Sep 24, 2008

Fritz Haarmann

Friedrich "Fritz" Haarmann (1879 - 1925) is the best known and most mythicized of the three most notorious German cannibal-killers of the 1920's: Georg Carl Grossmann and Karl Denke are the two others.



















His deeds were rather well described on many occasions, so we can refer here to an article in the New Criminologist: here.

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Just like Grossmann and Denke, Haarmann used to accost his potential victims at a train station. Just like the others, he was aiming at the feeblest and destitute. Like Grossmann but unlike Denke, he was a sexual deviant.

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All three of them committed their worst crimes during the peak of recession in Germany - in the years after World War I. They all profited of the crimes. Although it has never been proved, they have all allegedly sold, eaten or offered meat of their victims to others (sometimes to their next victim as a prelude to another killing).

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There have been a few movies based on Haarmann's story. Karmakar's Totmacher (1995) was a reconstruction of Haarmann's interrogation by a psychologist at the police station (it has been made made into a theatre piece by the Berliner Kriminal Theater just recently), while Lommel's Die Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe (1973) focused on the last months of Haarmann's killing spree - a period when he was employed by the Hannover police as an informer (in reality he was both an informer and the main suspect in the case of the killings of boys).

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The following scenes show Fritz Haarmann (played by Kurt Raab) in Die Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe as an undercover police officer, a gay pedophile killer and cannibal entrepreneur.





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