THE BLOOD LUST OF FRITZ HAARMANN

Article BY Kimberly Graham - Art by Chuck Hodi

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“You won’t kill me; I’ll be back-yes, I shall be amongst you for all eternity.”
-Fritz Haarmann

Deep within the bowels of mankind lurk the criminally insane; those men and women whose atrocities are beyond the stretch of the human imagination. These corroded abominations of humanity committed murders whose morbidity and ghastly natures have forever been seared into the flesh of history by the fires of Hell. Among these devilish beings is a man by the name of Fritz Haarmann. Fritz raped and heinously murdered twenty-seven young boys and men in Hanover, Germany between the years of 1918 and 1924. The method by which Fritz murdered and disposed of his victims garnered him nicknames such as “The Butcher of Hanover,” “The Werewolf of Hanover” and, most fitting, “The Vampire of Hanover.”

On October 25, 1879 Friedrich Heinrich Karl Haarmann was born. He was the youngest of six children in the Haarmann family, which consisted of two girls and four boys. Fritz, as he came to be known, was doted on and spoiled by his mother whom he cherished until his dying day. His mother had wanted another little girl, however, and would dress him up in dresses and other feminine attire and encourage him to play with dolls and other girly toys. Mrs. Haarmann remained weak and sickly after the birth of Fritz and died twelve years later, but her influence would remain with him always.

His father was the complete opposite of his mother leading Fritz to loathe him and remain at odds with him throughout his life. Mr. Haarmann was a drunk and frequently cheated on his wife. His treatment of young Fritz was less than savory causing many problems for Fritz that he was never able to overcome.

As a young boy Fritz began to show symptoms of mental problems that would inevitably lead to his killing spree later in life. He was a borderline transvestite; he enjoyed acting like a girl and even enjoyed being dressed as one by his mother. He also enjoyed terrorizing his siblings, especially his sisters. A well-loved past time of his was to tie up his sisters and then tell them haunting and horrifying tales about monsters and ghosts late at night. Their fear pleased him immensely.

By the year 1895 Fritz had begun studying to become a locksmith, but became discouraged when he failed his exams. He decided to try another profession and was sent to Neu-Breisach in April of that year. This was a training school for non-commissioned officers and it was here that the nearly fifteen year-old really began to blossom. He did as he was told by his superiors and even discovered he had a talent for gymnastics. This was not to last though, Fritz had an accident while performing and sustained a severe concussion. The gravity of this injury would leave him partially crippled for the remainder of his life with bouts of epilepsy and periodic lapses in consciousness. In November he decided to leave the school for good.

From 1895 to 1897 Fritz lived at home and worked for his father. During this time his apparent femininity turned into homosexuality and his lust for young boys became a major problem. After a few young boys in the neighborhood accused him of making sexual advances towards them and molesting them his father took him to the local physician. The physician studied Fritz for a time before diagnosing him as being deranged. He was then committed to an asylum, he had just turned eighteen.

His stay at the madhouse was short, but an event occurred while he was there that left him terrified of such places. Daily he begged to be released, making promises that he would change and claiming that he was cured. His begging and pleading did no good and it seemed that he would never be released. Rather than wait to see, Fritz escaped and sought refuge in Switzerland.

Longing for the country of his birth, Fritz returned to Hanover, Germany when he was twenty. He made an attempt to live a normal life and even married a young woman. This didn’t last and he deserted her and their unborn child. He joined the army, but was booted out after approximately one year due to his prior injury. Once again he returned to his family in Hanover where his father tried to have him recommitted to the asylum. This did not work and Fritz finally moved into his own place at 27 Cellerstrasse. It was while living at this address during September 1918 that Fritz committed his first homicide.

Friedel Roth was to be Fritz’s victim number one. Friedel had run away from his home on September 25 and was shortly reported missing by his mother. In an effort to locate the boy and return him home, the police questioned his friends concerning his whereabouts. They told the police that Friedel had been with them for a short time. During this time they met and befriended a gentleman by the name of Fritz. Fritz had taken Friedel home with him they said and they gave the police the address.

