The German word Serienmörder, serial murderer, was coined, the legal historian Martin Rath writes in Legal Tribune Online, by the Berlin detective Ernst Gennat, who supported the Düsseldorf police in 1929 in connection with the crimes of Peter Kürten. The cases run from the Weimar years to the verdicts of the 2000s and after, and they cross a border as well as a century: some were tried in Germany, some in Austria, and one town in the first group, Münsterberg in Silesia, is now the Polish town of Ziębice.
Three themes return. In the Weimar cases, newspapers, informers and psychiatrists were as much on trial as the defendants. In the postwar cases the question became what a court could do with a defendant who had been a child when he began, as Bartsch had, or whose responsibility was held to be diminished, as Honka’s was. In the last cases, those of the hospital and care-ward killers, the question was what the people in charge had known.
Carl Grossmann was arrested on August 21, 1921, in a crowded building near the Silesian Station in eastern Berlin. Two police officers entered after a neighbor reported screams. He was a peddler with a long record, and under questioning he confessed to killing three women, among them Marie Nitsche, 34. He once put his own total at "three, at most five." Berlin police had been trying since the end of the war to explain the deaths of women in the city, and investigators and newspapers soon tied many of those cases to him. His trial for three murders opened before a Berlin jury court on July 1, 1922. On July 5, before the jury could reach a verdict, he died by suicide in his cell at the Moabit remand prison. No court ever ruled on any of the killings, and he died accused, not convicted.
What is known comes chiefly from the investigation file in the Landesarchiv Berlin, which the historian Sace Elder studied for a chapter published in 2014, and from the Berlin journalist Lutz Göllner, whose account appeared in Der Tagesspiegel in 2021. The two do not always agree. Grossmann was born in 1863 in Neuruppin, in Brandenburg. Elder describes him as one of seven children of a merchant; Göllner as the eldest of five, with a father who drank and was violent. Both agree that he went to Berlin at 16. His first sentence, at 20, was three days in jail for begging, and many short sentences followed for begging, theft, vagrancy and offenses against decency. His record also included crimes against children; Elder lists a sentence of 15 years at hard labor in 1899. Accounts differ on the details of that case.
In 1919 he moved into a one-room flat on the fourth floor of a building close to the Silesian Station. Göllner describes the surrounding district as a rough neighborhood, and notes that the Vossische Zeitung called it "Little Chicago." He lived as a peddler, selling matches, needles and shoelaces, and he ran a sausage stand at the station. He lent money to neighbors and drank with them. Women who had stayed with him told police, after his arrest, that he had hurt or drugged them. None of them had gone to the police earlier, Elder writes, and the reasons included shame and fear. Women whom the authorities suspected of immoral conduct could be registered by the morals police and made to undergo compulsory medical examinations, and Berlin residents were required to register their addresses; many of these women were living in his room without registering. To many of them, Elder concludes, the police were persecutors rather than protectors, and investigators later treated their accounts as evidence of murder rather than as evidence of the violence done to the women themselves.
The neighbors had noticed a good deal. He returned late at night with women, and there was noise and a smell from his room. When one neighbor shouted at him to stop beating a woman whose screams could be heard in the corridor, he answered through the closed door that the neighbor should be quiet. When people asked about the smell, he blamed a chicken that had gone bad, and they accepted the explanation. A married couple on his floor admitted that they had drilled a hole in his door so they could watch him. Elder writes that the wanted notices the police put up in early August 1921 made them think "instinctively" of him.
The police history page of the Berlin police counts 23 women in Berlin from 1918 to 1921 whose deaths remained unexplained, and Göllner gives the same number. Elder dates the police investigations from 1919. One woman who was identified was Frieda Schubert, 33, who came from Dresden, and whose death in October 1920 was later attributed to Grossmann. By August 1921 the anxiety had grown: the Berliner Morgenpost reported that 3,425 people had been reported missing in Berlin in 1919 and 4,280 in 1921, and Elder shows that the BZ am Mittag and the Morgenpost dressed up their stories with invented detail. Police and press spoke of six, fifteen to twenty, up to 27 or 50 deaths. None of those figures was ever proved.
Fritz Haarmann was convicted in December 1924 of the murders of 24 boys and young men aged 10 to 22: one in 1918 and the rest between February 1923 and June 1924. Most were teenagers. Many had left their families, or were passing through the city’s main railway station, at a time when Hanover, a city of about 450,000, was full of young people with no fixed place to stay. Haarmann, then in his forties, was a convicted thief and sex offender who traded in secondhand clothing and meat. He was also a police informer. According to the state archive, he was a small-time crook whom the police had pressured into the work from 1918, and it was the reason earlier suspicions were not pursued and reports of missing young people were handled only after long delays. He carried an official police pass, which let him move freely through the station and its waiting rooms, and boys he approached there took him for a plainclothes detective.
Friedrich Heinrich Karl Haarmann was born in Hanover on October 25, 1879, the youngest of six children. After failing as an apprentice locksmith, Haarmann was sent in April 1895 to a military school in Alsace and within months was in the garrison hospital with what doctors called signs of mental disturbance. In July 1896, at 16, he faced his first criminal proceedings; the state archive’s summary says he was held from March to December 1897 in several provincial psychiatric institutions. The Ärzte Zeitung, reviewing the case in 2024, noted that he accepted the death penalty partly out of fear of being committed again.
Friedel Rothe, a 17-year-old schoolboy, is the first of the 24 victims for whom Haarmann was convicted; the state archive dates his death to September 1918. The other 23 are dated between February 1923 and June 1924.
