In 1929 the city of Düsseldorf lived through nine months of attacks by someone no one could identify. Between February and November, eight people were killed: three small girls, a girl of fourteen, three women and a man. Others were stabbed or struck with a hammer and survived. The press across Germany and abroad followed the case, the newspapers turned on the police, and in November the killer sent a letter to a newspaper pointing to where the body of a five-year-old girl lay.
The man responsible was Peter Kürten, a molder by trade who lived quietly with his wife in an apartment on the Mettmanner Strasse. He was arrested on May 24, 1930, not through the police hunt but because a young woman he had attacked and released wrote about it in a letter, and because his wife, after he told her what he had done, went to the police. In April 1931 a Düsseldorf jury court convicted him of nine murders, including a killing in Mülheim in 1913, and of seven attempted murders, and sentenced him to death nine times. He was guillotined in Cologne on July 2, 1931.
The case left two lasting records. One is a detailed study by Karl Berg, the Düsseldorf court physician, who heard Kürten describe every attack. The other is the criminal file itself, held as 223 court files by the state archive of North Rhine-Westphalia, and to which a lost investigating judge's file was added in 2023.
Kürten was born on May 26, 1883, in Mülheim am Rhein, then a fast-growing industrial town across the river from Cologne and now part of the city. Britannica, in an entry by the historian Philip Jenkins of Baylor University, describes him as the third of 13 children. The legal historian Martin Rath, writing in Legal Tribune Online in 2014, notes that Mülheim's population rose from about 20,000 in 1880 to nearly 51,000 in 1905, and that the rapid growth produced crowded, slum-like housing. Rath gives his birth year as 1882; other accounts give 1883.
His father drank and was violent. Psychiatrists later described him, Rath writes, as a hard-working alcoholic. He was convicted of a sexual offense against one of Kürten's sisters, and Britannica says he served three years in prison for it. Kürten's parents divorced, which Rath notes was rare at the time. A report on the case file found in 2023, issued by the German Press Agency (dpa), says the father beat his wife and children. As a child, the same report says, Kürten watched a neighbor who caught animals for a living at his work.
The family moved to Düsseldorf in 1894, according to Karl Berg's chronology, and in 1897 Kürten was apprenticed as a molder in an iron foundry. In 1899 he was convicted for the first time, for theft.
When Kürten was tried in 1931, his father appeared as a witness. The physician A. A. Friedländer, writing in the science weekly Die Umschau a month after the trial, reported that the father disputed his son's account of a wretched childhood.
From 1900 onward, Kürten spent most of his life in custody. Berg's chronology, drawn from Kürten's own statements and checked against police and court records, records three long periods in prison: 1900 to 1904, 1905 to 1913, and 1913 to 1921. Rath writes that his earlier convictions included theft and desertion from the army. Britannica says that by his last arrest he had been sentenced to prison nearly 30 times. The historian Michael J. Sauter puts it this way: from 1903 to 1921 Kürten was, in effect, in the custody of the state, with short spells of freedom that ended in new arrests and new convictions. Because he was in prison, he missed the First World War.
Berg's list shows that his release periods were not idle. It records an attempt to strangle an 18-year-old girl in November 1899, before his first long term, and several fires he set in barns and hay lofts in 1904. Fire-setting runs through the whole list, which includes many more arsons between 1927 and 1929.
Kürten later spoke of revenge fantasies he had in prison. Friedländer reports that his defenders at trial pointed to these fantasies, which had grown during his sentences, as a cause of what he became. Friedländer himself was skeptical of the argument.
The first killing for which Kürten was convicted took place in Mülheim in 1913, during one of his brief periods outside prison. By his own account, given to Berg, he committed many thefts in the summer of 1913. He broke into a house used as an inn by a family named Klein and went up to the first floor, looking for things to steal. In a bedroom he found a girl asleep. Berg's account gives her age as about ten; Rath gives it as nine. She was Christine Klein, the innkeeper's daughter. Kürten strangled her and cut her throat.
Nobody connected him with the killing for 17 years. Rath writes that the crime would have stayed unsolved without Kürten's detailed confession in 1930. It was the first murder of which he was convicted in 1931. Soon after the killing Kürten was back in prison, and Berg's chronology shows him there from 1913 until 1921.