When the police entered Fritz’s dwelling they found him in bed with a young boy, but it was not Friedel Roth. They then arrested Fritz, charging him with the seduction of a juvenile boy. Believing that Friedel had left of his own accord, the police didn’t even bother to search the residence. Had they done so then they would have found what remained of the boy hidden from the naked eye.

Five years later, while being questioned about the other murders, Fritz confessed to the murder of Friedel. He claimed that when the police came to his house the “murdered boy’s head was stuffed behind the stove, wrapped in newspaper.” However, because the police did not search, he was only sentenced to nine months in prison for his seduction of the juvenile.

Shortly after his release in 1919 Fritz met a young man by the name of Hans Grans at the railway station in Hanover. Hans was a runaway, petty thief and male prostitute. He offered his body to Fritz that day and Fritz, liking what he saw, took Hans up on his offer. Hans and Fritz quickly developed a strong friendship and morbid bond with one another. It was a deviant and sexual relationship that would last throughout Fritz’s killing spree.

Between 1919 and 1923 Fritz’s lust was abated by Hans and he was able to establish himself as a member of society. He didn’t kill during this time and, in 1922, became an informant for the police. He wasn’t entirely clean during this time though, he needed money and turned to theft. He would steal clothes from the local laundry and sell them cheap to the poor men and women in the neighborhood. This practice of helping the deprived earned Fritz a lot of respect from those around him and helped to bolster his status in the community.

In February of 1923 Fritz once more felt the urge to quench his insatiable bloodlust and he killed his first victim in nearly four and a half years. Fritz knew that young runaways, male prostitutes, and homosexual commuters could always be found at the Hanover railway station and this was where he picked up his new victim; it would also serve as his primary hunting ground. On this day he approached two young boys who had been traveling together. He convinced them that he was a police officer to gain their trust.        

He was deeply attracted to one of the boys, but the other he found to be repulsive. He sent this unattractive boy on his way and charmed the other one into going home with him; this was to be the last time that anyone saw young Fritz Franke alive. At his home Fritz raped and viciously murdered the boy and was in the process of disposing of the body when Hans unexpectedly showed up. Fritz expected that Hans would be upset and that he would have to be killed as well, but was pleasantly surprised when Hans asked, “When shall I come back again?” Hans couldn’t have cared less about the dead body or what Fritz had done.

Over the next year and four months Fritz would use the same modus operandi to murder twenty-five more young men and boys. He so often used the policeman guise that a guard at the train station believed him to be a detective and said as much to a youth welfare worker when he was questioned about Fritz’s presence at the railway station. At some point, between February 1923 and June 1924, Fritz came across an ad in the newspaper seeking information on one of the missing boys. As it turned out, the boy was one of his many victims. Fritz saw that the ad was offering a sum of money for any information that could aid the boy’s parents in finding him. He found this opportunity to make some quick money and gloat in the faces of the parents too delicious to pass up. He donned his best suit and went to their house posing as a criminologist with information about their son.

The distraught parents welcomed him into their home, their hopes high that the information that he offered would lead them to their son. Fritz listened to the details that they already had and any other tidbits that they had to offer him without giving any of his own. The parents said that Fritz spent most of his time there “laughing hysterically” and that he even tried to collect the money that they had offered in their ad. Had they known of the fate that had befallen their son at the hands of the man sitting before them, they would have undoubtedly ended his reign of terror that very day.

Fritz was not the only one responsible for the missing men and boys during this time. Hans also played a part in the grotesqueries. Whenever Fritz beckoned him to do so, Hans would go to the railway station and select the victims. He would use the same policeman routine to lure them back to Fritz’s residence. From there Fritz would take over; Hans did not actually take part in the murders, only helped to facilitate them.