The killings came to light only in 1924. Haarmann was arrested on June 22 at Hanover’s main railway station, at first on a complaint about a teenager, and held in the court prison from June 23. He confessed under heavy pressure and was tried with his former companion Hans Grans before the Schwurgericht at the Landgericht Hannover from December 4 to 19, 1924, over 14 hearing days. He was charged with 27 murders. The court convicted him of 24 and acquitted him of three, for lack of proof: those of Hermann Wolf, Adolf Hennies and Hermann Bock. He was sentenced to death 24 times on December 19, 1924, and accepted the verdict. He was executed at 6 a.m. on April 15, 1925, in the prison yard of the Landgericht Hannover.
How many people he killed was never settled. The state archive counts 21 confessions; the city of Hanover’s summary says he confessed to nine, called twelve more possible and denied six. Grans was tried with him for incitement and aiding. He was sentenced to death in 1924; after a retrial in 1926 he received twelve years' penitentiary for aiding two murders, was released in January 1946 and died in 1975. The historian Dagmar Lieske has written on the way the Nazi state later treated him as a "dangerous" offender.
The psychiatric evidence was part of the controversy. The forensic psychiatrist Christine Pozsár, who studied the 1924 interviews in the 1990s, recorded a humiliating relationship with his father and abuse by an older brother from about the age of six. None of this, she concluded, was taken into account by the psychiatrist who assessed him in 1924, and the Ärzte Zeitung called that assessment flawed in 2024. The other controversy was the press. Lessing, the philosopher who covered the trial and criticized the role of the police, was removed from the courtroom and later driven out of his teaching post at Hanover; Leipziger Internet Zeitung described him in 2023 as the first political murder victim of the Nazis abroad. A century after the trial, the city of Hanover marked the "100 years" of the case with a page of its own, and dpa reported in 2024 that interest in the case had not faded.
Karl Denke never stood trial. He died in a police cell in the Silesian town of Münsterberg on the evening of December 21, 1924, a few hours after his arrest, and the case against him was never put to a court. What is known comes from the local and national newspapers of the winter of 1924 and 1925, and from the Wrocław historian Lucyna Biały, who wrote the first scholarly account in 2001. Investigators attributed the deaths of at least 20 people to him, most of them homeless men passing through looking for work. Later estimates by historians and journalists run to 30 or 40, and none of the deaths was ever proved in court.
Denke was a man in his fifties who lived alone, went to church, helped at funerals and gave beggars a bed for the night. The town called him "Ojczulek Denke," Father Denke. Münsterberg, now Ziębice in southwestern Poland, was a small German market town in Lower Silesia, about 50 kilometers from Breslau, with a population of about 9,000, according to CNN Prima News in a 2024 account based on the Czech and German press of the time. Biały describes an orderly provincial town that was the seat of its district until 1932. Denke was born, Biały gives, on August 12, 1870; the City of Wrocław portal places his birth in a village near Münsterberg. He made his living as a peddler with a permit to sell door to door, and neighbors described him as calm, orderly, pedantic and devout.
The case came to light because one of the men he took in, a journeyman named Vincenz Olivier, reported to the police on December 21 that he had been assaulted in Denke’s rooms. The police did not believe him at first. According to Biały, a commissioner whom the newspapers do not name dismissed his account, and it was Olivier, a vagrant without papers or money, who was locked up, although he was given medical treatment for his wound. The seriousness of the wound counted for more than the reputation of the man accused of causing it. Police took Denke into custody and put him in a cell. CNN Prima says that at the time police had not finished looking through his flat. At about 9:30 that evening Denke died by suicide in his cell; Biały takes the time, and the name of the officer who raised the alarm, Sergeant Palke, from the local press, and CNN Prima, using the Czech papers, gives about 9 p.m. Denke had answered no questions on the record. He left no statement and no explanation. With his death the criminal case ended before it began.
The authorities did not move quickly. On December 22 Denke’s relatives asked the police for his body, and on December 24 officers went to his rooms, Biały writes, to secure his belongings, not to look for evidence. Olivier was questioned on December 22 and, on January 15, 1925, tried as a beggar and vagrant under Section 361 of the German criminal code and sentenced to 10 days in jail. The case was soon forgotten, Biały writes, and she reconstructed it from the surviving issues of the Münsterberger Zeitung, the Frankenstein-Münsterberger Zeitung, the Breslauer Gerichts-Zeitung and the Schlesische Zeitung. In 2014 researchers at the University of Wrocław told the City of Wrocław portal that they wanted to examine the building in which he lived.
In 1929 the city of Düsseldorf lived through a series of killings and assaults by someone no one could identify. A leading Berlin detective came to help, more than a hundred clairvoyants offered their services, and the police were accused of failing to find the killer. The man responsible was Peter Kürten, who lived with his wife in Düsseldorf and presented himself as a respectable working man. He was arrested in 1930 after a woman who had survived one of his assaults helped investigators trace him, and after he had confessed to his wife. 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 executed in Cologne on July 2, 1931.
The case left two lasting records. One is a study by the forensic physician Karl Berg, one of the experts who examined Kürten, which Britannica calls a classic of criminology. The other is the criminal file itself, held as 223 court files by the state archive of North Rhine-Westphalia, to which a lost investigating judge’s file was added in 2023. The dpa report on that discovery says the letters Kürten wrote in custody suggest he did not expect to be executed; shortly before he was moved back from the psychiatric examination at Bedburg-Hau to Düsseldorf’s 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.
