Between 1962 and 1966 four boys disappeared in the Ruhr area and the towns around it in West Germany. Police had no leads. Parents kept their children indoors, and primary school pupils were allowed to walk to school only in groups, the journalist Markus Brauer recalled in the Stuttgarter Zeitung in 2016; he grew up in Essen and remembered the fear that gripped the region. The killings ended in June 1966, when a fifth boy got away from the young man who had taken him and went to the police. On June 21, 1966, officers arrested Jürgen Bartsch, a 19-year-old butcher's apprentice from Essen, in Velbert. He soon confessed to killing the four boys.
He had been 15 at the time of the first killing. The case went through two trials. In December 1967 the regional court in Wuppertal sentenced him to life imprisonment under adult criminal law. The Federal Court of Justice overturned that verdict, and in April 1971 a court in Düsseldorf sentenced him to ten years of youth detention, to be followed by commitment to a closed psychiatric institution. He was held at the state hospital in Eickelborn, near Soest. On April 28, 1976, he died there during a castration operation that he had asked for, after an error with the anesthetic. He was 29.
The case set off a fierce public argument in West Germany about punishment, juvenile justice, psychiatry and the treatment of children, and it has been the subject of books, a documentary and a feature film.
Bartsch was born Karl-Heinz Sadrozinski in Essen on November 6, 1946, the son of an unmarried mother. According to the Stuttgarter Zeitung, she left him in the infant ward of the hospital and died soon afterward; the taz, writing in 1991, said she died of tuberculosis shortly after the birth. For his first eleven months he was looked after by nurses working in shifts.
He was then taken in by a master butcher and his wife, a childless couple who ran two thriving butcher shops in Essen-Katernberg, a working-class district, according to the Stuttgarter Zeitung. The taz reported that the couple wanted to adopt the baby but that the youth welfare office in Essen had doubts about what it called the child's "dubious origins," so the formal adoption came only seven years later. It was then that Karl-Heinz Sadrozinski became Jürgen Bartsch.
Much of what is known about his childhood comes from Bartsch himself, in the many letters he later wrote from prison to the American journalist Paul Moor. As the taz summarized them, he described being shut in at home for years, forbidden to play with other children and regularly beaten. Both of his parents worked in the butcher shop and paid him little attention. He wrote that he hid his pain so as to seem brave.
The forensic psychiatrist Norbert Leygraf, interviewed by the Stuttgarter Zeitung in 2016, pointed to the first year of life as the time when a person's basic attitude to the world is formed, depending on whether a baby feels wanted and whether anyone responds to its crying. In Leygraf's view, the adoptive mother made the boy's disorder worse through behavior he described as rigid, unpredictable and moody.
In 1958, aged 11 according to the Stuttgarter Zeitung (12 according to the taz), Bartsch was sent to a Catholic boarding school run by the Salesians in Aulhausen, on the Rhine. The Stuttgarter Zeitung described him as a quiet, withdrawn boy. He later told the court that a priest there condemned sexuality and warned him about women. The school passed to the city of Cologne in 1970 and was later closed. A German film database, describing the 2002 feature film about his life, refers to the frightening years at the boarding school, to cold adoptive parents, and to a boy who did not want to grow up.
Leygraf told the Stuttgarter Zeitung that Bartsch turned repeated experiences of helplessness into acts in which he held control. Very few offenders kill at so young an age, Leygraf said, and that showed how severe the disorder was.
Bartsch killed four boys over four years, the first when he was 15 and the last when he was 19. The ZDF documentary series "Aufgeklärt - Spektakuläre Kriminalfälle" names the first boy as Klaus-Herrmann J., who was eight years old. Three more killings followed. The Stuttgarter Zeitung gives the boys' ages as eight to thirteen; the taz gives them as eight to eleven.
According to the taz and to ZDF, he approached the boys at fairgrounds or at a railway station and took them to Langenberg, a small town in North Rhine-Westphalia, where he killed them by strangling or striking them. He later estimated that he had made more than 100 further attempts to lure boys away that did not succeed, the taz reported.
The Stuttgarter Zeitung recalled how the disappearances dominated conversation across the region and around Düsseldorf, while police had nothing to go on. At the time of his arrest Bartsch was working as a butcher's apprentice.
The killings ended in June 1966. A fifth boy freed himself and got away, reached the police, and Bartsch was arrested in Velbert, near Essen, on June 21, 1966, at the age of 19. He confessed quickly to all four killings.
