August 21, 1921.
Occupants of an apartment block in Berlin hear screams coming from one of the rooms,
an apartment owned by a well-known butcher and street merchant.
A butcher police find, but not of cattle... of women.
When the cops barge into the bedroom, the killer is dissecting a woman’s body.
The cops can have no idea that parts of her were destined to end up on someone’s plate.
You won’t be surprised, then, to hear that this guy became known as “The Berlin Butcher.”
His story beggars’ belief.
He is, perhaps, one of a very few serial killers who might have profited from his crimes.
We say ‘might’ because we’re not completely sure.
Maybe you’ll feel the same way in about 12 minutes.
This story demands your full attention.
1921 was a bleak time in Germany for most people, following the loss of the First World
War and the harsh economic conditions that ensued.
Economically devastated, morale in society was as low as can be.
Many people saw no light in the darkness.
Food was scarce and still rationed, so much so that near-famine conditions were reported
in some areas.
For many people, they relied on the black market for their fill.
On one day in 1920, someone took a lurid photo: a crowd of men butchering a horse in the street;
its intestines pushed up against the curb.
We can’t paint a grim enough picture of what conditions were like for many Germans
back then.
Life was hell for a large part of the population.
Crime was pervasive.
Women sold their bodies in an attempt to eke out a living.
People begged for food.
Vagrants were everywhere.
These were the “years of crisis”.
They were also years that saw some of Germany’s worst serial killers.
Besides the man we’ll talk about today, there was Karl Denke, another cannibal who
murdered the poor and sold their meat to unsuspecting members of the public.
Even though he killed in the region of 40 people, his story was suppressed at the time.
That’s why he’s sometimes called “The Forgotten Cannibal.”
Also, in the 1920s, a German man named Bruno Lüdke may have murdered as many as 50 people.
Then there was Peter Kürten, aka “The Vampire of Düsseldorf”, who tore his victims apart
and drank their blood.
The savage Fritz Haarmann, who also killed during this dismal era, was later nicknamed
“The Wolfman.”
That’s because he often killed his victims by biting them through the throat.
He then butchered his prey and sold their meat as pork.
He once wrote, “God oh God, where is it going to end?”
In his confession, he told police, “When I would go out of control, I would bite them
and suck their necks.”
Ok, so we think we have amply set the scene for you.
These killers are still virtually unheard of, but they deserve much more attention than
they’ve been given in the annals of serial killer history.
It seems the English-language press, or Hollywood for that matter, doesn’t really care about
German killers.
But arguably even more forgotten is the killer we’ll focus on today.
Trust us, after hearing his story, you will never forget him.
His full name was Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Grossmann.
He was born on December 13, 1863.
He was one of seven or possibly eight kids and grew up in the town of Neuruppin.
His family was dirt poor, so he left school at the age of 14 to work in a textile factory.
He then went to Berlin after turning 16, where he held down many jobs, including a position
as a trainee butcher.
This would serve him well in later life.
He fought in the First World War but was released from duty after suffering from a hernia.
From then on, he wandered around taking odd jobs, usually in Berlin.
When he was 20, he was jailed for begging.
He spent much of his young life in and out of jail for vagrancy and petty theft.
He also did a lengthy stint in prison for a sex-related crime.
On his return from prison, he became well-known in his neighborhood, mainly because he was
always bringing women back to his apartment.
Sometimes neighbors would hear loud arguments, even screams, but with their own lives being
so harsh, no one ever bothered to complain.
Still, when women started going missing close to the Silesian train station, where Grossmann
was often seen, people became suspicious.
One time his neighbors, Helene and Mannheim Itzig, made a little hole in his door so they
could peep through.
Time and again, they heard screams from his apartment, and they were also pretty sure
Grossman looked just like a face they’d seen on a wanted poster.
Still, they never saw any murders through that hole.
Other neighbors often talked about the awful stench that emanated from his apartment.
It smelled like someone had died in there.
When the authorities asked Grossmann about this, he just said some meat had gone off.
He was a butcher, after all.
One of his ways to earn a crust was selling meat on the black market.
He even had a hotdog stand at that train station.
Little did his customers know that he was possibly making the hotdogs out of the women
he’d murdered.
Selling meat wasn’t just a way to make money or afford Grossmann some thrills.
It was also practical, given he lived in a fourth-floor apartment.