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, describes him as the third of 13 children. Rath 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. His father drank and was violent. Kürten spent much of his early adult life in prison: Britannica says that by his last arrest he had been sentenced to prison nearly 30 times, and 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. After his release in 1921 he went to Altenburg in Thuringia, where he married. In 1925 the couple moved to Düsseldorf, where, Sauter writes, he took on the habits of a respectable man: he dressed neatly, shaved with care and kept a close watch over his wife.
The first killing for which he was convicted took place in Mülheim in 1913, during one of his brief periods outside prison. The victim was Christine Klein, a girl of nine. According to Rath, the crime would have stayed unsolved without Kürten’s detailed confession in 1930, and it was the first murder tried in 1931. 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 because under the criminal code of the German Reich criminal responsibility began at 12. The deaths themselves are unconfirmed. The Düsseldorf killings and assaults he was tried for took place between February and November 1929.
The investigation had a character that Rath ascribes to the Prussian police of the Weimar Republic: it followed liberal principles, and Berg later wrote an essay defending the police against the charge of failure. A. A. Friedländer, writing in the science weekly Die Umschau a month after the trial, reported that more than 100 clairvoyants had offered to find the killer and that all of them had failed. Kürten made a detailed confession; before trial he took it back at one point and then returned to it, according to the dpa report on the 2023 file. He was sent for psychiatric examination to the provincial asylum at Bedburg-Hau, and Rath writes that Berg and the other experts all judged him fully responsible for his acts, a finding that matched the test then set out in paragraph 51 of the criminal code. Friedländer said the experts had agreed with rare unanimity.
The trial opened on Monday, April 13, 1931, before the Schwurgericht at the Landgericht Düsseldorf and lasted until April 22. It was held in the Turmsaal, the tower hall of a former cavalry barracks in Derendorf, and Kürten was moved the night before to a small prison set up in the barracks. Britannica describes the trial as a national event that drew academic observers, and says Kürten was held in a specially built cage in the courtroom. Friedländer’s article makes clear that the public was excluded from at least part of the hearing. He was charged with nine murders and seven attempted murders, and estimated that Kürten had committed perhaps 70 or more serious offenses in all. His father gave evidence that his son’s childhood had not been as bleak as Kürten said. On April 22 the court sentenced him to death for each of the nine murders, to a combined term of 15 years' penal servitude for the attempted murders, and to loss of civil honor rights. The Prussian State Ministry rejected his clemency petition at noon on June 30, 1931. He was executed at about 6 a.m. on July 2.
Paul Ogorzow worked for the Deutsche Reichsbahn, Germany’s state railway, on the S-Bahn line that runs east from Rummelsburg in Berlin. Between October 1940 and July 1941 he killed eight women and seriously injured six more, according to a 2026 account by t-online that draws on the files of the Berlin police history archive. The historian Roger Moorhouse, who wrote that he rediscovered the case in the Berlin archives in 2008, records that Ogorzow admitted eight counts of murder and more than thirty counts of assault. He was a member of the Nazi Party, and the regime kept his crimes out of the press while police hunted for him. He was arrested in the summer of 1941, confessed, and was executed at Plötzensee prison the day after he was sentenced to death.
Ogorzow was born in 1912 in East Prussia, the illegitimate child of a farm laborer, according to a 2014 article by Marcel Piethe in the Berlin district magazine Maulbeerblatt. He was registered under the name Paul Saga and later adopted by an estate worker named Ogorzow. In 1934 the Reichsbahn hired him as a track construction worker; by then, Maulbeerblatt reports, he was already a member of the Nazi Party and had been in the SA since 1931. The blackout changed who was on the trains late at night. With men called up to the Wehrmacht, many of the women riding the S-Bahn alone after dark were shift workers keeping the war economy going while their husbands were at the front, t-online reports. Maclean’s notes that 28 people died on the S-Bahn in December 1940 alone, most of them in falls or struck by unlit trains, and says the blackout and the many night-time deaths helped him avoid detection.
The first woman to die was Gerda Ditter. Moorhouse, writing from the Kripo report he located in the archives, gives her name as Gerda Ditter, née Bath, born on July 21, 1920, in Berlin; Maulbeerblatt calls her Gertrud Ditter and gives her age as 20. She was killed on October 4, 1940. She had two small children, 18 months and three months old; her husband was serving with the Wehrmacht in Potsdam. The report was written the next day by a Kripo detective named Hinze. Moorhouse notes that this first killing did not follow the pattern of the later ones. Maulbeerblatt records further deaths on December 22, 1940, December 29, 1940, and January 5, 1941, and that of Johanna Voigt, 39, a married woman, on February 11, 1941. She had asked Ogorzow to walk her to Karlshorst station. The last of the eight, Frida Korziol, 35, was killed on the night of July 3, 1941. Five of the eight women have been named in the reporting; the other three have not.
The killings brought one of the largest operations the Berlin police had run. t-online quotes a protocol from the Berlin police history archive that lists the forces assigned: members of the homicide squad, railway surveillance officers, a special unit of one police commissioner and 20 men, 100 criminal investigators, and 10 officers of the women’s criminal police. Police tried decoys: male officers dressed in women’s clothing rode the trains as bait, t-online reports, and Maulbeerblatt describes women officers used the same way. Stations were patrolled, identity papers were checked, and detectives in railway uniforms worked on the line. Maulbeerblatt reports that more than 5,000 workers of the Reichsbahn and the Rummelsburg depot were screened; Maclean’s, from Selby’s book, puts the number of railway workers police went through at about 8,000. The local Nazi Party organization set up an escort service for women who had to travel alone at night. In the Voigt case, Maulbeerblatt notes, the man she had asked to walk her to the station was Ogorzow himself.