Kürten also claimed to have killed two boys in the Rhine in 1893, when he was a child. The Düsseldorf court left that claim out of its judgment, Rath writes, both for lack of evidence and for a legal reason: under the criminal code of the German Reich, criminal responsibility began at 12. Britannica reports the claim with the word "apparently", and the deaths themselves are unconfirmed.
After his release in 1921 Kürten went to Altenburg in Thuringia, where he married. Berg ties the gap in his crimes to the long prison term and the marriage that followed it. His wife was Auguste Scharf, and the local historian Winfried Steiling dates the marriage to 1923. Sauter writes that she too had a criminal record, a conviction for killing, from before they met.
Between 1921 and 1925 Kürten worked in construction and manufacturing. Sauter describes how he took on the habits of a respectable man in these years: he dressed neatly, shaved with care and kept a close watch over his wife. In 1925 the couple moved to Düsseldorf, a place he knew well, and lived at Mettmanner Strasse 71 until 1930. Auguste worked in restaurants and catering, Sauter writes, sometimes on late shifts as a cook.
Düsseldorf had grown fast. Sauter gives its population as about 175,000 in 1895 and more than 430,000 in 1925, and argues that the larger city gave Kürten the anonymity he needed. He approached women while presenting himself as a decent man with a good job, and Sauter notes that he carried a document that gave his age as ten years younger than he was and misstated his employment.
Kürten's record in Düsseldorf soon resumed. Berg quotes him as saying that in 1925 he began relationships with two servant girls; after complaints from them, he received two months in prison for attempted seduction and, in the second case, eight months. Berg's list also includes several strangling attempts on women between 1925 and 1928 and many fires. A 2023 history of the Düsseldorf-Derendorf prison by Antonia Ahrens for the Rhineland regional association (LVR) records that Kürten had been held there in 1928 for minor offenses.
The Düsseldorf series began on February 3, 1929. On a lonely road in the district of Flingern at dusk, Kürten stabbed a woman with a pair of scissors. She survived.
On February 9, the body of Rosa Ohliger, eight years old, was found near a hedge on the Kettwiger Strasse in Flingern. Berg, who reviewed the autopsy, put her death on the evening before, and Kürten himself dated the killing to February 8. Kürten told Berg that he returned to the place and set fire to her body, because he wanted, in his words as translated, "to increase the general indignation."
A few days later Rudolf Scheer, a man of about 45, was killed on the Hellweg in Flingern after leaving a beer hall. Berg dates the attack to about February 13 and Kürten gave February 12; Scheer was found the next morning. Kürten went back to the scene the following day and talked with a detective there, who grew suspicious. Kürten explained that he had heard about the killing by telephone. The detective confirmed the conversation when he gave evidence.
In early April 1929 two women were attacked on the north side of Düsseldorf, one of them a 16-year-old girl, on April 2 and 3. A 20-year-old man with a severe intellectual disability, the son of a family living in a common lodging house, was arrested for those attacks. This man, S., was later cleared of the killings. Under questioning he confessed not only to the April attacks but also to the February attack on the woman with scissors and to the killings of Rosa Ohliger and Rudolf Scheer, describing them, Berg writes, in surprising detail.
He had not committed the February crimes. His prosecution was stopped under paragraph 51 of the criminal code, which covered offenders not responsible because of mental illness or disability, and he was committed to an asylum. For the police, the February cases appeared to be closed. They reopened in August, when the attacks began again.
Berg's list, taken down from Kürten's dictation, shows that he was attacking women again by July. In July 1929 he met a woman several times while posing as a locksmith under a false name; when his wife confronted the two of them on an outing, he struck his wife with a rose and walked away. On July 21, after a festival, he tried to strangle a young woman near the Rhine. She escaped and did not report it; police later had to find her. These women survived.
Maria Hahn worked as a domestic servant. Steiling writes that Kürten met her on August 8, 1929, at the Hansaplatz in Düsseldorf, and Berg records that she disappeared on August 11, after a day off. Steiling, who has studied the case as a local historian of Erkrath, describes how Kürten took her on a walk in the Neandertal and a train trip, then to a meadow near the Gut Papendelle estate in the Rotthäuser Bachtal, on the edge of Erkrath, where he strangled and stabbed her. He buried her body nearby. Berg records that Kürten took her watch and later gave it to a woman in his building. Kürten's wife confirmed to investigators that he came home at dawn that night with dirty shoes and stained clothes, and police found the shovel where he said he had hidden it. After this killing, Berg notes, Kürten changed weapons, from scissors to a dagger.
