On June 1, 1965, a young man tried to snatch a customer's handbag in the Brenninkmeyer department store in Nuremberg. Passers-by chased him. In the struggle he shot dead Otto Thieme, a caretaker, and badly wounded two other men, and at Breite Gasse 88 three pedestrians and two traffic policemen, Rudolf Müller and Bodo Hartung, wrestled him down. He was carrying three pistols, a blackjack and firecrackers. His name was Klaus Gosmann, he was twenty-four, and he was the Mittagsmörder, the Midday Murderer, whom Nuremberg police had been hunting for five years.
He was born on September 1, 1940, in Frankfurt an der Oder, the son of a career officer who went missing in February 1945. He grew up with his brother in Meseritz in eastern Brandenburg and, from 1949, in Hersbruck, east of Nuremberg. At the Oberrealschule in Hersbruck he repeated a year and failed his final examinations; he moved to a school in Ingolstadt and passed the Abitur in July 1962, and that autumn he began studying economics in Nuremberg and then dropped out. In 1964 he joined the Bundeswehr as an officer candidate and trained with engineer units in Koblenz and Munich. He asked again and again to be discharged, and when he was refused he deserted in April 1965 and lived under false names around Nuremberg.
The first killings came on April 22, 1960, in the Tuchergartenstraße in Nuremberg. He broke into an elderly woman's apartment, and when she called for help her lodger, Valeska Eder, and Eder's fiancé, Enrique Hering, ran in. He shot them both, fled without taking anything, and left the householder alive to give police a good description. The weapon was a Belgian FN pistol in 7.65 millimeter. After a year without an arrest, investigators began one of the largest checks in the history of the Federal Republic: every man born in 1939 or 1940 who had lived in Nuremberg at the time, 50,366 of them, plus 1,174 men from the marriage bureau where the surviving woman worked.
On September 10, 1962, he robbed the savings bank at Ochenbruck, shot the branch cashier, Erich Hallbauer, and escaped with more than 3,000 marks. On November 30 he robbed the savings bank branch at Neuhaus an der Pegnitz and shot Oskar Seidel, a retired man working as a cash messenger, who seemed not to understand what was happening and reached into his breast pocket for his glasses. On March 29, 1963, in the workshop of a Nuremberg gun shop, he killed the owner, Helmut Hannwacker, and his mother, Karola. Bullets and casings tied the same Walther pistols to Ochenbruck, Neuhaus and the gun shop. The robberies fell around midday, when the church bells of Franconia were ringing noon, and the press gave him his name.
He denied everything at first. But one of the pistols he was carrying, and two more found in an apartment he rented in Nuremberg, were identified as the murder weapons; they had been stolen in 1959, 1960 and 1962. A witness to the Ochenbruck robbery recognized him. He confessed, with an indifference that the court record preserves. Of the first killing he said the man came rushing at him like a savage, so he fired a third time. Of the banks: when he drew the pistol they all had to put their paws up, and if they did not, it was their own fault if he had to shoot them. His motto, he said, was that whoever stood in his way had to die. As for midday, he said it meant nothing: he was not an early riser, and his preparations always took so long that it was nearly twelve before he acted.
On July 27, 1967, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for five murders and three aggravated robberies. The 1960 double murder was not tried, because he had committed it before his twenty-first birthday and the murders he committed as an adult already carried a life sentence.
He spent almost fifty years in prison, the longest term of any prisoner in Bavaria. In 2010 the regional court in Regensburg ordered steps toward his eventual release on parole; the higher regional court in Nuremberg overturned that, finding he was still dangerous, and his constitutional complaint against that ruling succeeded (German accounts give the year as 2011 or 2012). He was prepared for life outside, taken on supervised outings, taught how to use a cash machine and shown what a smartphone was. In 2012 he wrote to the Hersbrucker Zeitung that he had changed completely since the crimes. With no relatives to go to, he was to be placed in a men's hostel in Bavaria. On February 26, 2015, at seventy-four, he was released on parole from Straubing prison, and he has lived since under a new identity.