The regime did not want Berliners to know a killer was riding the trains. Maulbeerblatt reports that Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry ordered the press kept out of the investigation, and Maclean’s says the Nazi leadership allowed no media coverage and forbade investigators from appealing to the public for help, arguing that an open investigation would have exposed him far sooner. After a gap of several months the police spread a rumor that the hunt was being called off, and the killings began again. The decisive lead came from an undercover officer of the criminal police, t-online reports. Investigators went back over the night-shift lists of the railwaymen, and a cleaner gave a vague tip that a switchman had left his signal box during a shift. The switchman was Ogorzow. He denied the accusations at first and then confessed.
Ogorzow was tried in Berlin and sentenced to death; the court was not named, and the charges were not set out count by count. In his final statement, Maulbeerblatt reports, he blamed a Jewish doctor for lasting harm to his state of mind and stressed that he was a party member; the magazine treats both claims as an attempt to save himself by appealing to the regime’s own prejudices. He was executed at Strafgefängnis Plötzensee the day after he was sentenced. Maulbeerblatt gives the date as July 24, 1941; t-online gives no date. The two accounts of the manhunt differ, as noted, on the number of railwaymen screened.
Between 1962 and 1966 four boys died 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. 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.
Bartsch was convicted of murder, with other charges. 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 an 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 on November 6, 1946, in Essen, and was taken in by a master butcher and his wife, a childless couple who ran two butcher shops in the working-class district of Katernberg, according to the Stuttgarter Zeitung. The taz reported 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 he became Jürgen Bartsch. Much of what is known about his childhood comes from Bartsch himself, in the letters he later wrote from prison to the American journalist Paul Moor. As the taz summarized them, he described being shut in for years, forbidden to play with other children and regularly beaten. 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, and in his view the adoptive mother made the boy’s disorder worse. In 1958 Bartsch was sent to a Catholic boarding school run by the Salesians in Aulhausen, on the Rhine. Investigators met, in the words of the Stuttgarter Zeitung, a friendly young man who answered their questions willingly. Leygraf said that, unlike many offenders of his kind, Bartsch did not lack empathy and wanted to be free of his fantasies.
The first trial at Wuppertal in December 1967 was a public event. 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 said in 2004 that the only person placed ahead of him was Adolf Hitler. The court sentenced him to life imprisonment under adult criminal law, though, as the Stuttgarter Zeitung noted, he was still a minor for most of the killings. His defense lawyer was Rolf Bossi of Munich, who represented him in both trials and put the defendant’s harsh childhood at the center of his case. The verdict divided opinion. The CSU politician Richard Stücklen publicly called for the death penalty for the murder of children. Ulrike Meinhof, writing in the magazine Konkret, criticized the spectacle 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 families.
Bossi appealed. The Federal Court of Justice overturned the Wuppertal judgment, objecting, according to the taz, 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 retrial in Düsseldorf in April 1971 excluded the public and the press and did not become a spectacle. Leading German experts in sexual research and forensic psychiatry gave evidence, the taz reported. The court sentenced Bartsch to ten years of youth detention, to be followed by commitment to a closed psychiatric institution, and that judgment stood.
After the first trial the journalist Charles Paul Moor, a German-American writer, made contact with Bartsch, and for the next eight years, the Stuttgarter Zeitung wrote, Moor became a kind of father figure to him. 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, in 1972 and 1991. The two newspaper accounts differ on how Bartsch came to choose the operation that killed him: the taz wrote that he considered a brain operation, judged it too risky and chose castration instead, while the Stuttgarter Zeitung wrote that he agreed to a brain operation, apparently expecting it would lead to his release, but was considered unsuitable for it. The taz gave the cause of death as acute heart failure caused by an anesthesia error; the Stuttgarter Zeitung reported that the surgeon was later convicted of negligent homicide.
Fritz Honka was a night watchman who lived alone in an attic flat in Ottensen, a working-class district of Hamburg. The court tied four deaths between December 1970 and January 1975 to Honka, all of women he had met in the bars of St. Pauli, the city’s nightlife district near the harbor. Gertraud Bräuer, Anna Beuschel, Frieda Roblick and Ruth Schult were all middle-aged or older, poor and largely without fixed addresses. For years no one connected their deaths. The case came to light by chance. On July 17, 1975, fire broke out in his building and brought police to his address. Honka, who was out at the time, returned while police were there and said he knew nothing about it. He confessed on July 29.
The trial opened on November 12, 1976, before a jury court of the Hamburg Regional Court. On December 20, 1976, the court convicted him of murder in one case and manslaughter in three, held that his criminal responsibility had been diminished, and sentenced him to 15 years with committal to a psychiatric hospital. He was released from psychiatric care in 1993, lived for some years in a care facility on the Baltic coast under the name Peter Jensen, was readmitted to psychiatric care and died there in October 1998. Earlier, in 1972, he had been charged with the attempted rape of another woman, who survived; he was fined in 1975. For decades the case was remembered for its setting and its killer. The novelist Heinz Strunk, who studied the case for his 2016 novel, said in an interview with the taz that Honka had a brother but little is known about him, and the 2019 film adapted from the novel kept the story in public view.