On the night of August 21, 1929, three people were stabbed in the district of Lierenfeld, among them a woman stabbed in the back and a man. All three survived.
On Saturday evening, August 24, 1929, two girls went to the fair in Flehe, a district on the Rhine in the south of Düsseldorf. Gertrud Hamacher was five. Louise Lenzen was fourteen; Berg describes her as Gertrud's adopted sister. Kürten met them as they were leaving and killed them both with a dagger. They were found the next morning near Flehe.
The next day, Sunday, August 25, Kürten returned to Flehe to see how people were reacting. That same Sunday he stabbed a young woman he had met, on the meadows by the Rhine toward Neuss. She survived, and she would later be one of the witnesses who identified him.
In September Kürten began using a hammer. Ida Reuter, a servant from Barmen, went on an excursion to Düsseldorf on Sunday, September 29, 1929. She was found dead by the Rhine on September 30.
Elisabeth Dörrier, a young servant who was out of work, was found unconscious in Flingern on October 12 and died the next day, October 13. Berg's main text spells her surname Dörrier; his table gives Dorner.
On the evening of October 25, 1929, two more women were struck with a hammer, one on the Hellweg in Flingern and one in the Hofgarten, the large park in the city center. Both survived.
Gertrud Albermann was five. She was last seen at about 7 p.m. on November 7, 1929, in Flingern. Her body was found on November 9, beside a footpath by the garden wall of a house belonging to the Haniel family, a detail that the journalist Carl von Ossietzky would later cite in his criticism of the case.
On the evening of November 8, before the body was found, someone posted a letter to a Communist newspaper in Düsseldorf. Steiling names the paper as Die Freiheit. The letter said where the child's body lay and also mentioned a second body buried at the edge of a wood near the city. It arrived too late to lead searchers to Gertrud Albermann, who had been found by then. The second reference led on. On November 15, 1929, digging at the edge of a wood brought to light the body of Maria Hahn, who had lain buried for three months.
Kürten had written to the authorities before. Berg records that on October 14, 1929, the police received a letter describing the burial of a body at the edge of the woods, with a plan marking the place. Steiling gives a slightly different sequence: an anonymous sketch of the burial site sent to a Düsseldorf publisher in late September, a second sketch, too vague to use, sent to the police on October 13, and the more precise sketch of November 8 that brought police to the grave, with help from a farmer who had found a woman's glove.
Gertrud Albermann was the last person Kürten killed.
Berg, who carried out or reviewed the autopsies, described the effect of the crimes as a wave of horror and indignation that spread through Düsseldorf, Germany and beyond, until public alarm, in his words, "reached the point of stupefaction." The press attacked the police for failing to find the killer. Berg thought the criticism unjust. An enormous police apparatus had been set in motion, he wrote, and it had very few clues to work with: the victims were men, women and children, attacked with different weapons, and some of the earlier cases had been closed by a false confession.
Help came from Berlin. Rath writes that the Berlin detective Ernst Gennat supported the Düsseldorf police, and that Gennat coined the German word "Serienmörder", serial murderer, in connection with Kürten's crimes. Rath also notes that the investigation followed the liberal principles of the Prussian police under the Weimar Republic, and that Berg later wrote an essay defending the police against the charge of failure.
Others offered help of a different kind. Friedländer reported in 1931 that more than 100 clairvoyants had offered to find the killer, and that all of them had failed.
The case gave Kürten a name in the press. Newspapers called the unknown killer the Vampire of Düsseldorf. Steiling writes that Kürten later admitted drinking Maria Hahn's blood, and that he also killed a swan in the Hofgarten and drank its blood.
The attacks did not stop after November, though no one else died. Berg's list includes a hammer attack on a woman in April 1930 and further attempts in May, among them an attempted murder of a woman in May 1930.
On May 14, 1930, Kürten met a young woman who had come to Düsseldorf looking for work. He took her first to his room on the Mettmanner Strasse and then out toward the Grafenberg woods on the edge of the city, where he choked her and sexually assaulted her. Then he let her go.
