Jurgen Bartsch was born Karl-Heinz Sadrozinski in Essen on November 6, 1946. His mother, a factory worker, died of tuberculosis shortly after his birth and he spent his first eleven months in a hospital cot with almost no handling. He was adopted at three by a butcher and his wife, who kept him indoors, bathed him herself until he was nineteen, and beat him. He was sent to a Catholic boarding school where he was abused by a priest.
The four boys were Klaus Jung, eight; Peter Fuchs, thirteen; Ulrich Kahlweiss, twelve; and Manfred Grassmann, twelve.
Between 1962 and 1966, from the age of fifteen, he lured four boys aged eight to thirteen away from fairgrounds and cinemas in the Wuppertal and Langenberg area and took them to a disused air-raid bunker in an abandoned quarry, where he tied, tortured and killed them and dismembered the bodies. A fifth boy talked him into untying him in 1966 and escaped, and Bartsch was arrested in June of that year.
He was convicted in December 1967 and given life. In 1971 the sentence was set aside on the ground that he had been a juvenile for three of the killings, and at a retrial he was given ten years and indefinite psychiatric detention.
What made the case unusual in Germany was what Bartsch himself did afterwards. He wrote hundreds of letters, including a long correspondence with the American writer Paul Moor, in which he described his upbringing and his acts with an unsparing clarity that almost nobody in that literature manages. He asked repeatedly for surgical castration in the hope that it would end the compulsion, was refused for years on legal grounds, and eventually consented to it under the 1969 law.
He died on the operating table at Eickelborn on April 28, 1976, aged twenty-nine, from an overdose of anaesthetic administered by an inexperienced anaesthetist. The death produced a further scandal. Moor's book about him, Das Selbstportrat des Jurgen Bartsch, remains a standard text in German criminology.