Since 2025 a Hamburg historian, Frauke Steinhäuser, working from police files in the Hamburg State Archive and from the records of the Nazi camp system, has reconstructed the lives of the four women, and a memorial stone with their names now stands in Ohlsdorf Cemetery, according to Garten der Frauen, the association behind it. Gertraud Bräuer was born on October 30, 1928, and moved to Hamburg in 1948; she lived in several West German cities, often without a fixed address, and was convicted at least twice of theft, fraud and embezzlement. She was 42 when she was killed, in December 1970. Anna Beuschel, born Anna Hahn and known as Anni, was born on October 8, 1919, in Aschersleben. On August 1, 1942, at 23, she was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp after the Nazi authorities labeled her "asocial," and she was freed by American troops in April 1945. After the war she gave birth to twins; the father took the children to the United States, and they never traced her. She was killed in early October 1974. Frieda Roblick was born on April 25, 1917, in Sommerfeld in Lower Lusatia, today Lubsko in Poland. Hamburg police later wrote that she had been sent to a concentration camp in 1937; Steinhäuser located no evidence of that, and in her reading of the records Roblick was most likely one of 44 women sent from Ravensbrück to the Riga-Kaiserwald camp in October 1943. She survived the camps. In 1952 a Munich court recognized that her offenses arose from need, but the criminal police went on classing her as a "professional and habitual criminal," a label Steinhäuser describes as a continuation of Nazi categories. She was killed in December 1974. Ruth Schult, born on July 7, 1923, was killed in January 1975.
Joachim Kroll was a washroom attendant at a steelworks in Duisburg who, by his own confessions, killed girls and women across the Ruhr region for 21 years without being caught. WDR, the regional public broadcaster, describes him as one of the worst criminals in postwar German history and says he killed at least eight people between 1955 and 1976. He was arrested in July 1976 in the Laar district of Duisburg in the course of the inquiry into the death of a four-year-old girl, and he confessed to that killing and, over the following months, to many more crimes going back 21 years.
He was tried at the Duisburg Landgericht on an indictment of eight murders and one attempted murder. The trial opened on October 4, 1979, in Room 201, and the press called it a "trial of the century." Interest from the media was heavy, and seats in the courtroom were limited to selected outlets, WDR says. The trial lasted 155 days of hearings by WDR’s count. On April 8, 1982, the court sentenced him to nine life terms. He died of a heart attack in the prison at Rheinbach in July 1991, at 58. Other killings he confessed to were never tried; they are confessed, not convicted.
The case is best documented in the work of Stephan Harbort, a Düsseldorf detective chief inspector and author, whose 2004 article in the police journal Die Kriminalpolizei quotes the Duisburg court’s judgment, and in a review of Harbort’s book by the forensic biologist Mark Benecke, who called it the first and only book on the case written from the complete original files. Harbort used Kroll as an example of an offender whose personal "signature" emerged only after a series of killings. He quoted the court’s finding on the first killing, in February 1955: the court held that Kroll had not used the method that later characterized his crimes, and that because he had not killed before, he could not yet have known it would become central. Benecke added that the case shows how many innocent people can end up in court while an offender like Kroll stays free: a man identified only as K. M. confessed to one of Kroll’s crimes because, by his own account, he wanted a "time out from life" in prison. Which killing it was, and what sentence K. M. received, has not been reported. Benecke also noted that Harbort’s book quotes the psychiatric expert Eberhard Schorsch.
One of the detectives who questioned Kroll was Bernd Jägers, whom WDR interviewed for its 2022 program in the Lokalzeit MordOrte series, alongside the Duisburg lawyer André Miegel, who discussed the case’s effect on Duisburg and the Ruhr and the experience of defending a murderer, and the legal psychologist Natalie Oesterlein. Radio 91.2 told the story in two parts in its Mord im Pott series, beginning in January 2020.
Jack Unterweger was serving a life sentence for murder when he became one of Austria’s best-known writers. In prison he wrote poems, plays, radio stories and an autobiographical novel, Fegefeuer (Purgatory), which was made into a film. Writers and public figures campaigned for his release, and he was paroled on May 23, 1990, as a symbol of successful rehabilitation. He had been born Johann Unterweger on August 16, 1950, in Judenburg, in Styria. His only final murder conviction is for the killing of Margret Schäfer, 18, in Herborn, Hesse, in December 1974; he was arrested in Salzburg and on May 31, 1976, was sentenced to life imprisonment, the date given by the Austria Presse Agentur and by a 1992 parliamentary question in the National Council. He served the sentence at Stein, near Krems in Lower Austria.
At Stein he completed his schooling and began to write. He founded a small publishing house, Edition Wortbrücke, and edited a literary magazine of the same name. Fegefeuer was filmed in 1988 by the Graz writer and director Willi Hengstler and won the Vienna Film Prize in 1989. In a written answer to Parliament in April 1992, the Ministry of Education and Arts listed the public money he had received: a drama scholarship of 25,000 schillings in 1986, a book prize of 20,000 schillings in 1987, printing grants of 10,000 to 30,000 schillings a year for Wortbrücke between 1986 and 1991, and a working grant of 15,000 schillings in 1990. The writer Elfriede Jelinek, later a Nobel laureate, and the actress and singer Erika Pluhar were among those who campaigned for his early release, profil names. In February 1992 three members of the National Council put a formal question to the Minister of Education and Arts. They argued that his work had been subsidized beyond its merits for political reasons, and that his presentation of himself as a victim of society had been accepted without reflection. The ministry replied that there was "a significant difference" between presenting an offender as a showpiece and helping him back into society.