On May 17, 1930, the young woman wrote to an acquaintance in Düsseldorf, a woman she had met recently, and in the letter she hinted that she had fallen into the hands of a murderer. Berg records that the letter came into the hands of a woman who suspected a link with the Düsseldorf killings and took it to the criminal police. Berg gives the name of the woman the letter was addressed to and the name of the woman who handed it in differently, which fits the account usually given, that the letter reached the wrong person.
The police questioned the writer, and she set out to find the building she had been taken to. She had already asked at several houses on the Mettmanner Strasse for a man of his description. At No. 71 residents told her that a crying girl had once come asking for a man like that. On May 21 she saw and recognized Kürten there.
Kürten saw her too. He told his wife that he had to leave the apartment and on May 22 took a room on the Adlerstrasse. The dpa report on the 2023 file find likewise says that a surviving woman led investigators to his home.
On May 23, 1930, Kürten confessed to his wife. According to Berg, he told her he was the Düsseldorf murderer. "I did it. I did everything," he said, in the English translation of Berg's account. When she asked why, he answered that he did not know himself, that it had just come over him. A Wilhelmshaven newspaper noted in April 1931 that Auguste Kürten had learned of her husband's crimes only a few days before his arrest.
Kürten hinted to her that there was a large reward for the killer's capture and that she could claim it by turning him in. Her own account, as Berg reports it, says nothing about a reward and describes only the shock of what she had heard. She agreed to go to the police.
On May 24 she met him as arranged, first at the Hofgarten, then for a meal and a walk across the Rhine bridge, and finally near the Rochus church. She had told the police where he would be, and the square was quietly surrounded. By Kürten's own account he was arrested at about 3 p.m. He was calm, Berg writes, and he even calmed a detective who came toward him with a drawn revolver. Ahrens and Steiling place the arrest on the Rochusmarkt.
Kürten described his crimes at length. Berg writes that he dictated them in order, without being asked about each one, and with precise detail; when Berg compared his own shorthand notes with the police and court records, they matched closely on the main facts. The list ran to 79 offenses, starting in 1899. Berg also found that Kürten distorted or concealed some facts during police questioning, especially about his motives, and that he seemed to enjoy the horrified faces of the officers who listened to him. Steiling dates his full confession to the police to August 1930. Before trial he took back his confession at one point, and then returned to it, according to the dpa report on the 2023 file.
Not everything he confessed could be confirmed. He told investigators that in 1929 he had strangled a woman he called Anni and thrown her into the Rhine. Berg records that police doubted the account, because no body surfaced and no missing person report matched. Several other attacks he described could not be traced.
Kürten was sent for psychiatric examination to the provincial asylum at Bedburg-Hau, on the Lower Rhine, according to Ahrens and Steiling. Steiling summarizes the result: no psychosis, sadistic tendencies, and full criminal responsibility. Rath writes that Berg and the other experts all reached the same view on responsibility, and that their finding matched the test then set out in paragraph 51 of the criminal code. Friedländer, writing after the trial, said the experts had agreed on this with a rare unanimity.
While he was held, Kürten wrote letters, some of which survive in the file kept by the investigating judge, Carl Hertel. According to the dpa report, they suggest that he did not expect to be executed. Shortly before he was to be moved back from Bedburg to Düsseldorf's Ulmer Höh' prison, he asked for a freshly painted cell on the sunny side. In some letters he showed remorse, writing that the views he had held when he committed the crimes had probably been mistaken.
The trial opened on Monday, April 13, 1931, before the Schwurgericht, the jury court, at the Landgericht Düsseldorf, and lasted until April 22, according to Ahrens. It was held in the Turmsaal, the tower hall of a former cavalry barracks in Derendorf. On the night before it opened, Kürten was moved to a small prison set up in the barracks, in a cell that had been a laundry room, with a barred window. A radio-service report printed that day said the court expected the trial to last about 14 days.
The trial drew national attention. Britannica describes it as a national event that drew academic observers, and says Kürten was held in a specially built cage in the courtroom to prevent escape. Friedländer's article makes clear that the public was excluded from at least part of the hearing; he remarked that the exclusion had not prevented young readers from learning about sexual perversion from encyclopedias.