Throughout the mayhem of this six year period Fritz managed to maintain his standing within the community. He would sell or donate the clothes of his victims to the underprivileged throughout Hanover and even began selling black market “beef” and “pork.” These meats were not what Fritz claimed them to be though; in actuality they were pieces of flesh that he had removed from his victims. At one point a lady that Fritz had sold some of his “meat” to suspected that it may indeed be human and to it to the authorities. There an analyst studied it and told her that it was only pork! Fritz would even surprise friends and fellow neighbors with gifts of sausages and select cuts of “beef” whenever he couldn’t sell it fast enough.

Fritz was living a good life by his standards, but it all began to come unraveled in May of 1924. Two children were playing in the River Leine near Herrenhausen Castle, and dangerously near Fritz’s abode, when they came across a human skull. Twelve days later another skull washed up onto the river bank. By June 13th two more skulls were found in the same vicinity lying in the river sediment. The police had the skulls examined by a coroner who determined that they ranged in ages between twelve and twenty. On Whit Sunday hundreds of men and women from all over Hanover searched pathways and bridges around the area where the skulls had been. Many more bones were found and the people began to believe that a “man-eater” or “werewolf” or “vampire” of some kind was on the loose.

It was at this point that law enforcement decided to dam River Leine where the skulls had originated to see what they may find. They were astounded when the search turned up more than five hundred human bones - this being the equivalent to the remains of more than twenty-two people. The coroner estimated these remains belonged to young men and boys between the ages of fifteen and twenty. Aghast by how many victims there were and at the ages, the police began doing their best to solve the murders. They had several suspects in mind, deviants with a criminal history who liked little boys and young men, and one the suspect list was none other than Friedrich Haarmann.

They wanted to interrogate Fritz but had no way of linking him to the bodies since they didn’t even know who the bodies belonged to. Nevertheless, they kept Fritz on their list and hoped he would do something they could arrest him for. On June 23rd, 1924 they got their wish.

That day Fritz was seen arguing with fifteen year-old Karl Fromm at the railway station. Fritz had picked up Fromm several days earlier and had spent that time trying to get the boy to sleep with him willfully. When he wouldn’t Fritz took him to the station to try and make the boy return home. Karl refused and the two began to argue. Fritz, now angry with Karl, turned him in to the railway police, accusing him of traveling with false documentation. Once in custody, Karl told the officers of Fritz’s sexual harassment and advances towards him. This was all that they needed to hear, they took Fritz Haarmann into custody that same day.

The police questioned him about Karl’s statement but he vehemently denied the accusations. While they had him, the police decided to also question Fritz about the murders. He denied knowing anything about them. The police were at their wit’s end with Fritz when they caught a break that would bust the case wide open. Their break came in the form of a jacket that had belonged to one of Fritz’s victims that he had sold.

The parents of a missing boy, Robert Witzel, had been sitting outside of the Chief Commissioner’s office during the interrogation of Fritz. Robert had been missing since April 26th of that year and they were hoping the police could give them some information on what may have happened to their son. While waiting they noticed a couple who had walked into the station. Robert’s mother immediately recognized the jacket that the man was wearing and asked him where he had obtained it. He responded by telling her that he had purchased it from Fritz Haarmann and then showed her and the police the identification card that had been in the pocket. The jacket did indeed belong to Robert Witzel.

With this information firmly in their minds, the police once again began to question Fritz. At first his demeanor was calm, cool and even polite, but that promptly began to change. As the police grilled him he became agitated; he fidgeted in his seat, picked at his fingernails and became irate. After several days of extreme inquiry on the part of the police and “maniacal rages” on Fritz’s part, he finally made a full confession.

Part of this confession included taking police on a “murder tour” of Hanover. He showed them every place that he dumped bones and body parts; they were mortified to learn that there were more than those that had already been found. He had hidden them in bushes and in various other locations in plain sight all over the city. After the conclusion of the murder tour and word of Fritz’s confession hit the streets, anyone who had purchased clothing or meat from him showed up at the police station to give the merchandise to the police or to make a statement regarding when they had purchased it. The people of Hanover were outraged to learn that what they had been eating was human flesh when they had purchased meat from Fritz.