Investigators met, in the words of the Stuttgarter Zeitung, a friendly young man who answered their questions willingly and spoke openly about what he had done. Leygraf said that Bartsch suffered from his acts and his fantasies and wanted to be free of them, and that, unlike many offenders of his kind, he did not lack empathy. People in his position, Leygraf said, usually take far longer to speak about the motives behind such crimes.
Bartsch was tried before the regional court in Wuppertal in December 1967. Crowds came to the hearings every day, and the press covered the case in greater detail than any before it, the taz wrote in 1991. Readers sent in letters proposing punishments as cruel as the crimes. In a poll he was ranked the second-worst criminal of the century; Der Freitag, in 2004, said the only person placed ahead of him was Adolf Hitler.
The court sentenced him to life imprisonment under adult criminal law. He had been 15 at the time of the first killing, and, as the Stuttgarter Zeitung noted, he was still a minor for most of them. His defense lawyer was Rolf Bossi of Munich (1923 to 2015), whom the Stuttgarter Zeitung called a Munich star lawyer. Bossi represented Bartsch in both of his trials and, according to the Stuttgarter Zeitung, put the defendant's harsh childhood at the center of his case.
The verdict and the reaction to it divided opinion. The CSU politician Richard Stücklen publicly called for the death penalty for the murder of children. The journalist Ulrike Meinhof, writing in the magazine Konkret, criticized the scene in the courtroom, where spectators cheered the life sentence and the judge said nothing. As the taz summarized her argument, she wrote that society's hatred of one child killer allowed it a comfortable conscience while it looked away from children being killed in Vietnam and from cruelty to children in German homes.
Bossi appealed. The Federal Court of Justice overturned the Wuppertal judgment. According to the taz, the federal court objected that no expert in sexual science had been consulted: the three neurologists who had examined Bartsch had looked only for organic disease of the brain.
The case was heard again in Düsseldorf in April 1971. This time the public and the press were excluded, and the trial did not become a spectacle. Leading German experts in sexual research and forensic psychiatry gave evidence, the taz reported. The proceedings brought out many details of his life, which pointed to possible causes without explaining how his particular disorder had developed.
The court sentenced Bartsch to ten years of youth detention, to be followed by commitment to a closed psychiatric institution. That judgment stood. He was held at the state hospital in Eickelborn, near Soest.
After the first trial in 1967, the journalist Charles Paul Moor (1924 to 2010), a German-American writer, made contact with Bartsch. For the next eight years, the Stuttgarter Zeitung wrote, Moor became a kind of father figure to him. Bartsch wrote him a great many letters. In letters to his parents, as described by the taz, Bartsch wrote that his urges had not stopped and that he could not will them away without medical help. He said he wanted to become "normal like other people."
Moor published two books drawn from this material: "Das Selbstporträt des Jürgen Bartsch" in 1972 and "Jürgen Bartsch: Opfer und Täter" (victim and perpetrator) in 1991, in an edition from the publisher Rowohlt.
In 1974, while he was confined, Bartsch married a nurse from Essen who, according to the Stuttgarter Zeitung, believed she could cure him.
Bartsch wanted to be rid of his urges altogether. The two newspaper accounts differ on how he came to choose castration. The taz wrote that he considered a stereotactic brain operation intended to destroy the part of the brain linked to sexual drive, judged it too risky and chose castration instead. The Stuttgarter Zeitung wrote that he agreed to a brain operation meant to suppress his sex drive, apparently expecting that it would lead to his release, but that he was considered unsuitable for the operation.
On April 28, 1976, he was castrated at his own request at the state hospital in Eickelborn. He died during the operation. The taz gave the cause as acute heart failure caused by an anesthesia error; the Stuttgarter Zeitung described a serious anesthetic error and reported that the surgeon was later convicted of negligent homicide. He was 29.
According to the Stuttgarter Zeitung, his adoptive father drove the coffin around the Ruhr area, asking cemeteries to accept it. None would, and he could not obtain permission for a burial. In the end a cemetery in Essen agreed to cremate the body and bury the urn without a name. Bossi later said that Bartsch had been buried in secret at night and that his name was not allowed on the gravestone.
