Pommerencke was born in 1937 in Bergen auf Rugen and was a solitary, much-bullied child who moved to West Germany as a young man. He worked as a labourer.
Between February 26 and June 9, 1959 he killed four women: Hilde Conther, forty-nine; Karin Wadle, eighteen; Dagmar Klimek, twenty-one; and Rita Waltersbacher, sixteen. He beat them with rocks or stabbed them, in woods and beside railway lines in Baden. Dagmar Klimek he pushed from a moving express train and then followed on foot to kill. He admitted more than thirty rapes. The German press called him the Beast of the Black Forest.
He was arrested on June 10, 1959, the day after the last killing, when a tailor in Hamburg found a bloodstained jacket he had left for alteration and called the police.
He was tried at Freiburg and on October 22, 1960 received six life sentences with a minimum of 140 years, the heaviest sentence then handed down in the Federal Republic. He died in prison on December 27, 2008, having served forty-nine years.
He gave an account of himself at trial that has been repeated ever since. That seeing the film The Ten Commandments in 1959 and watching women dance in it had triggered him. It is his own explanation, offered in his own defence, and the entry records it as that rather than as a cause.