Dragging full bodies down the stairs would have attracted attention, even in a neighborhood
where people were used to seeing strange things.
He cut up his victims and ate parts of them, as well as drinking their blood, some reports
say.
Often, he dumped the parts he couldn’t eat or sell in the canal.
Many of his victims went missing and no one looked for them.
They were the “less dead,” women who could vanish without causing a stir.
To explain, here’s how one historian described the area where Grossmann found his victims.
“In the sooty Koppenstraße at the Silesian train station poor, weathered, and wrecked
creatures walk around nightly, especially on Saturdays, without head-covering and with
blue kitchen aprons.
They count on the drunken workers returning home, to whom they can offer themselves for
one to two Marks.”
Often, Grossmann would wait in a park in the area called the Andreasplatz.
One witness later said that he was almost famous at the park.
She explained, “He was there almost daily and always had a different friend with him.”
His so-called friends believed his promise of a free meal and a roof over their heads
for the night.
He didn’t always kill them, however.
He was known to hire some of his women.
Others escaped his clutch after he’d been violent towards them.
People often turned a blind eye to this, only because Grossmann had money in his pocket,
and at times, he was willing to lend it to desperate residents in the area.
In a book written by the author Sace Elder, she says, “In his neighborhood, then, Grossmann
was no anonymous urban predator like the Ripper of Whitechapel, with whom he would later be
compared.
He was, on the contrary, quite well-known, if not universally disliked.”
The book explains that he picked up prostitutes at times, or single mothers, or sometimes
women who had zero social connections.
During the court trial, some of the survivors came forward.
The story was always the same.
For food or clothing, they slept with him.
Some of them were lied to.
He’d offer them a job, but the payment never came.
One woman said she stayed over at his place.
He drugged her that night, and you can imagine what happened.
One prostitute, named Erika, said in court he was just too “creepy” so she didn’t
go back with him.
Another prostitute named Johanna said she did go back to his place, and she also got
out in one piece in the morning.
These two women were lucky to survive.
A lady of the night named Nitsche wasn’t so fortunate.
She’d just gotten out of Moabit prison when she bumped into Grossmann in the park.
As always, he charmed her and promised her a warm bed and good company.
Back at his place, she drank coffee spiked with cyanide.
He bound her body and trussed her up to be butchered.
That’s when the cops paid him a visit.
Other women came forward and said they suspected he’d drugged them.
They woke up on his bed, not knowing what had happened to them.
Some of them went to the police, but their social standing didn’t exactly elicit much
action.
As one historian wrote, prostitutes didn’t see the police as prosecutors but as persecutors.
Unfortunately, even today, vulnerable women worldwide elicit very little sympathy from
the public and don’t exactly demand the most thorough investigations when they go
missing.
This is why prostitutes are often the first choice for killers.
For many of them, the sorry state of affairs means the illegality of their job precludes
them from working in safe spaces.
This is how Grossmann could have killed as many as 50 women; some say 100 women.
The real number will never be known, nor how many victims ended up becoming packages of
meat or sausages in buns...If that’s true.
Keep watching.
Police should have known better, especially given his criminal record.
But it was often he that was at the police station making complaints.
Time and again, he accused his “housekeepers” of stealing from him.
One of them, Freda T. was charged with theft.
Emma B got off, the cops in her case believing her story about this violent, compulsive liar
of a man.
And then one day, the neighbors had heard one too many screams.
Finally, they called the cops.
That’s when they found Ms. Nitsche being dissected.
On further inspection, police found parts of the bodies of two other women.
Then, when neighbors told investigators the full story of his park visits and women constantly
going in but not coming out, they began to wonder just what kind of man they had in their
station cell.
The lead investigators were named Werneburg and Riemann.
For a few years, they’d known that a killer was in their midst.
Bodies had been found on many occasions, most of them slaughtered or in pieces.
Many of them remained nameless, Jane Doe’s as American cops call them now.
At one point, police were finding a body or body parts in the canal and other nearby waterways
almost daily.
The German newspapers soon reported on the case.
One of them, Vorwärts, wrote that Grossmann “has caused primarily the feminine population
of Berlin understandable anxiety and excitement.”
Like in the Yorkshire Ripper case many years later in England, the news reports said “respectable”
women had nothing to fear.
This was not only a gross insult to some of the most vulnerable women in Germany, but
Grossmann’s so-called friends had come from all walks of life.
