Ludwig Tessnow was a journeyman carpenter from Pomerania who was sentenced to death at Greifswald on July 4, 1902, over the deaths of two small boys at the Baltic resort of Göhren on Rügen in the summer of 1901. His case sits at a point where several histories meet. It is a case in which a laboratory test that could tell human blood from animal blood supplied the central evidence. It is a standard example in the history of forensic psychiatry, because every psychiatric expert who examined him judged that he was not criminally responsible, and two juries disregarded them. And it carries a later correction: for decades he was believed to have been executed in the Greifswald court prison, yet research published in 2014 showed that he was a patient in a state asylum and was killed there in the last weeks of 1939.
The legal record is less settled than the story. The accounts agree on the 1901 case at Göhren, the trial in 1902 and the retrial in 1906. They disagree on what exactly the 1902 verdict covered, and they connect Tessnow to an earlier double killing of two girls in 1898 near Osnabrück without agreeing on whether he was ever tried for it.
Tessnow was born in February 1872 at Stolzenhagen near Stettin, an illegitimate child. According to a 2018 account by Dieter Naumann and Rainer Leonhardt in Das Blättchen, his mother, born in 1843, suffered from epilepsy. She had left her husband, a heavy drinker, and later left the man believed to be Tessnow's biological father, Julius Tebesius, who also drank and had been prosecuted over a knife fight. A stepfather, Friedrich Ludwig Tessnow, gave the boy his surname by marriage; he drank as well and mistreated the family, and the mother separated from him. An older half-brother had been sentenced to eight years in prison for manslaughter and died by suicide in custody.
Naumann and Leonhardt record that Tessnow himself had convictions for begging, theft and burglary. He trained as a carpenter and followed the custom of the trade by moving between employers. Employers and acquaintances later described a diligent, quiet worker. They also described a change in him around the time of the crimes, with heavy drinking and altered behavior. No epilepsy diagnosis from his youth is recorded; the psychiatric opinion that he acted in an epileptic twilight state came later, from the experts who examined him after his arrest (Armbruster and Haack, 2014).
The earliest event linked to Tessnow took place on September 9, 1898, at Lechtingen, a village near Osnabrück. Two girls from the village, both seven years old and both named Elise, died that day. The account by the local writer Joachim Dierks, first printed in the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung on April 27, 2017 and republished by the Hollager Hof heritage association, says that a button from a traveling journeyman carpenter's jacket was linked to the case and that the jacket carried reddish-brown stains. The man, Tessnow, said they were wood stain. Blood could not yet be proved by any test, and he was released for lack of evidence. Naumann and Leonhardt make the same point: he was freed from remand for want of proof.
Nothing further happened in the Lechtingen case for three years. Dierks writes that after Tessnow's arrest on Rügen in 1901 the prosecutors in Greifswald asked Osnabrück about the earlier suspect, and the Osnabrück files were reopened. Naumann and Leonhardt cite the Greifswalder Zeitung of December 16, 1906 for the detail that the Osnabrück criminal commissioner pointed the Greifswald investigators to Tessnow after they inquired.
What happened to that case afterward is disputed. Dierks states that in 1902 Tessnow was convicted of the double killing at Göhren and of the Lechtingen deaths. Naumann and Leonhardt write that the Lechtingen deaths appear in their account only as an earlier case in which he had been named as the suspect, and they do not list them among the counts of the trial. The 2014 article by Jan Armbruster and Kathleen Haack in the journal Forensische Psychiatrie, Psychologie, Kriminologie says in its abstract that he was sentenced to death for four murders; the four counts are not itemized. The Lechtingen deaths are therefore best described as attributed to Tessnow by investigators and, according to some accounts, included in the 1902 verdict; no source reports a separate trial for them.
The year 1901 brought a run of incidents in Pomerania and on Rügen. In March Tessnow was arrested in connection with an incident involving a young woman near Pribbernow in Western Pomerania, and witnesses again spoke of a change in his personality and of heavy drinking (Naumann and Leonhardt). In June, sheep were killed on a pasture near Sagard on Rügen, where Tessnow was working for a master carpenter. In the night of July 11 to 12, there was a similar attack on sheep near Göhren; the owner saw a man running away and later picked out Tessnow.
These incidents matter to the story chiefly because of what they did for the prosecution. They explain why animal blood, as well as human blood, was found on the clothes of a man who said his stains came from his trade.
In mid-June 1901 Tessnow found work and lodging with a master carpenter in Baabe, a few miles from Göhren on the south-east coast of Rügen. On July 1, 1901, according to Naumann and Leonhardt, two brothers, Peter, about five and a half, and Hermann, about seven and a half, died near Göhren. A listing for a crime-history walking tour published by the city of Greifswald places the event in the night of July 1 to 2, 1901, and says the culprit was found quickly but that decisive evidence was missing.
On July 2, witnesses came forward, and a road worker said he had seen Tessnow the evening before in a suit covered in brownish stains. He was arrested on the beach, where, according to Naumann and Leonhardt, he was trying to clean his clothes. He told the police the stains came from the wood stain he used every day at work.
