On June 18, 1966, a fifteen-year-old boy named Peter Frese lay bound in an abandoned air-raid shelter when the young man who had brought him there left him with a candle burning. Frese held his bindings to the flame until they burned through, and got out. The man who had tied him was Jurgen Bartsch, nineteen, who had already killed four boys in that shelter.
He was born Karl-Heinz Sadrozinski in Essen on November 6, 1946, to an unmarried mother who died of tuberculosis five months later, and he spent his first months in the care of nurses. At eleven months he was adopted by a butcher and his wife in Langenberg, who named him Jurgen Bartsch. His adoptive mother was fixated on cleanliness; he was not allowed to play with other children in case he got dirty, and she bathed him herself until he was nineteen. He was beaten from infancy and often carried visible scars and bruises, sometimes in the same room where his father was cutting up carcasses. By one account he was kept in an underground cellar for six years. He did not start school until he was ten, and his parents moved him to a Catholic boarding school because they thought his first school too lax. He was sexually abused by a thirteen-year-old cousin at eight and by a teacher at thirteen.
He began killing at fifteen. On March 31, 1962, he took Klaus Jung, eight, into the shelter. Peter Fuchs, thirteen, followed on August 6, 1965, then Ulrich Kahlweiss, twelve, on August 14, 1965, and Manfred Grassmann, twelve, on May 6, 1966. He persuaded each boy to come with him, made him undress, sexually abused him, killed him and dismembered the body.
After his arrest in June 1966 he confessed openly. On December 15, 1967, the Wuppertal regional court sentenced him to life, the first German judgment to take the defendant's psychological and social background into account in setting the sentence. An appeal failed at first, but in 1971 the Federal Court of Justice sent the case back to the Dusseldorf regional court, which gave him ten years of juvenile detention and ordered him into psychiatric care at Eickelborn. There, on January 2, 1974, he married Gisela Deike of Hanover.
His psychiatrists weighed psychotherapy, castration and even brain surgery. He refused surgery at first, but with his depression unrelieved, and to avoid being confined in a mental hospital for life, he agreed to voluntary castration. The operation at the Eickelborn state hospital, on April 28, 1976, killed him. An autopsy and inquiry found he had been given ten times the proper dose of the anesthetic halothane. He was twenty-nine.
The American journalist Paul Moor, who corresponded with him at length, published Jurgen Bartsch: Opfer und Tater, victim and perpetrator, and the psychoanalyst Alice Miller took the case as a central example in For Your Own Good, her study of cruelty in child-rearing. It was filmed in 2002 as Ein Leben lang kurze Hosen tragen, released in the United States as The Child I Never Was.