers, wives, workers and women in desperate need from the surrounding streets.
The historian Anne-Kathrin Kompisch, in a 2008 Hamburg dissertation on press images of serial killers in Germany, describes Grossmann as nearly forgotten today, though his case caused great excitement at the time. She argues that the reporting on his case still followed the descriptive crime reporting of the imperial era, and that newspapers in the unsettled early 1920s did not treat it as extraordinary. Three years later, she writes, the press handling of the Haarmann case showed such patterns clearly.
Göllner describes the case as a dispute between the prosecutors and the criminal police. The early Weimar Republic was in turmoil, with inflation rising and political murders, among them the killing of Matthias Erzberger, and the state wanted the case closed quickly. The criminal police wanted more time to look into other unsolved deaths. Gennat later said of the authorities' handling of the case, as Göllner quotes him: "I call dealing in such a way with such dangerous sex offenders official complicity in murder." Göllner writes that Gennat afterward set up a central file of murder cases.
The trial opened on July 1, 1922, before Schwurgericht I, the jury court of the Berlin Landgericht, on three murders the prosecution considered provable, Göllner writes; 51 witnesses were called. His defense lawyer was Erich Frey. Elder writes only that the trial was held in early July 1922.
The trial drew less public attention than it might have. Berlin's newspapers were stopped by a printers' strike from June 29 to July 12, 1922, Göllner writes, and the city was still shaken by the assassination of Walther Rathenau by right-wing extremists on June 24.
On July 5, 1922, Grossmann hanged himself in his cell at the Moabit remand prison with a cord made from a torn handkerchief, according to Göllner. Elder writes that the trial was cut short after three days by his suicide. The proceedings ended with no verdict. He was 58, the Berliner Kurier reports.
Because there was no judgment, the case was never settled in court, and the accounts written afterward filled the gap in different ways. Frey, in his memoir Ich beantrage Freispruch (Hamburg, 1959), described the dead women as "poor girls from the provinces." The criminologist Robert Heindl, in Der Berufsverbrecher (1926), repeated the story that Grossmann had sold human flesh and presented him as a professional criminal. The sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, in Geschlecht und Verbrechen (1930), claimed instead that he had eaten it. The police writer Curt Elwenspoek, in Mord und Totschlag (1930), made him a faceless killer of the big city.
Elder argues that these versions, either a nameless urban predator or the product of a criminal underworld, missed the social reality the police file shows: a familiar figure in his neighborhood who lent money to and drank with his neighbors, and women who had reason to see the police as persecutors rather than protectors. In her reading, the crime stories helped to restore prewar ideas about women's place after the war. The historian Amber Aragon-Yoshida made the Berlin case of 1921 and 1922 one of three case studies in a 2011 Washington University dissertation on sexual murder in Germany and Austria, treating it as an early Weimar contrast to a Berlin case of 1904.
The killings were never tried to a verdict, and the accounts disagree on much of the record.
The number of deaths. Grossmann confessed to three, according to Elder, and gave his own count as "three, at most five," according to Göllner. The police file includes a report naming six. The press of 1921 claimed 15 to 20 and spread a rumor of fifty, and police hoped to attribute up to 27. Later estimates have gone far higher. None of these figures was tested in court.
The identities of the dead. Marie Nitsche's death is the only one documented at his arrest. Frieda Schubert's death in October 1920 was later attributed to him. Göllner names Elisabeth Barthel and a woman called Johanna. The three victims in the counts tried in 1922 were not named in reports.
The rumors about the bodies. The lurid claims about what he did with his victims' bodies began as neighborhood rumor and in the Lokal-Anzeiger before the trial, and were repeated by Heindl and Hirschfeld. Göllner writes that investigators never proved them.
The 1899 case. Elder records a 15-year sentence for crimes against two small girls, one badly injured; Göllner writes that a four-year-old girl died. The point remains unsettled.
His family and the arrest. The accounts disagree on the size of his family, his father's occupation, his schooling, the year he returned to Berlin, and whether Gennat or the officers from Precinct 50 made the arrest.
1863: Born in Neuruppin, Brandenburg.
At 16: Goes to Berlin; works among other jobs for a butcher.
At 19: Called up for military service; released because of a hernia. Years of farm labor follow.
1897: Sentenced at Nuremberg for an offense against a 12-year-old girl (Elder).
1899: Sentenced by the jury court at Bayreuth to 15 years for crimes against young children (Elder; Göllner).
1913 or 1914: Returns to Berlin (Kurier; Göllner).
1918: Unexplained finds of women's remains in Berlin begin, by the count of the Berlin police and Göllner.
1919: Moves into a fourth-floor room near the Silesian Station.
October 16 and 17, 1920: The Berliner Morgenpost reports the death of Frieda Schubert, 33, and her identification.
Early August 1921: Police post notices about murdered women in the district.
August 21, 1921: Arrested in his room; Marie Nitsche, 34, is found dead.
September 1921: The Lokal-Anzeiger reports lurid rumors (September 1) and claims 15 to 20 victims (September 4).
July 1, 1922: Trial opens before Schwurgericht I, Landgericht Berlin, on three counts of murder.
July 5, 1922: Hangs himself in his cell at Moabit; the trial ends without a verdict.