The case drew heavy press attention at once. Naumann and Leonhardt quote the Greifswalder Zeitung of July 5, 1901, which wrote that every doubt about his guilt had fallen away, although Tessnow had not confessed. Two days later the paper used the phrase "beast in human form". The authors present this as prejudgment, and as a cause of the public pressure that bore on the later trial. Local papers also took care to tell visiting bathers that the man who had been caught was not from the area.
The magistrate in charge of the inquiry was Justizrat Johann Schmidt of Greifswald. The Greifswald public prosecutor, Hermann Hübschmann, then learned of work being done at the university's Hygiene Institute by Paul Uhlenhuth, and urged Schmidt to consult him (Naumann and Leonhardt).
Uhlenhuth was born in Hannover on January 7, 1870. In 1899 he joined Friedrich Löffler at the University of Greifswald, where he first worked on foot-and-mouth disease and a vaccine against it, according to the entry by Axel C. Hüntelmann in the Neue Deutsche Biographie. The same entry credits him with developing the precipitin method for distinguishing blood sera, including human from animal blood, and notes that the method was taken up in forensic medicine and in food chemistry. A 2001 review of one hundred years of forensic serology, by Geserick, Wirth and Strauch in the journal Rechtsmedizin, dates the introduction of the precipitation reaction for identifying species to 1901 and notes that Karl Landsteiner's description of the ABO blood groups appeared in the same year.
The Embryo Project Encyclopedia at Arizona State University describes Uhlenhuth's basic experiment: he injected a rabbit with proteins from hens' eggs, drew off the rabbit's serum, and mixed it with egg white, which made the original proteins clump. The same reaction, applied to blood of different species, is the basis of the test.
Naumann and Leonhardt report that Uhlenhuth had succeeded in blind tests in picking out human and cattle blood among 19 kinds of blood. Packages of Tessnow's clothing were sent to him. The report he delivered in August 1901 found human blood at 22 places on Tessnow's clothes and sheep's blood at nine. Naumann and Leonhardt call it the first scientific report to separate kinds of blood in a criminal case, and they describe it as the decisive evidence at the trial in 1902.
How quickly the method spread can be seen in a paper by G. S. Graham-Smith and F. Sanger of the Pathological Laboratory in Cambridge, published in the Journal of Hygiene. It says the test was by then in use in courts in Germany, Italy, Spain, Norway, Romania, Egypt and the United States. It also credits Uhlenhuth with showing that dried human blood stains six to twelve years old still reacted with human antiserum, and it names Uhlenhuth, Ziemke, Biondi and others as the continental workers who developed the legal side of the test. The paper adds that Nuttall was among the first, in 1901, to point out the test's possible value in forensic work.
Court-appointed psychiatric experts examined Tessnow, and Naumann and Leonhardt say that four of them agreed he had been mentally ill at the time of the crimes. Armbruster and Haack, who studied the clinical and court records, put the conclusion in more specific terms: the experts were unanimous that he acted in a state of lost responsibility rooted in epileptic twilight states, and the jury court overrode them in both verdicts. Armbruster and Haack describe the case as a late example of the nineteenth-century contest between lawyers and medical experts over who decides on responsibility, and as an instance of how public opinion, strengthened by the lay jury system, could settle a verdict before the trial.
The trial took place at the Schwurgericht, the jury court, in Greifswald under the presiding judge Karl Buddee (1836 to 1910). The prosecutor, Hübschmann, called on the jurors to convict so that the "beast in human form" would be removed from society, and the defense lawyer was Richard Frantz.
On July 4, 1902, the jurors found against Tessnow. Naumann and Leonhardt say the court sentenced him "twice to death and to two years in prison"; they do not say which counts the two death sentences and the two years answered. Armbruster and Haack say he was sentenced to death for four murders. Dierks says the conviction covered both the Göhren and the Lechtingen deaths. On one point all three agree: a jury court at Greifswald convicted Tessnow on July 4, 1902, of murder, with other charges, in connection with the Göhren case and sentenced him to death.
The execution was planned for October 1903. It did not go ahead. Naumann and Leonhardt write that Frantz reported a mental disturbance in his client in prison, and that this raised doubts about whether he was fit to be executed; Dierks puts the same event as an admission to the university clinic in Greifswald and says an epileptic seizure was suspected. In November 1903 the defense asked for a retrial and the Landgericht at Greifswald refused. In December 1903 the Oberlandesgericht at Stettin ordered one.
The retrial took place in December 1906 before the jury court, again at Greifswald. The experts again found that he had acted without criminal responsibility. At the retrial one of them complained of being attacked in a way he had not experienced in thirty years of practice. The twelve jurors, all medical laymen, nevertheless confirmed the 1902 verdict. Naumann and Leonhardt say they were moved by revulsion at the acts rather than by an assessment of the evidence. Armbruster and Haack list contemporary commentary on the case from 1907 and 1908 in German journals of criminal psychology and psychiatry, and Naumann and Leonhardt report that since 1907 many psychiatrists and jurists have called the verdict a miscarriage of justice.