APA, citing the indictment, lists eleven killings charged against Unterweger, all between September 1990 and July 1991: one in Prague, one in Bregenz, two in the Graz area, four in the Vienna area and three in Los Angeles. He lived in Vienna and moved in literary and media circles. According to his own diary, profil reported, 152 women were in contact with him during his time out of prison. The Graz Regional Court issued an arrest warrant on February 13, 1992; he was arrested in Miami on February 27, 1992, and extradited to Austria at the end of May. His trial in Graz began on April 20, 1994. On the evening of June 28, the jury returned guilty verdicts for murder in nine of the eleven cases and he was sentenced to life imprisonment and committal to an institution for mentally abnormal offenders. The jury did not convict him in two cases where, profil reported, the cause of death could not be established. At 3:40 a.m. on June 29, 1994, he was dead in his cell at the Graz court prison. Because he died before the judgment could become legally final, the 1994 verdict never became a final conviction, and his record in law stays as it was after 1976.
Waltraud Wagner was a nurse’s aide on Pavilion V of the Lainz hospital in Vienna, a city-run hospital whose First Medical Department cared for elderly and often frail patients. In April 1989 she and three other aides from the same ward were arrested on suspicion of killing patients. At her trial two years later the prosecutor called her the main culprit. In March 1991 a jury in the Vienna Provincial Court convicted her of 15 counts of murder, 17 of attempted murder and two of bodily harm, and she was sentenced to life imprisonment. She was released on parole on August 7, 2008. The case shook Austria. Federal Chancellor Franz Vranitzky described the killings as the worst crimes in the country’s history, according to United Press International. How many patients died at the aides' hands was never settled. The four women first admitted involvement in 42 deaths, then retracted most of those statements; the court convicted them of far fewer.
Wagner was 32 when her trial opened in February 1991, UPI reported. Her three co-defendants were Irene Leidolf, 29; Stefanija Mayer, 51; and Maria Gruber, 28. All four were nurse’s aides, not trained nurses. Little has been reported about Wagner’s life before the case. Psychiatrists who examined her for the court testified that she did not have a psychopathic personality; UPI’s report of their testimony described her as barely of average intelligence and neurotic, but otherwise of normal character. The Vienna health councillor, Alois Stacher, said at the time that neither patients nor relatives had complained about the aides or about the care on the ward, according to the Austria Press Agency. The prosecutor, Ernst Kloyber, told the court when the trial opened that the ward’s death rate was three times the normal rate when Wagner was on duty, and that her nursing station had used six times as many ampoules of one medication as another station. He said she had begun killing in 1982; later Austrian reports give the period as 1983 to 1989. The aim, according to the APA’s later reconstruction, was to kill in ways that would stay hidden from the doctors for as long as possible.
Wagner did not deny everything. She told the court that she had killed ten patients who, she said, were about to die, and that she had acted out of compassion; the news magazine News reported in 2022 that she called her killings "Sterbehilfe," the German word for assisted dying. The testimony painted a more troubling picture. The son of one patient, a man who survived, told the court that Wagner had threatened his father after he wet the bed. Wagner, UPI reported, said she had acted because the man was a burden and she wanted him moved to another ward. Kloyber rejected the language of mercy. The step from killing terminally ill patients to killing burdensome ones, he told the court, led to "that which was known as euthanasia in the Third Reich," and "that’s a door that should never be pushed open again." At trial her three former colleagues called her a "witch" and the mastermind. Mayer testified that Wagner had made her watch, and that she had gone along because she feared losing her job. The City of Vienna pledged in the week before the verdict to renovate and modernize several geriatric wards in its hospitals, UPI reported, and testimony described the state-run hospital between 1983 and 1988 as understaffed and poorly supervised.
The case came to light when Pesendorfer called Stacher with what the councillor later described as a "more or less vague" suspicion, and the police were brought in. On Friday, April 7, 1989, at midday, Wagner and Leidolf made their first confessions at the Vienna police security office, APA reported. At her arrest Wagner went through a death book from the ward and marked 39 names as patients she had killed, UPI reported; she later retracted that confession. On April 11, 1989, the investigating judge, Klothilde Eckbrecht-Dürckheim, said she had felt sick while typing the arrest warrants, and the police president, Günther Bögl, described the motive as roughly a misguided idea of euthanasia. The trial opened at the end of February 1991 and lasted 17 days; Wagner was charged with 32 of the 40 killings in the case. Kloyber said the charges were "only the tip of the iceberg," and that how big the iceberg was "will never be known." Vienna’s mayor compared the killings to Nazi medical experiments, UPI reported. The jury returned its verdicts at the end of March 1991, and a three-judge panel set the sentences, the Deseret News reported. Leidolf received life, for five murders and two attempted murders. Mayer received 20 years for seven attempted murders and one count of manslaughter, and was acquitted on five other charges. Gruber received 15 years for two attempted murders. The Deseret News in 1991, and the Associated Press in 2008, described the four as convicted of killing at least 20 patients.
In July 2008 Austria’s Justice Ministry said that Wagner and Leidolf would be conditionally released by the end of August for good behavior, the Associated Press reported in a story carried by CBS News. AP noted that a life sentence in Austria typically meant about 15 years in prison, and set the news alongside the Josef Fritzl case and a public debate over whether Austria’s justice system was harsh enough.