Kürten was charged with nine murders and seven attempted murders. The killings in Berg's case list are those of Christine Klein, Rosa Ohliger, Rudolf Scheer, Maria Hahn, Gertrud Hamacher, Louise Lenzen, Ida Reuter, Elisabeth Dörrier and Gertrud Albermann; LTO reports that the Klein killing was the first murder tried in 1931. The reports do not list the nine counts of the judgment by name. Friedländer estimated that Kürten had committed perhaps 70 or more serious offenses in all.
The court heard from psychiatric experts. Friedländer names two of them, Professor Sioli and Professor Hübner, and defended them against critics who complained that no psychoanalyst had been called. Kürten's father gave evidence that his son's childhood had not been as bleak as Kürten said.
Kürten spoke in court. He called his acts abhorrent. According to Friedländer, he also pointed to two doctors then in the news, Dr. Wolf and Dr. Kienle, who he said were still celebrated by some although, as he put it, they had stained their hands with blood nearly 500 times. He blamed young women for what he called an excessive desire for men, and he asked for leniency. His lawyer, named by Ossietzky as Wehner, asked the court not to abandon the defendant to human contempt and to see his acts as an inescapable fate. Friedländer, who had not attended the trial and relied on press reports, did not accept that argument.
On April 22, 1931, the Schwurgericht convicted Kürten of murder in nine cases. For each murder it imposed a death sentence. For the attempted murders it imposed a combined term of 15 years' penal servitude, and it stripped him of his civil honor rights. Rath, who reports the judgment, adds that the court ordered the confiscation of two pairs of scissors, a hammer and the broken tip of a dagger.
The experts' finding of full responsibility stood. The court did not accept that Kürten's acts were beyond his control.
The verdict was not universally welcomed. Carl von Ossietzky, editor of the weekly Die Weltbühne and an opponent of the death penalty, wrote on May 5, 1931 that the trial had left too many questions open to justify an execution. He pointed out that the case rested largely on Kürten's own confession, and that Kürten had confessed to three killings that, Ossietzky wrote, were shown to have happened while he was in prison. He complained that Kürten's wife, the first person to hear his confession, had never been questioned in court. He suggested that Kürten had been coached into playing a penitent with hints that mercy might follow, and he called the proceedings a smooth piece of judicial theater. He quoted the journalist Rudolf Olden: "Kein klarer Fall!", not a clear case.
A month later, in an essay against the death penalty, Ossietzky returned to Kürten. He argued that the police had caught Kürten only because he confessed to his wife, that the whole prosecution rested on that confession, and that an execution would serve mainly to bury the failures of the police and the courts. He also mocked the psychiatrists' finding that Kürten was normal.
Friedländer, writing in Die Umschau, took a narrower position. He regarded Kürten's guilt as clearly established and the experts' view as sound, but argued that the death penalty should be abolished at least in cases that were not fully resolved.
A petition for clemency followed. In Prussia that decision lay with the state government. According to a report printed on the day of the execution in the Volksblatt of Wilhelmshaven-Rüstringen, the Prussian State Ministry rejected the petition at noon on June 30, 1931, on the proposal of the Prussian Ministry of Justice, and ordered that the sentence be carried out at once, a step the paper described as taken for humane reasons. The paper denied reports of a dispute in the cabinet over the case, explaining that the files had reached the Justice Ministry only eight days earlier. Rath quotes a statement from the Düsseldorf prison administration on the petition, which he calls a remarkably petty piece of bureaucracy.
Kürten was not executed in Düsseldorf. The code of criminal procedure required executions to take place in an enclosed space, Rath explains, and the guillotine had to stand in the open air, but the yards of the Düsseldorf prison could be seen from outside. The execution was moved to the Klingelpütz prison in Cologne.
On the afternoon of July 1, 1931, Kürten was taken from Düsseldorf-Derendorf to Cologne. At about 5 p.m. the senior prosecutor, Dr. Eich, told him that clemency had been refused. Kürten asked for his confessor, Father Albrecht, who stayed with him through the night with two other priests. During the night Kürten wrote letters to the families of his victims, expressing deep remorse and asking their forgiveness. Toward morning he made his confession and received communion.
At 6 a.m. on July 2, 1931, he was led into the prison yard with his hands loosely tied. The executioner, who came from Magdeburg, carried out the sentence with the guillotine. Kürten made no last request and went to his death calmly, the Volksblatt reported. The president of the prison administration, Dr. Eich and an official from the ministry in Berlin were present, together with twelve citizens of Cologne. Rath found that the Düsseldorf prosecutor's office had asked the city of Cologne to send twelve respected citizens, and asked them to come in tailcoats and top hats; whether the mayor, Konrad Adenauer, complied is not recorded. Only a few onlookers gathered outside, and one policeman was enough to keep the street clear.
