Gesche Margarethe Gottfried was beheaded on the Domshof, the square beside Bremen Cathedral, on April 21, 1831. A Bremen court had sentenced her to death by the sword for 15 murders by poison, and a crowd estimated at 35,000 came to watch, according to the Bremen edition of the Berlin daily taz. It was the last public execution in Bremen.
Between 1813 and 1827 she had poisoned her parents, her brother, both of her husbands and her three children, along with a man she meant to marry and several friends and neighbors. Many more people fell ill from her doses and recovered. For most of that time Bremen saw her as a devoted nurse to the sick and dying, and called her the "Engel von Bremen," the Angel of Bremen. She confessed after her arrest, but she never gave a clear reason. At her trial her defense argued that she was not responsible for her acts, a plea the taz has described as the first of its kind, and the case has been argued over in Bremen ever since.
She was born Gesche Margarethe Timm in Bremen on March 6, 1785, according to the City of Bremen's tourism portal. Her father was a master tailor, and she had a twin brother. WEB.DE, in a 2022 account of the case, describes the family's circumstances as modest.
In 1806 she married Johann Miltenberg, a master saddler. They had five children. The marriage was unhappy, WEB.DE reported: Miltenberg spent much of his time in taverns and brothels and ran through his money.
The City of Bremen portal dates the start of her poisonings to about 1812.
In 1813 she poisoned her husband. She stayed on in his house with their children.
In 1815 she killed her mother, and then, at short intervals, her two daughters, her son and her father, WEB.DE reported. In 1816 she killed her twin brother, who had come home from the Wars of Liberation.
In 1817 she married the wine merchant Michael Christoph Gottfried, and she poisoned him too. The child she was carrying was born dead a few weeks after his death.
Bremen pitied her. People who knew her saw a woman who had nursed her husband, her parents and her children to the end, and the name "Angel of Bremen" came from that care, according to the City of Bremen portal and WEB.DE.
By the early 1820s money was short. She rented out her house and took rooms nearby while keeping up the outward signs of wealth, WEB.DE reported. In 1823 she became engaged to Paul Thomas Zimmermann, a dealer in fashion goods. The City of Bremen portal describes him as her fiancé and says she poisoned him in June 1823, after a break of six years. WEB.DE wrote that for the second series she obtained the poison from a pharmacy through a woman friend.
In 1825 she killed a music teacher who was her friend, and a neighbor, WEB.DE reported.
She sold her house to Johann Christoph Rumpff, a master wheelwright, and his wife Wilhelmine, but kept the right to live there, so she shared a roof with the family. Wilhelmine Rumpff died in 1826, shortly after giving birth. After that, WEB.DE reported, Gottfried gave poison in doses that did not kill to people who seemed to be chosen at random.
In 1827 she killed her friend Beta, the woman who had once fetched the poison for her, and Beta's three-year-old daughter. Later that year she traveled to Hanover, where she killed Friedrich Kleine, a farrier with the Hanoverian cavalry, to whom she owed 800 taler. He was the last person to die by her hand.
The taz, reporting on new research in 2010, put the toll at 15 people close to her killed between 1813 and 1827, and 19 more harmed by doses that did not kill. The writer Peer Meter, who studied the court files, told WEB.DE there were at least 20 such poisonings.
The case could have ended years sooner, according to Meter. In the 2010 taz report he argued that many people raised warnings and that the community met them with indifference. He pointed to Wilhelm Olbers, the Bremen astronomer after whom the city's planetarium is named, who examined the body of one of the dead. Olbers made only a single cut and misjudged the cause of death, Meter said, and without that error she might have been exposed by about the sixth death.
WEB.DE reported that the year before her arrest, poison had been found in food she prepared, but it was thrown away and not examined further.
In 1828 Johann Christoph Rumpff noticed strange white grains in his food. He had them examined, and his family doctor found they were poison, according to the City of Bremen portal and WEB.DE.
She was arrested on the evening of March 6, 1828, her birthday; the taz noted in 2010 that the anniversary of her arrest was also her birthday.
She spent almost three years in custody before the sentence was carried out. She was held in the Ostertorwache, according to a 1997 taz report on the history of the building, which over the years served as a Bremen reform prison, a Gestapo prison and a deportation detention center.
She confessed to 15 killings and to numerous poisonings that did not kill, WEB.DE reported, but she gave no clear account of why. Meter told the taz that she grieved deeply for the children she had poisoned, and that the files record her saying she had no reason, only an urge to do it.
While she waited, showmen applied for permission to exhibit her at Bremen's Freimarkt fair, the taz reported in 2023.
Her trial was, by the taz's account, the first anywhere in which the defense argued that the accused lacked criminal responsibility. The argument failed. The court refused a request for a psychiatric examination. WEB.DE wrote that a mental disorder was not ruled out, yet she was sentenced to death by the sword.
The judges found the motives to be inheritance, relief from debt and access to sexual partners, the taz reported in 2023. Meter has disputed any single motive. He told the taz in 2010 that no plausible motive exists and that she was a mentally ill woman, rather than the greedy murderer of the standard account or a fascinating and efficient killer. To WEB.DE he described her as severely mentally ill, and cited a psychologist's view that she never came to terms with the deaths of her children and parents, which in turn led to the second series of killings.
On April 21, 1831, she was beheaded with the sword on the Domshof, according to the taz and the City of Bremen portal. The taz in 2023 put the crowd at 35,000. It was the last death sentence carried out in public in Bremen.
Later accounts long rested on a contemporary biography by Friedrich Leopold Voget, the taz reported in 2010. The trial files were long believed lost. According to the 2010 taz report, they turned up in East Germany in 1987 and passed to the Bremen State Archive, where they drew little attention at first; WEB.DE dates their return to Bremen to 1988.