Elfriede Blauensteiner was arrested in Vienna early on January 11, 1996. She was 64, a widow with long-running money troubles, and in the days that followed she told investigators that she had killed people one after another in order to inherit from them. About a month later she withdrew every confession. Two trials, in Krems in 1997 and in Vienna in 2001, convicted her of three murders: Alois Pichler, Franziska Köberl and Friedrich Döcker. She was sentenced to life imprisonment, and she died in November 2003 while still serving her sentence. According to the reporting, she sought out elderly people who were well off and needed looking after, often through newspaper personal ads, took them into her care, and killed them; the Oberösterreichische Nachrichten reported that the deaths came after the victims had signed over or left her their money and property.
She grew up in Favoriten, a working-class district of Vienna, with five brothers and sisters, in poor circumstances, profil wrote in 2016. In conversations recorded in 2001 with the court psychiatrist Sigrun Roßmanith, later turned into a book by the journalist Florian Klenk, she described violence from her mother and fear of her stepfather. Her second husband, Rudolf Blauensteiner, died on August 10, 1992; his death was not brought to trial, and profil reported that she said of him, without remorse, "Rudi deserved to die." Poverty followed her into adult life, and she looked for quick money at the gaming tables; in the recorded conversations she said that for weeks she drove to the casino in Baden every Saturday with her young daughter to play roulette. "I always lost," she said.
Franziska Köberl was her neighbor, and profil reported that she died in 1992 and that Blauensteiner wanted her savings books. Friedrich Döcker was her companion, the Oberösterreichische Nachrichten wrote; profil called him her husband. He died in 1995 in her care. Alois Pichler died in November 1995 in Rossatzbach, in Lower Austria, and his death began the case: a nephew who believed he had been cheated of his inheritance became suspicious and went to the authorities, according to both profil and the Oberösterreichische Nachrichten. At first she was suspected in three cases. In her statements she admitted five murders, one of them as an accomplice. Investigators described her as "calculating through and through," the paper wrote, and said she cooperated only when there was clear evidence against her. Before the investigating judge she took the confessions back; the Tiroler Tageszeitung put the withdrawal at about a month after her arrest.
The first trial, for the death of Alois Pichler, opened at the Krems regional court on February 10, 1997. Profil described the proceedings as at times absurd, because she confessed to murders and then withdrew the confessions again. One remark became the best known of the trial: "No man is a loss when he dies." In another appearance she held up a golden crucifix and, in the manner of Pontius Pilate, declared, "I wash my hands in innocence." The court in Krems convicted her of murder in 1997 and sentenced her to life imprisonment. A second trial in Vienna dealt with the deaths of Franziska Köberl and Friedrich Döcker; in 2001 the Vienna court convicted her of murder in both cases. On December 17, 2001, the Supreme Court, the Oberster Gerichtshof, upheld the guilty verdicts. Its president Johann Rzeszut spoke of a dimension of wrongdoing "that is really too great for an earthly court," the Oberösterreichische Nachrichten reported. Profil’s 2018 account of one court hearing records the judge asking why she had gone to the casino while Friedrich Döcker lay dying, and why she had already placed a new personal ad. She answered, smiling toward the courtroom, that she had gone out "for distraction."
She was remembered as a cheerful widow who presented herself in court as a talkative media figure. She also took several media outlets to court for calling her names such as "Weibsteufel," roughly "she-devil," and "schwarze Witwe," "black widow." The tabloids often called her "Killer-Omi," profil noted in 2018. A film about her, "Die Gottesanbeterin" ("The Praying Mantis"), released in 2001, starred Christiane Hörbiger. Blauensteiner spent six years in the women’s prison at Schwarzau and died on November 16, 2003, of the effects of a brain tumor. Only three deaths were proven in court, profil wrote in 2018; according to the Tiroler Tageszeitung, three further deaths that she was suspected of, and had first confessed to, never led to charges. Profil’s 2016 account named other people who died in her care, including Otto Reindl, whom it called her first victim in the late 1980s, and Erwin Niedermayer. None of these deaths was tried, and none is a conviction. In 2026 the Tiroler Tageszeitung reported on a new book, "Ausreden" ("Excuses"), that turns the transcripts of the psychiatric conversations into a monologue in her own voice.
Niels Högel worked as an intensive care nurse at two hospitals in Lower Saxony, in northwestern Germany, until 2005. He caused cardiac crises in patients and then joined the team that tried to revive them. He wanted the praise that came with a successful resuscitation, the court in Oldenburg held. In most cases the patients died. On June 6, 2019, the Landgericht Oldenburg convicted him of 85 murders at the Klinikum Oldenburg and the hospital in nearby Delmenhorst, committed between 2000 and 2005, and sentenced him to life in prison with a finding of particular gravity of guilt and a lifetime ban on working in nursing, elder care or rescue services. It acquitted him of 15 further counts for lack of evidence. He had already been convicted twice before. Investigators said in 2018 that the true toll might exceed 200, AFP reported, but more than 130 deaths on his shifts could no longer be examined.
The case also put the hospitals on trial. Staff in Oldenburg kept a tally of the nurses on duty at resuscitations and deaths in 2001, a list later described in court; Högel’s name had the most marks, 18, the taz reported in 2019. A handwritten note on the list said that endangering the department and the hospital was not acceptable, and that the suspicions were not enough to inform prosecutors. The list stayed inside the hospital. According to the prosecutors who later charged his superiors, the people responsible had recognized the danger he posed by the end of October 2001 at the latest, and several meetings discussed calling in law enforcement, but the decision was made not to inform the police. Högel was moved to the anesthesia department. In 2002, according to the 2019 indictment of his superiors, the managing director and the director of nursing arranged for him to be released from work for three months on full pay, and he was then given a choice between doing only patient transport and errands or leaving. He left with a good reference. The taz described him as having been "praised away" with it. With it he applied for a job at the hospital in nearby Delmenhorst and was hired.