Steiling gives the time of execution as 5 a.m.; the contemporary newspaper gives 6 a.m. Steiling also writes that Kürten's organs were examined after his death and that the examination found nothing conclusive.
Auguste Kürten suffered a nervous breakdown after her husband's crimes came to light, according to the dpa report on the 2023 file. A divorce was begun but not completed before the execution, so she was left his widow. When she was recognized under another surname, the investigating judge helped her change her name again. When Kürten wrote to her from prison, she replied coldly and asked the judge to tell him to stop; it was too late, she wrote, for regret.
Kürten's head did not stay in Germany. Rath reported in 2014 that his skull, preserved, was owned by Ripley Entertainment, which had acquired it in 1989 from a collector in Hawaii and had shown it since 1990 at its museum in Wisconsin Dells, in the United States. Edward Meyer, Ripley's vice president for exhibits and archives, confirmed this to Legal Tribune Online and said the company did not know how it had reached the United States. Steiling wrote in 2021 that the skull went to the United States after the Second World War and was still on display in Wisconsin Dells.
Karl Berg (1868 to 1936), professor of forensic medicine and the Düsseldorf medico-legal officer, published his account of the case about five months after the execution under the title Der Sadist, with the subtitle (in translation) "forensic-medical and criminal-psychological notes on the acts of the Düsseldorf murderer." Rath describes it as a work of about 100 pages. An English translation by Olga Illner and George Godwin, The Sadist, was published in London in 1938.
Berg's book sets out the forensic evidence case by case and then Kürten's own account of each attack. Britannica calls it a classic of criminology and notes Berg's view of Kürten as a sexual psychopath whose crimes were "Lustmord", killing for sexual pleasure. Rath values the book as a view into the forensic medicine of its time but criticizes parts of it, especially Berg's approving remarks about the strict upbringing given by Kürten's father, given what the family had been through. Reading Berg, Rath suggests, should encourage some caution about the expert opinions of any period.
In April 2023 the head of the Düsseldorf city archive, Benedikt Mauer, announced that a previously unknown file on the case had turned up. It had been kept by the investigating judge, Carl Hertel, who later sat on the Federal Court of Justice. Hertel had passed it to Max Güde, who became Federal Prosecutor General, and after Güde's death his son found it among his father's papers and sent it to the city archive. The file contains original letters by Kürten and records of his interrogations. Mauer handed it to the state archive of North Rhine-Westphalia (Landesarchiv NRW), whose Rhineland department already held 223 court files on the case. Martina Wiech of the Landesarchiv called the find a stroke of luck. The dpa report described the Kürten series as the most spectacular criminal case of the Weimar Republic.
Fritz Lang's film M, released in 1931, the year of the trial, follows a city's hunt for a child killer. Britannica says the film was based on the Kürten case, with Peter Lorre in a role modeled on him. Sauter, by contrast, describes Lang's killer as a composite drawn from several criminals rather than a portrait of Kürten. The critic Georg Seeßlen noted in 2016 that Kürten was executed shortly after M's premiere.
In 2016 the director Gordian Maugg released Fritz Lang, a film that imagines Lang visiting Kürten in prison while preparing M, with Heino Ferch as Lang and Samuel Finzi as Kürten. Seeßlen, reviewing it in der Freitag, described it as speculative fantasy that mixes staged scenes with archive footage. No evidence has been reported that such meetings took place.
Sauter has argued against treating Kürten as a typical "Weimar killer". Kürten was formed under the German Empire, Sauter writes, and spent most of the years from 1903 to 1921 in its prisons; the police of the Weimar Republic merely caught up with him. In his view the respectable manner Kürten learned after 1921 sat on top of habits formed long before.
Proven by final judgment: the murders of Christine Klein (1913) and of Rosa Ohliger, Rudolf Scheer, Maria Hahn, Gertrud Hamacher, Louise Lenzen, Ida Reuter, Elisabeth Dörrier and Gertrud Albermann (1929), and seven attempted murders, all by the judgment of the Düsseldorf Schwurgericht on April 22, 1931.