The psychoanalyst Alice Miller made the case a central example in her book "Am Anfang war Erziehung" (published in English as "For Your Own Good"). As the taz summarized her argument, she suggested that in his crimes he re-enacted the humiliation and powerlessness he had suffered as a child, and that in the fear of his victims he met the feelings he had been forced to suppress in himself.
Fifty years after the arrest, the Stuttgarter Zeitung asked whether his tendencies could have been recognized early enough to save the children. The criminologist Britta Bannenberg rejected the idea. People capable of severe violence often lack empathy, she said; they do not see the other person as a human being. Some take pleasure in violence and in dominating others, partly for genetic reasons, but neglect or violence in childhood and youth plays a role more often. A child who learns that ruthlessness and violence get results learns to see violence as a good thing, and for that reason she would not speak of people being "born murderers." She called the idea of identifying such offenders in advance and locking them up beforehand a Hollywood fantasy.
Leygraf told the newspaper that if Bartsch were alive today he would be in the forensic unit at Eickelborn, and that there was still no method of treating sadism this severe to the point where a patient could be released with a clear conscience.
The director Rolf Schübel made a documentary about the case between 1982 and 1984. It was cleared for audiences aged 16 and over on March 7, 1984, and was first shown on German television by ZDF on December 5, 1985, according to the German film database filmportal.de. The film draws on many witnesses from the time and on audio recordings of Bartsch made during his sessions with a psychoanalyst. Der Freitag later described it as covering the case in full detail.
The feature film "Ein Leben lang kurze Hosen tragen" (released in English as "The Child I Never Was") was produced by the broadcaster WDR in 2002, the Stuttgarter Zeitung reported, with a screenplay based on Moor's books. It was directed by Kai S. Pieck. Filming began in Cologne on February 25, 2002, and the film had its premiere at the Hof International Film Festival on October 25, 2002; it opened in German cinemas on August 19, 2004, according to filmportal.de. The film is framed by a long confession by the older Bartsch, played by Tobias Schenke, before a grainy black-and-white camera, intercut with scenes from his youth in which Sebastian Urzendowsky plays the young Bartsch. Reviewing it in Der Freitag in 2004, Matthias Dell found its restraint became a problem over time and left the film's purpose unclear.
In 2020 the ZDFinfo series "Aufgeklärt - Spektakuläre Kriminalfälle" devoted a 42-minute episode to the case, asking why some men kill children, how they become killers and whether they can be treated.
His age at the first killing: the Stuttgarter Zeitung, the taz, filmportal.de and ZDF all put it at 15; Der Freitag, in its 2004 review, said 16.
The boys' ages: eight to thirteen in the Stuttgarter Zeitung, eight to eleven in the taz.
His age on entering the boarding school: 11 (Stuttgarter Zeitung) or 12 (taz).
The brain operation: the taz said he decided against it as too risky; the Stuttgarter Zeitung said he agreed to it but was judged unsuitable.
His defense lawyer's first name appears as Ralf in the taz article of 1991 and as Rolf in the Stuttgarter Zeitung; the Stuttgarter Zeitung gives Rolf Bossi, with his dates (1923 to 2015).
November 6, 1946: born Karl-Heinz Sadrozinski in Essen.
After eleven months in the care of nurses: taken in by a butcher couple in Essen-Katernberg; formally adopted seven years later.
1958: sent to a Catholic boarding school in Aulhausen on the Rhine.
1962: first killing, of Klaus-Herrmann J., 8, when Bartsch was 15.
1962 to 1966: three more boys killed.
June 21, 1966: arrested in Velbert, near Essen, aged 19, after a fifth boy escaped; confesses soon afterward.
December 1967: life sentence under adult criminal law, regional court in Wuppertal.
After 1967: Paul Moor begins an eight-year correspondence with him; the Federal Court of Justice overturns the Wuppertal verdict.
April 1971: retrial in Düsseldorf; ten years of youth detention followed by commitment to a closed psychiatric institution.
1972: Moor's first book on him is published.
1974: marries a nurse while confined.
April 28, 1976: dies at the state hospital in Eickelborn during a castration operation he had requested, after an anesthesia error, aged 29.
1984 to 1985: Rolf Schübel's documentary is released and shown on ZDF.
1991: Moor's "Jürgen Bartsch: Opfer und Täter" published by Rowohlt.
2002 to 2004: "Ein Leben lang kurze Hosen tragen" premieres at Hof (2002) and opens in cinemas (2004).