On March 22, 1991, Tamara Petrowskaja, forty-four, was walking with her three-month-old son, Stanislaw, in the woods at Beelitz-Heilstätten, the old sanatorium complex southwest of Berlin. Both were Russian nationals. A very tall attacker tied and gagged her with two pieces of underwear, killed the baby by crushing his skull against a tree stump, and kicked and stamped on him; shoe prints were found on the child's clothes. Then the killer raped Petrowskaja, strangled her with a bra, and changed her underwear for another pair. A search of the ground nearby turned up hidden stashes of women's underwear that filled five trash bags. It was the killing that turned a series of attacks on women in the Potsdam countryside into a manhunt, and it gave the killer the name the press used ever after: the Beast of Beelitz.
The killer was a twenty-four-year-old former sergeant in the East German People's Police, Wolfgang Schmidt, who stood about six feet three inches. Because pink women's underwear was left at some of the scenes, the tabloids also called the unknown attacker the Pink Giant. Schmidt later took the name Beate and lives as a woman.
Born in Lehnin, near Potsdam, on October 5, 1966, the eldest of three children, Schmidt began wearing women's underwear at about seven and deliberately soiling it, and later described the feelings it brought as overwhelmingly pleasant. When the mother found the dirty garments hidden in a barn, the child was kept from playing with other children. A doctor offered the parents no diagnosis, and they began locking their clothes cabinets; the boy scavenged women's clothing from dumpsters and landfills instead. The practices grew more elaborate and more sexual through the teenage years, crowding out schoolwork and friends, and Schmidt left school in the tenth grade.
In 1985 Schmidt signed on for ten years with the People's Police in Potsdam, moving from work as a train supervisor to the 20th readiness unit and reaching noncommissioned rank. In late April 1989 Schmidt and three other officers were dismissed for holding a private neo-Nazi gathering to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Hitler's birth. A job as a crane operator at a steel mill ended within months over repeated absences. After that came manual labor, the last of it as a hand in an orchard, and a record of turning up drunk, stealing from workplaces and fighting with colleagues. Drunk one night, Schmidt damaged the apartment of a girlfriend and her family. That relationship ended after one of her relatives found several knives hidden in Schmidt's bedroom and reported them to the police, who did not look into it. Schmidt also took long walks through the forests dressed in women's clothing and grew angry at the way women passing by reacted.
The first killing came six months after the dismissal. On October 24, 1989, Schmidt broke into the house of Edeltraut Nixdorf, fifty-one, in Deetz to steal underwear. Nixdorf saw the intruder from the garden and came at the stranger with a rake. Schmidt forced her to the ground, choked her and beat her to death with a hammer, raped the body, and was wrapping it in a blanket when a neighbor saw and the killer ran. The investigators had a single strong lead: a very large boot print, European size 49, whose sole matched the boots issued to East German soldiers and some police officers. In March 1990 Nixdorf's husband killed himself by drinking pesticide.
On May 24, 1990, Christa Naujoks, forty-five, was strangled with an electric cable near a garbage dump in Ferch and raped after death. Her former husband, a groundskeeper at the site, found her the next day. Soiled pink underwear lay around the dump, and police had reports of a tall figure harassing women in the forest next to it. On June 9 Edith Weber, fifty-eight, was raped at a dump near Wust and beaten with a wooden pole; construction workers found her alive and she survived her injuries. At some point that summer Schmidt also fought a homeless woman over recyclable trash at a landfill and beat her nearly to death with a truncheon.
Nothing more is known to have happened for nine months. On March 13, 1991, Inge Fischer, thirty-four, was walking home through the forest between Borkheide and Neuendorf when she was beaten, kicked, dragged off the path, raped and killed with a stab wound to the neck. Hikers found her more than a week later. Her underwear had been replaced with a pink pair, and searchers found more underwear and pornographic magazines buried in ditches nearby. When detectives went back over the Deetz and Ferch scenes they concluded that all three killings were the work of one person. Nine days after Fischer died, Petrowskaja and her son were killed in the woods at Beelitz.