His hotdogs were not discriminately filled.
People compared Grossmann to London’s Jack the Ripper, but comparisons shouldn’t have
been made.
Grossmann was likely far worse, and he was only interested in availability, not what
the women did as a living.
Just a few days before Grossmann was arrested, the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper published
an article with the headline: “Persons who Disappear.”
It said thousands of people had disappeared in 1919, 1920, and 1921, mainly young women.
Two days after, the same newspaper reported that a lower leg and spinal cord had been
found in the canal.
A young woman was the victim.
So, with Grossmann in handcuffs, investigators understood that they might have a prolific
killer on their hands.
Grossmann admitted he’d killed the three women found in his apartment, but he didn’t
own up to any more murders.
He said he’d killed the women because they’d stolen from him.
As for why he chopped them into pieces, he said it was the only way to get them out of
the apartment block.
Even back when police were not so educated in the ways of serial killers, they knew there
had to be more victims.
They also knew this man hadn’t killed solely out of anger.
Psychologists said this man is a sexual killer.
He murders not out of emotional rage like so many one-time killers do, but he killed
because it gave him a thrill.
One expert said his murders were a “manifestation of a degenerate sexual urge.”
There was no motive other than the fact killing aroused him.
In October, the Berliner Morgenpost printed the details about Grossmann’s brutal dismemberment
of the bodies.
Directly opposite was an unrelated article with the headline, “Meat is Getting Cheaper.”
Was this dark humor, or an editorial blunder?
We will never know.
On September 19, 1921, The Washington Post ran the headline, “Butcher Held for Killing
20 Girls And Selling Flesh.”
This time there was an editorial blunder in the US.
Just below that headline was another headline, “Fresh From Paris.”
Two young women in fashionable outfits were printed underneath.
The article called Grossmann a “shabby, quivering old man” saying he was one of
the worse killers in criminal history.
Sensationally, the writer called Grossman a “beast in human form” and like the German
media, the story didn’t bother to talk about poverty or the reasons for widespread hunger.
It is in that article where American readers first heard about the cannibal meat seller.
In the third paragraph, it said, “This confessed killer of 20 girls and women, butcher of their
bodies, and seller of the flesh of some of them in the guise of veal steak or sausages,
will spend the rest of his life…in a hospital for the criminally insane.”
The article stated that hospitals and even “savants” were racing to buy his skull
and other body parts after he died.
Designed to titillate rather than educate, the article hyperbolically said Grossmann
had “superhuman cunning.”
It has for years been a habit of poor reporters to de-humanize serial killers, therefore avoiding
tricky discussions about the problems in society.
With that in mind, perhaps some of the rest of the story was exaggerated.
It stated that Grossmann would often walk around with a package of meat wrapped in brown
paper.
He’d hug it to his stomach and then “peddle the contents to some shady itinerant butcher
or half-starved inhabitant of darkest Berlin.”
We’ve dug pretty deep into this story, and we have no idea where the Post journalist
got some of those small details from.
The story wasn’t just pulled out of thin air, though, except the bit about confessing
to 20 murders.
He only admitted to police he’d killed four women.
German investigators did think Grossman was behind scores more murders.
One of the reasons was that in the canal near his house they discovered the limbs of 23
women.
Investigators even found entries in his diary which suggested he’d lately killed more
women and thrown the “useless” parts into the canal.
The German newspaper, the Lokal-Anzeiger, wrote, “The mass-murderer Grossmann is suspected,
after the dismemberment of the murdered women, of having prepared them as a fleshy treat.”
It further explained, “He apparently, after separating the flesh from the bone, prepared
some as veal, some as corned beef, some as sausage, and then sold them nearby at the
Schlesischen Bahnhof.”
To this day, we don’t know where the newspapers found this evidence.
The police certainly never said that, not in official statements anyway.
What is certain, though, is that neighbors told investigators and reporters that they
had bought packages of meat from Grossmann.
It’s also a fact that human hot dogs and dubious veal sold newspapers.
Names of dead women who were suspected victims were reeled off in other papers.
They included Luise Werner, Lisbeth Potske, Marie Feld, Emma Baumann, Emma Boritzki, Frieda
Thomas, and Albertine Asher, to name a few.
Grossmann never did meet with the scaffold, though.
He died in his cell shortly after he’d been sentenced to death.
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