In June 2005 a colleague caught Högel giving a patient a drug that had not been prescribed. Even then he was not stopped at once. The head of the later police special commission said that staff had detected in patients' blood a heart drug that no doctor had given, yet Högel went on working late shifts until his vacation began, according to the Ärzte Zeitung. His last known killing came on June 24, 2005, two days after he had been caught in the act with another patient. He was dismissed and arrested.
The first case against him concerned the patient he had been caught with. In December 2006 the Landgericht Oldenburg convicted him of attempted manslaughter with dangerous bodily harm; the Bundesgerichtshof overturned that verdict. At a retrial in the summer of 2008 the Oldenburg court convicted him of attempted murder and dangerous bodily harm and sentenced him to seven and a half years, with a lifetime ban on working in the profession. The court that sentenced him in 2015, to life for two murders and two attempted murders, said there had already been indications of further crimes in 2008. The second case came after years of pressure from families who accused the prosecutors of dragging their feet; new charges were filed in January 2014. In 2018, at a hearing on 100 counts, he confessed to 43; he said he could not remember 52 and denied five. The Bundesgerichtshof rejected his appeal on September 1, 2020, and the conviction became final.
The superiors were tried too. In September 2019 prosecutors charged five former Oldenburg superiors with manslaughter by omission, and the trial of seven former superiors opened on February 17, 2022. On October 13, 2022, after 29 hearing days, the court acquitted all seven, following the requests of both the prosecution and the defense. The judge said this was not an acquittal for lack of evidence: the court had positively concluded that there had been no intentional wrongdoing. The case shaped new rules in Lower Saxony. In October 2018 the state passed an amendment to its hospital law, in force from January 1, 2019: every hospital must run an error reporting system that accepts anonymous reports, hold regular conferences to review deaths and unusual courses of illness, form a drug commission, and by January 1, 2022, provide ward pharmacists to advise doctors and nurses on medication. Lower Saxony was the first German state to make ward pharmacists compulsory, dpa reported. On March 17, 2026, the sentence enforcement chamber of the Landgericht Oldenburg set his minimum term at 28 years, as the prosecutors had asked, and refused to suspend the sentence after 15 years. A court spokesperson said the 28 years did not mean automatic release. As of April 2026 he was in prison.
The twelve cases fall on both sides of a line the courts themselves drew. Haarmann, Kürten, Bartsch, Honka and Kroll were tried in open court, often in front of large audiences, and the verdicts were individual: counts, sentences, committal to psychiatric care. Grossmann and Denke died before the courts could rule. Unterweger’s last verdict was never final. In each of those three, a death in custody left a body of allegations that no court has tested.
The older cases are about institutions that missed what was in front of them. In Hanover a police informer carried an official pass and was not examined; in Berlin the women of the Silesian Station district feared the morals police more than the man in the next room; in Münsterberg a vagrant who reported an assault was locked up while the accused man was treated as a respectable resident; in 1941 the regime kept an S-Bahn killer out of the newspapers. The later cases are about institutions that knew and did not act: the Oldenburg managers who let a nurse leave with a reference, and the writers and officials who accepted a prison writer’s account of himself, a point three members of the National Council put to the Minister in 1992. Lower Saxony changed its hospital law after Högel, and the Lainz case drew a pledge from the City of Vienna to modernize its geriatric wards.
• 1913: the killing in Mülheim for which Kürten was later convicted.
• September 1918: the killing in Hanover that was the first of Haarmann’s convictions.
• August 21, 1921: Grossmann arrested in Berlin; July 5, 1922, dies by suicide during his trial.
• February 1923 to June 1924: the killings for which Haarmann was convicted in Hanover; arrested June 22, 1924.
• December 19, 1924: Haarmann sentenced to death 24 times; executed April 15, 1925.
• December 21, 1924: Denke arrested in Münsterberg; dies by suicide in a police cell that evening.
• February to November 1929: the Düsseldorf killings and assaults.
• April 22, 1931: Kürten sentenced to death; executed July 2, 1931.
• October 1940 to July 1941: the killings in eastern Berlin; Ogorzow arrested in the summer of 1941 and executed.
• 1962 to June 1966: the four deaths for which Bartsch was convicted; arrested June 21, 1966.
• December 1967: Bartsch sentenced at Wuppertal; April 1971, retrial at Düsseldorf; dies April 28, 1976.
• December 1970 to January 1975: the four deaths tied to Honka; arrested July 17, 1975; sentenced December 20, 1976.
• December 1974: the killing in Herborn; May 31, 1976, Unterweger sentenced to life; paroled May 23, 1990.
• July 1976: Kroll arrested; April 8, 1982, sentenced to nine life terms.
• April 1989: the Lainz arrests; March 1991, Wagner sentenced; paroled August 7, 2008.
• June 28, 1994: Graz jury finds Unterweger guilty in nine cases; June 29, he dies in custody.
• January 11, 1996: Blauensteiner arrested; December 17, 2001, her third conviction upheld.
• June 24, 2005: Högel’s last known killing.
• June 6, 2019: Högel convicted of 85 murders; October 13, 2022, seven former superiors acquitted.
• March 17, 2026: Högel’s minimum term set at 28 years.