Armbruster and Haack write that the death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in a penitentiary. Naumann and Leonhardt say a quiet pardon seems to have occurred about 1907, and Dierks also dates the commutation to 1907. After that, Tessnow was held among the mentally ill offenders in the secure unit, the "Festes Haus", of the Pomeranian provincial asylum at Stralsund, which opened in 1912 (Naumann and Leonhardt). Armbruster and Haack confirm that he was admitted to the Landesheilanstalt Stralsund.
At the end of 1939, Tessnow was killed in the Nazi killings of patients of psychiatric hospitals. Armbruster and Haack describe him as a victim of the "euthanasia" program and state that he did not die by execution in the Greifswald court prison, as had long been wrongly assumed. Naumann and Leonhardt give the date as the end of 1939 and attribute the order to Gauleiter Schwede-Coburg, in killings that came before the central T4 program in Berlin. Dierks, citing later research by Ingo Wirth and Jan Armbruster as reported by the historian Andreas Albers, writes that Tessnow was moved from Stralsund to an institution in West Prussia, recorded as "incurable", and killed near Gross Piasnitz. Kathleen Haack, in her 2025 book on psychiatry in Ueckermünde and Pomerania, records that 502 patients from the Ueckermünde hospital were killed at Piasnitz or elsewhere in November 1939 and February 1940, which shows the scale of the killings of Pomeranian patients at that place in those months. The exact day and place of Tessnow's own death were not reported.
The belief that Tessnow was executed lasted a long time. An article by the physician Magnus Hirschfeld in the weekly Die Umschau of November 17, 1928, recalls the case for readers: older court physicians still remembered Tessnow, who had been sentenced to death despite favorable opinions from many psychiatrists, and who, according to Hirschfeld, suffered a severe epileptic attack as he was taken to be executed. The detail of the attack matches the broad outline of the 1903 postponement, though the accounts of 1903 do not describe him being taken to execution, and Hirschfeld's version reads as a later recollection. The Embryo Project Encyclopedia entry also states that he was executed; the 2014 article and the later accounts based on it contradict this.
Naumann and Leonhardt add that in 1933 Uhlenhuth took part in the dismissal of Jewish and politically unwelcome colleagues at the University of Freiburg and that in 1944 he reportedly applied for immunization experiments on prisoners of war of color. A street in Freiburg named after him was renamed in 2014. The Neue Deutsche Biographie records that a street in Greifswald is named after him and that Greifswald gave him an honorary doctorate in 1955.
The legal scope of the 1902 verdict is the main open question. There are three accounts: four murders (Armbruster and Haack), two death sentences plus two years (Naumann and Leonhardt), and a conviction for both Göhren and Lechtingen (Dierks). The Lechtingen deaths are attributed to Tessnow by investigators; in 1898 he was released for lack of evidence.
The sheep. Sheep were killed on Rügen near Sagard and Göhren in June and July 1901, and Tessnow was identified by a witness as the man running away from the Göhren pasture. Uhlenhuth's finding of sheep's blood at nine places on his clothing agrees with that, but no separate trial for it is recorded, and the reason for the "two years' imprisonment" in Naumann and Leonhardt is not given.
Responsibility. Four court-appointed experts found Tessnow mentally ill; Armbruster and Haack specify epileptic twilight states. The jury court rejected this twice. The verdicts were not set aside, though the sentence was later commuted. The question of whether he should have been found not responsible, and so not convicted, was debated in German professional journals in 1907 and 1908 and is still discussed in the literature.
His death. Both a Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung account and the Naumann and Leonhardt article describe a killing with Nazi connections in 1939; they differ over whether it was part of "Aktion T4" proper or an earlier regional operation, and only Dierks reports a transfer to West Prussia first.
February 1872: Ludwig Tessnow is born at Stolzenhagen near Stettin.
September 9, 1898: two seven-year-old girls die at Lechtingen near Osnabrück; a journeyman carpenter is arrested, then released for lack of evidence. The killings are later attributed to Tessnow.
March 1901: Tessnow is arrested in connection with an incident involving a young woman near Pribbernow.
June 1901: sheep are killed near Sagard on Rügen, where Tessnow is working.
Mid-June 1901: Tessnow takes work and lodging at Baabe, Rügen.
July 1, 1901: two brothers, about five and seven, die near Göhren; Tessnow is arrested on the beach in the following days.
July 11 to 12, 1901: sheep are killed on a pasture near Göhren.
August 1901: Paul Uhlenhuth reports human blood at 22 places and sheep's blood at nine on Tessnow's clothes.
July 4, 1902: the jury court at Greifswald sentences Tessnow to death.
October 1903: the planned execution is postponed.
December 1903: the Oberlandesgericht at Stettin orders a retrial.
December 1906: the retrial at Greifswald upholds the 1902 verdict.
About 1907: the sentence is commuted; later accounts say life imprisonment in a penitentiary.
1912: the Stralsund provincial asylum, where Tessnow was later held, opens.
End of 1939: Tessnow is killed in the Nazi killings of asylum patients.
2014: Armbruster and Haack publish the finding that he was not executed at Greifswald.