Confessed but not proven: the killing of a woman he called Anni in 1929, which police doubted; several attacks that could not be traced; and, according to Ossietzky in 1931, three killings that had happened while he was in prison. Kürten's list of 79 offenses rests largely on his own word, and Berg himself found that he concealed or shaded some facts.
Claimed, not proven: that he drowned two boys in the Rhine as a child. The court excluded the claim, and no record confirming the deaths has come to light.
Details that vary between sources: his birth year (1883 in Britannica and Berg; 1882 in Rath); Christine Klein's age (about ten in Berg; nine in Rath); the size of his family (third of 13 children in Britannica; at least ten siblings in the dpa report; ten in Rath); the date Maria Hahn met Kürten (August 8, Steiling) and the date she disappeared (August 11, Berg); which letters and sketches led to her grave (Berg and Steiling describe the sequence differently); the time of the execution (6 a.m. in the contemporary Volksblatt; 5 a.m. in Steiling, who also gives July 12 in one place); and the date of the death sentence (April 22, 1931 in the court-based accounts; an Austrian broadcaster's 2023 report says July 1931, which confuses the sentence with the execution).
Some popular statements about the case are not supported by reliable reporting, including the size of the reward, the number of tips the police received, and the words Kürten is often said to have spoken about hearing his own blood at the moment of execution.
May 26, 1883: Peter Kürten is born in Mülheim am Rhein.
1894: the family moves to Düsseldorf.
1897: apprenticed as a molder.
1899: first conviction, for theft.
1900 to 1904, 1905 to 1913: in prison.
Summer 1913: kills Christine Klein in an inn in Mülheim.
1913 to 1921: in prison.
1921: released; moves to Altenburg, Thuringia.
1923: marries Auguste Scharf.
1925: moves to Düsseldorf, Mettmanner Strasse 71; short prison terms follow complaints by two women.
1928: held at Düsseldorf-Derendorf for minor offenses.
February 3, 1929: stabs a woman in Flingern; she survives.
February 8 or 9, 1929: kills Rosa Ohliger, 8.
About February 12 or 13, 1929: kills Rudolf Scheer.
April 2 and 3, 1929: two women attacked by another man, who falsely confesses to the February crimes and is committed to an asylum.
August 11, 1929: Maria Hahn disappears.
August 21, 1929: three people stabbed in Lierenfeld; all survive.
August 24, 1929: kills Gertrud Hamacher, 5, and Louise Lenzen, 14, at Flehe.
August 25, 1929: stabs a young woman near the Neuss meadows; she survives.
September 29, 1929: kills Ida Reuter.
October 12, 1929: attacks Elisabeth Dörrier, who dies on October 13.
October 14, 1929: police receive a letter with a plan of a burial place.
October 25, 1929: two women struck with a hammer; both survive.
November 7, 1929: kills Gertrud Albermann, 5; her body is found on November 9.
November 8, 1929: letter posted to a Communist newspaper naming where her body lay and pointing to a second grave.
November 15, 1929: Maria Hahn's body is found.
April and May 1930: further attacks; no deaths.
May 14, 1930: attacks a young woman and lets her go.
May 17, 1930: she writes the letter that reaches the criminal police.
May 21, 1930: she recognizes him at Mettmanner Strasse 71.
May 23, 1930: he confesses to his wife.
May 24, 1930: arrested near the Rochus church, Düsseldorf, about 3 p.m.
1930: psychiatric examination at Bedburg-Hau; found fully responsible.
April 13, 1931: trial opens before the Düsseldorf Schwurgericht.
April 22, 1931: convicted of nine murders and seven attempted murders; nine death sentences.
May 5, 1931: Ossietzky's critique appears in Die Weltbühne.
June 30, 1931: the Prussian State Ministry rejects clemency.
July 1, 1931: moved to Klingelpütz prison, Cologne.
July 2, 1931, about 6 a.m.: executed by guillotine.
1931: Fritz Lang's M is released; Berg's study Der Sadist follows months after the execution.
1938: English translation of Berg's study published in London.
1989 to 1990: his preserved head is acquired by Ripley Entertainment and put on display in Wisconsin Dells.
April 2023: investigating judge Carl Hertel's file on the case is found and passed to the Landesarchiv NRW.