On December 21, 1924, a homeless drifter named Vincenz Olivier knocked at a house on what is now Stawowa Street in Münsterberg, a small town in Lower Silesia. A woman in the town had sent him there; the man in the ground-floor flat, Karl Denke, was known for his charity. Denke offered him twenty pfennigs to write a letter, handed him pen and paper and sat him at a desk. Then he began to dictate, and the words made no sense for a letter: "Adolph, du fetter Wanst!" Adolph, you fat slob. Olivier turned around, puzzled, in time to see Denke raising a pickaxe over his head.
He ducked. The blade opened a gash at his temple about eight centimeters long and two wide, and he wrestled the pick out of Denke's hands, got to the front door and ran out screaming that a madman was trying to kill him. A coachman named Gabriel heard him from nearby, and the neighbors called the police. The police found themselves weighing the word of a bleeding tramp against that of a man the town called Papa Denke, and at first they arrested Olivier, for vagrancy and begging. It was a judge who insisted that his story be looked into, and Denke, then sixty-four, was brought in for questioning.
He never answered any questions. He was put in a holding cell at the police station, and within hours he had hanged himself. Accounts differ on what he used, most often a handkerchief or a shoelace, sometimes his braces. He was pronounced dead on December 22, 1924, before an interrogation had begun. A respectable townsman killing himself over a scuffle with a beggar made no sense to the police, and they went to search his flat.
In it they found two tubs of brine with meat curing in them, a box of human bones, and pots of human fat. There were shoes, belts, braces and shoelaces that analysis later showed had been made from tanned human skin. There were identity papers belonging to a dozen traveling journeymen and a pile of clothing. The forensic inventory ran to sixteen femurs, one pair of them remarkably strong and two pairs very thin, along with 150 pieces of rib, 120 toe bones and phalanges, sixty-five bones of the feet and hands, eight heels and ankle bones, two shoulder blades, a pair of collarbones and a quantity of arm and leg bones.
There was also a ledger. In it Denke had written the names of the people he had killed, with the dates and the weights of the bodies. There were thirty-one names. The last was Olivier's, entered before Olivier got away, which left thirty dead on Denke's own count. Examiners who looked at the quantity of remains believed the true number was higher, perhaps forty-two, perhaps more.
The first name was Ida Launer, in 1903; the first entry is dated February 21 of that year. Among those who came after were a carpenter from Kammerswaldau named Heinrich Bruchmann, killed on February 2, 1914; a railroad worker from Reumen named Niebel, killed on January 8, 1919; and Kaspar Hubalek, killed on April 20, 1924. The last victim known by name was Rochus Pawlick. Most of the others were men and a few were women, and nearly all were drifters, beggars and journeymen on the road looking for work, people nobody in Münsterberg would have missed. For most of them what survives is a name, a date and a weight in his hand.
One of the names belonged to a case the town thought it had already solved. Emma Sander was twenty-five when she was killed in 1909, and a butcher named Eduard Trautmann had been convicted of her murder and sent to prison. The ledger cleared him. Accounts disagree on the dates: one says he had already been released for good behavior in 1922 and sued for damages in 1925 once Denke's book exonerated him; another says he was freed only in 1926, after the truth came out.
Much about Denke himself is uncertain, since he left no statement and there was no trial. Most accounts give his birth as February 11, 1860, in Oberkunzendorf, a farming village northeast of Münsterberg, now Kalinowice Górne in Poland; others give August 12, 1860 or 1870. He was a quiet, soft-spoken child who was hard to raise and was remembered as one of the worst pupils at his elementary school. He ran away from home at twelve and apprenticed himself to a gardener. When he was twenty-five his father died; his elder brother inherited the farm and Karl received a share of money, bought a piece of land, failed at farming it and sold it. He bought the house in town to rent out, and when inflation forced him to sell it he would not leave, and kept the small flat to the right on the ground floor.
He took out a vending license and ran a small shop nearby, selling leather goods and boneless meat. He was a cross-bearer and organist at the local Lutheran church, although he gave up his membership in 1906, three years after the first name in the ledger. He was thin, bearded and polite, and he was generous to beggars, which was how they found their way to his door. The years in which the ledger fills up include the war, the defeat and the hyperinflation of 1923, when the roads of Germany were full of people with nowhere to sleep.
What he did with the flesh is less certain than the killings. The tubs in the flat suggest he ate it himself, and it was widely believed afterward that he had sold pickled meat as pork, some said at the weekly market in Breslau, the nearest city, along with the leather goods from his shop. That claim was repeated for a century. It was never tested in a court, because there was nobody left to try.
The case surfaced once more after the Second World War, when Münsterberg had become the Polish town of Ziębice. The wooden shed in Denke's garden was pulled down, and its new owners dug up several skulls and more human bones. Only two photographs of him are known to exist, and the only clear one was taken after his death.
His name traveled for a while. When the spree killer Wilhelm Brückner murdered eight members of his family in Hassenberg in June 1925, a note was found at his workplace that read "Massenmörder Haarmann! Massenmörder Denke! Massenmörder ? ? ?" Fritz Lang said in an interview that Denke was among the cases behind his 1931 film M. But he never became as famous as Fritz Haarmann, whose case broke in Hanover the same year and went to a long public trial. Denke left no testimony, only the ledger.