On April 6, 1991, two twelve-year-old girls in Sputendorf, near Ludwigsfelde, were attacked with a knife. They fought back, scratching their attacker's face, and escaped seriously hurt, and their description gave police a composite sketch. The same day Talita Bremer, sixty-six, was strangled in her apartment in Fichtenwalde and raped after death; a relative found her two weeks later. Her clothes drawers had been searched, which tied her to the series, and forensic teams recovered semen and a pubic hair. Some accounts date this last killing to April 5.
A reward of 20,000 marks brought more than a thousand tips. One came from the parents of Schmidt's fiancée, who told police the sketch looked very like the young man their nineteen-year-old daughter was engaged to and living with in Rädel. The tip was not followed up.
The case broke in July 1991, when a jogger named Mike Klein noticed underwear hanging in the branches in a forest near Schmerzke and came upon a camper masturbating near a tent, wearing a bra over a shirt. Klein recognized the face from the sketch, saw knives in the tent, and drove to the police in Brandenburg an der Havel. A special tactical unit put the area under watch rather than move in at once. Klein kept coming back to the woods to watch the operation, sometimes with a friend, Andreas Siegel, and on August 1 the two of them came across Schmidt camping in another part of the forest. Posing as foresters, they talked Schmidt into the covered bed of their truck, supposedly to help clear litter from the old campsite, and drove to where the officers were waiting. Schmidt was overpowered, handcuffed to a tree and taken to Potsdam. German accounts give a shorter version, in which two joggers overpowered Schmidt and handed their captive to the police. In custody Schmidt confessed to six murders to Volker Kelm, the detective who had led the investigation since 1989.
Klein was at first refused the reward, on the police view that other tips would have led to the arrest anyway, and eventually received 12,000 marks, with the other 8,000 divided among other informants. The chief prosecutor, Marianna Böhm, called Klein and Siegel bounty hunters, and Klein was never called to testify. In a 2018 television interview with Klein for the RBB crime program Täter|Opfer|Polizei, Kelm said that in any other circumstances what the two men did would have been false imprisonment.
The trial opened in Potsdam on October 20, 1992, and the national press followed it closely. Before it began Schmidt gave an exclusive interview to the court reporter Gisela Friedrichsen, who wrote in Der Spiegel that the defendant had opened up to the court's expert as no one accused of such terrible crimes ever had. That expert, the forensic psychiatrist Wilfried Rasch, found a sexual-pathological development with paraphilic, coprophilic, transvestite and sadistic elements, and argued that it diminished Schmidt's responsibility. Accounts of the verdict differ on how the counts were framed, as five murders and one attempted murder or as six murders and three attempted murders. The court imposed fifteen years in prison, to be followed by indefinite commitment to a psychiatric hospital. German sources date the sentence to November 30, 1992; others give December 1.
The coverage was harsh even by the standards of the crimes. The Spiegel writer Gerhard Mauz objected to the press turning the defendant into a spawn of hell, and pointed to what it did to the people around Schmidt. The fiancée had an abortion before the trial, after a Springer newspaper ran an open campaign urging her to abort the child of the Pink Giant on the theory that violent impulses were inherited.
The prison term was served at Brandenburg-Görden. There Schmidt began to identify as transgender. Television footage from 1997 showed a cell decorated with stuffed animals and magazine cutouts and access to women's clothing and makeup. A court granted the change of name to Beate in 2001, and hormone treatment began in 2009. In 2010 Schmidt told Bild never to be released and to be considered unpredictable. The same year Schmidt was investigated over the alleged rape of another transgender inmate, who afterward attempted suicide; the accusation was never proved.
When the prison term ended, commitment to the forensic psychiatric hospital at Brandenburg an der Havel began, and it has never been lifted. In July 2013, twenty-two years after the arrest, the clinic loosened the conditions to allow unsupervised walks on the hospital grounds but not beyond them. Day trips into Brandenburg an der Havel were granted for a while afterward, on the strength of what the clinic called first steps forward in therapy, and withdrawn when newspapers published security-camera images of Schmidt buying pornographic magazines at a gas station. As of the most recent reporting Beate Schmidt remained committed.
The case outlived its tabloid names. Anna Langhoff wrote a play about it, Schmidt Deutschland: Der Rosa Riese, commissioned by Heiner Müller for the Berliner Ensemble, and Rosa von Praunheim drew on it for a theater workshop with young people in Brandenburg an der Havel that became his 2008 film Der rosa Riese, with Charly Hübner in the title role.