On July 8th, 1924 Hans Grans was arrested. He was charged with the facilitation of murder and as Fritz’s accomplice. Fritz did his best to incriminate Hans and claimed that he was just as much a part of the murders as he was.

December 4th, 1924 the trial began at Hanover Assizes. Fritz and Hans were tried separately. Fritz acted as his own attorney and made a mockery of the court during the process. There were more than sixty volumes of files entered into evidence and two hundred witnesses during the two week trial, which was unprecedented in German Judicial History at that time. No evidence was more compelling than the testimony of Fritz himself.

The jury and members of the audience were revolted by the statements that Fritz made while on the stand. When asked why he murdered the young men and boys he responded by saying, “I never intended to hurt those youngsters, but I knew that if I got going something would happen and that made me cry… I would throw myself on top of those boys and bite through the Adam’s apple, throttling them at the same time.”

Fritz claimed that he would feel guilty after, he would cover the faces of the dead so then “it wouldn’t be looking at me.” As if the testimony he had already given wasn’t incriminating enough, he began to tell of how he disposed of the victims. “I’d make two cuts in the abdomen and put the intestines in a bucket, then soak up the blood and crush the bones until the shoulders broke. Now I could get the heart, lungs and kidneys and chop them up and put them in my bucket. I’d take the flesh off the bones and put it in my wax cloth bag. It would take me five or six trips to take everything and throw it down the toilet or into the river. I always hated doing this, but I couldn’t help it - my passion was so much stronger than the horror of the cutting and chopping.”

His testimony went on to reveal that he would smash the skulls and throw them in the marsh or River Leine. He even told of how he sold the clothes and meat of the victims or gave them away to friends as gifts. He believed that he was driven by the passion, beauty and sensuality of each victim. This passion would also lead him to chew on the penis’s of his victims before disposal.

“Often, after I had killed, I pleaded to be put away in a military asylum, but not a madhouse. If Grans had really loved me he would have been able to save me. Believe me, I’m not ill - it’s only that I occasionally have funny turns. I want to be beheaded. It’ll only take a moment, then I’ll be at peace,” Fritz said at the conclusion of his testimony.

At 10:00 AM on December 19th, 1924 Friedrich Heinrich Karl Haarmann was found guilty of twenty-four counts of murder and was given twenty-four death sentences. Upon receiving his sentence Fritz said, “I want to be executed on the market place. On the tombstone must be put this inscription, ‘Here lies Mass-Murderer Haarmann.’”

Hans Grans was convicted of instigating murder one count. He was sentenced to death as well. He was not executed, however, because of two letters written by Fritz exonerating him of having anything to do with the murders. The first was mailed to Hans’s father, the second was found in his cell after his execution. This second letter read:
“You won’t kill me; I’ll be back - yes, I shall be amongst you for all eternity. And now you yourselves have also killed. You should know it: Hans Grans was innocent! Well? How’s your conscience now?”

Hans’s sentence was commuted to twelve years imprisonment as a result. There in no known information on what became of Hans after his release.

On April 15th, 1925 Fritz Haarmann was beheaded by sword. This took place within the walls of the prison and he was buried in a prisoner’s grave. His requests to be beheaded in public and for the morbid epitaph were denied. Before burial his brain was removed and taken to a German university for extensive studying.

Crawling through the annals of human history are demented, murderous men and women. Friedrich Heinrich Karl Haarmann was as demented and depraved as any of them. His insatiable bloodlust led him to rape and murder twenty-seven boys and young men in a brutal and unimaginable manner. Though it has been nearly one hundred years since Fritz prowled the streets of Hanover, Germany, his six years of mayhem and lust will never be forgotten.