Real Crime Stories/Paranormal Hauntings

Fritz Haarmann: The Butcher of Hanover (Part II)

Arrest

On the night of 22 June, Haarmann was observed by the two undercover officers prowling Hanover's central station. He was soon observed arguing with a 15-year-old boy named Karl Fromm, then to approach the police and insist they arrest the youth on the charge of traveling upon forged documents. Upon his arrest, Fromm informed police he had been living with Haarmann for four days, and that he had been repeatedly raped by his accuser, sometimes as a knife was held to his throat. Haarmann was arrested the following morning and charged with sexual assault.

Following his arrest. Haarmann's attic apartment at No. 2 Rote Reihe was searched. Haarmann had lived in this single room apartment since June 1923. The flooring, walls, and bedding within the apartment were found to be extensively bloodstained. Haarmann initially attempted to explain this fact as a by-product of his illegal trading in contraband meat. Various acquaintances and former neighbors of Haarmann were also extensively questioned as to his activities. Many fellow tenants and neighbors of the various addresses in which Haarmann lived since 1920 commented to detectives about the number of teenage boys they observed visiting his various addresses. Moreover, some had seen him leaving his property with concealed sacks, bags or baskets—invariably in the late evening or early morning hours. Two former tenants informed police that, in the spring of 1924, they had discreetly followed Haarmann from his apartment and observed him discarding a sack into the Leine River.

The clothes and personal possessions found at Haarmann's apartment and in the possession of his acquaintances were suspected as being the property of missing youths: all were confiscated and put on display at Hanover Police Station, with the parents of missing teenage boys from across Germany invited to look at the items. As successive days passed, an increasing number of items were identified by family members as having belonged to their sons and brothers. Haarmann did initially attempt to dismiss these successive revelations as being circumstantial in nature by explaining he acquired many of these items through his business of trading in used clothing, with other items being left at his apartment by youths with whom he engaged in sexual activity.

The turning point came when, on 29 June, clothes, boots, and keys found stowed at Haarmann's apartment were identified as belonging to a missing 18-year-old named Robert Witzel. A skull which had been found in a garden on 20 May (which was not initially connected with later skeletal discoveries) was identified as that of the missing youth. A friend of Witzel identified a police officer seen in the company of the youth the day prior to his disappearance as Haarmann. Confronted with this evidence, Haarmann briefly attempted to bluster his way out of these latest and most damning pieces of evidence. When Witzel's jacket was found in the possession of his landlady and he was confronted with various witnesses' testimony as to his destroying identification marks upon the clothing, he broke down and had to be supported by his sister.

Confession

Faced with this latest evidence, and upon the urging of his sister, Haarmann confessed to raping, killing and dismembering many young men in what he initially described as a "rabid sexual passion" between 1918 and 1924. According to Haarmann, he never actually intended to murder any of his victims but would be seized by an irresistible urge to bite into or through their Adam's apple—often as he manually strangled them—in the throes of ecstasy, before typically collapsing atop the victim's body. Only one intended victim had escaped from Haarmann's apartment after he attempted to bite into his Adam's apple, although this individual is not known to have reported the attack to the police.

All of Haarmann's victims' bodies were disposed of via dismemberment shortly after their murder, and Haarmann was insistent that he found the act of dismemberment extremely unpleasant; he had, he stated, been ill for eight days after his first murder. Nonetheless, Haarmann was insistent that his passion at the moment of murder was invariably "stronger than the horror of the cutting and the chopping" which would inevitably follow, and would typically take up to two days to complete.