Peer Meter, a writer from Worpswede near Bremen, worked through the files over about two decades. On the 182nd anniversary of her arrest, in March 2010, two books came out of that work: Eine Bremer Tragödie, published by Edition Temmen and described by the taz as the first complete analysis of the trial files, and Gift, a graphic novel of about 200 pages from the Berlin publisher Reprodukt. Meter argued that Voget had misquoted the files to present her as a greedy murderer, and that after her arrest Bremen's middle class tried to make it look as though her crimes had been committed in secret. To WEB.DE he said the files show the city's leading citizens trying to hide their own share of responsibility.
Bremen later set a block of basalt engraved with a cross into the pavement of the Domshof to mark the place where she died, as a memorial to the last death sentence carried out in the city, the taz reported in 2023. People began to spit on it to show their contempt for her, and it became known as the Spuckstein, the spitting stone. The city's tourism portal presents the spitting as a local custom. In 1931 someone used a hammer and chisel to turn the cross into a swastika; the stone was removed, reportedly ground down, re-engraved and returned to the square.
In 2012 a spokeswoman for Bremen's tourism office told the taz that city crime tours stop at the spot. In 2023 the taz reported that a Bremen resident had begun laying flowers and candles at the stone, arguing that spitting on it offends the human dignity protected by Article 1 of Germany's Basic Law, which in her view extends beyond death. She wanted the stone moved to the state museum, which holds a cast of Gottfried's death mask. Some tour guides now ask visitors not to spit.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder wrote the play Bremer Freiheit in 1971 and staged it in Bremen that year. A television version with the Bremer Theater ensemble, Bremer Freiheit: Frau Geesche Gottfried, followed in 1972, with a cast that included Margit Carstensen, Wolfgang Schenck, Hanna Schygulla and Kurt Raab, according to the Berliner Festspiele. The production brought Fassbinder his only invitation to Berlin's Theatertreffen. The play recasts her killings as a woman's escape from the men and conventions that confined her.
Gesches Gift, a feature film loosely based on the case, had its world premiere at the Montreal film festival in August 1997 and was first shown on German television by ZDF on January 25, 1998, according to filmportal.de, the German film database.
Effigie: Das Gift und die Stadt, directed by Udo Flohr from a screenplay by Flohr and Meter, premiered at the Bremen film festival on September 21, 2019, and reached German cinemas on January 20, 2022. Suzan Anbeh played Gottfried. The story is told through a court stenographer, Cato Böhmer, one of the few invented figures; the taz noted that the victims, witnesses, judges and senators, as well as Mayor Johann Smidt, are real people.
The case has also inspired a ballad by Adelbert von Chamisso, a musical, an opera and radio plays, the taz reported. In 2003 the artists Korpys/Löffler made a drawing titled Der Gedenkstein für die Giftmörderin Gesche M. Gottfried for their installation Etagentraum, which is now in the collection of the Kunsthalle Bremen.
The number of victims. The court sentenced her for 15 murders and she confessed to 15 killings; German accounts give 15 throughout. Which of the deaths were charged one by one is not on record.
The number who survived her poisonings: 19 (taz, 2010) or at least 20 (Meter, in WEB.DE, 2022).
The end date. Most reporting ends the killings with Friedrich Kleine's death in Hanover in 1827; the City of Bremen portal gives the period as 1813 to 1828, and the taz in 2022 gave 1812 to 1828.
The place of the execution. The taz in 2023 and the City of Bremen portal place it on the Domshof, where the Spuckstein lies. A 2022 taz film review and the Kunsthalle Bremen catalog refer to the Marktplatz, the market square next to it.
Her motive. The judges cited inheritance, debt and access to sexual partners. Meter, after reading the full files, argues that no plausible motive exists and that she was severely ill.
The insanity defense. The taz describes it as the first such defense raised in any trial; that claim rests on the 2010 report of Meter's research.
The return of the files: 1987 (taz, 2010) or 1988 (WEB.DE, 2022).
March 6, 1785: born Gesche Margarethe Timm in Bremen, a twin.
1806: marries the saddler Johann Miltenberg; they have five children.
1813: poisons her husband.
1815: kills her mother, her two daughters, her son and her father.
1816: kills her twin brother, home from the Wars of Liberation.
1817: marries the wine merchant Michael Christoph Gottfried and poisons him; her child is stillborn weeks after his death.
June 1823: poisons her fiancé, Paul Thomas Zimmermann, after a six-year pause.
1825: kills a music teacher who was her friend, and a neighbor.
1826: Wilhelmine Rumpff dies shortly after giving birth; poisonings that do not kill follow.
1827: kills her friend Beta and Beta's three-year-old daughter; later kills Friedrich Kleine in Hanover.
1828: Johann Christoph Rumpff finds white grains in his food; his doctor identifies poison.
March 6, 1828: arrested in Bremen on her birthday.
1828 to 1831: held almost three years in the Ostertorwache; confesses; tried, and sentenced to death by the sword.
April 21, 1831: beheaded on the Domshof before a crowd estimated at 35,000; the last public execution in Bremen.
1931: the cross on the execution stone is defaced with a swastika; the stone is later re-engraved and returned.
1971 and 1972: Fassbinder's Bremer Freiheit is staged in Bremen and filmed for television.
1987 or 1988: the trial files, long thought lost, return to Bremen from East Germany.
January 25, 1998: ZDF broadcasts the film Gesches Gift.
March 2010: Peer Meter publishes Eine Bremer Tragödie and the graphic novel Gift.
September 21, 2019: Effigie: Das Gift und die Stadt premieres in Bremen; cinema release January 20, 2022.
2023: a campaign asks Bremen to stop spitting on the Spuckstein.