Mel Gordon - Voluptuous Panic - The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin

The exact number of Lustmord crimes in Weimar Germany cannot be easily tallied. Berlin sexologists testified that many sexual-related homicides were unintentional— Suitors and rape victims expiring from heart attacks or strokes; lethal roughhousing during S&M play; auto-asphyxiation; spouses reacting to abusive sexual punishment. Even necrophiliac penetration following murder was not necessarily deemed Lustmord if the perpetrator violated the cadaver in a symbolic, rather than passionate, gesture.

True Lustmord required sexual frenzy, where torture, savage annihilation, and orgasm intertwined. In fact, few German lust murderers had normal or forced intercourse with their victims. The killing and mutilation itself substituted for coitus. As a rule of thumb, ejaculation took place during the actual moment of death or immediately afterward when the sex maniac was madly sawing, pummeling, hacking, or dismembering the corpse’s head or genitals. Female lust murderers typically climaxed just when their naked partners, after being informed of their dire situation, convulsed in agony from the effects of a poisonous cocktail.

Two Lustmord trials in particular captured the imagination of Weimar Berlin and inspired a significant body of medico-legal and sexological literature. These were the cases of the “Werewolf (or Butcher) of Hannover,” Fritz Haarmann, and the “Düsseldorf Vampire,” Peter Kürten. Like their filmic namesakes, Haarmann and Kürten generated enormous amounts of misplaced empathy and a decade of sick folklore. (Peter Lorre played a Kürten-like character in Fritz Lang’s 1932 talkie, M .)

Haarmann was executed in the spring of 1925 for the murder and sexual mutilation of one girl and 27 boys and young men. (Haarmann hinted at much higher numbers but claimed he lost count at 40.) Besides the sheer aggregate of bodies, the Haarmann Lustmord case stood out for several unusual factors. For one, Haarmann came from a wealthy bourgeois background and married well. His father, who later disowned him, ran a cigar factory in Hannover, and Fritz received further financial backing from his wife’s family. Haarmann began seducing children in doorways and abandoned cellars, virtually on a daily basis, after his 16th birthday. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, Haarmann was arrested for “indecent acts” and shuttled in and out of mental wards for the next 23 years.

Released from the penitentiary immediately after the Great War, Haarmann adapted well to the chaotic times. The understaffed Hannover police graciously accepted Haarmann’s offer to be their chief Nose , or stool pigeon. This gave Haarmann unlimited access to all the officially restricted areas in the main railroad station and the exalted appearance of some civic authority. It was there that Haarmann and his accomplices befriended truant boys and young men seeking work. Usually Haarmann bought his homeless ward a good meal and invited him back to his dingy abode.

How Haarmann’s pedophilia and debauchery transformed into Lustmord varied from victim to victim. His traditional M.O. was to pile on the small boy, licking and kissing his chest, and then engaging in some form of anal stimulation. As soon as the unfortunate child dozed off, Haarmann experienced an uncontrollable sadistic rush and bit into the boy’s throat, severing his carotid artery. The child’s shock, his pitiful struggle, the hot stream of blood, the disembowelment of the body—these were the elements that fiendishly excited Haarmann. More disconcerting was what happened next. Haarmann cleaved the dead youths into pot-sized portions and cooked up their organs and muscular parts. (The genitals were pickled and preserved as mementos.)

For meat-starved Hannoverians, Haarmann was heaven-sent. He peddled the boy-flesh as fresh pork and sold it at cut-rate prices. When neighbors complained about the smells emanating from Haarmann’s apartment and the overall spooky atmosphere—boys going in but not out—the Hannover police, of course, ignored their pleas; Haarmann was one of their own.

But over a six-year period, too many young men were last seen at the Hannover Bahnhof under the watchful care of Fritz Haarmann. Also Haarmann had an overly generous habit of giving away the victims’ recognizable clothing to his lowbrow friends. Frantic relatives practically fainted when they saw their missing sons’ overcoats, caps, and homemade cravats on the bodies of complete strangers. And, finally, when a tiny human skull washed up behind banks of Hannover’s “Jew Town,” the police were forced to investigate the murky Leineschloss shores for more clues. After extensive dredging, forensic scientists identified the skeletal remains of 500 different individuals. Haarmann was arrested but only confessed to a fraction of the dispatched bodies. The rest, he assured his lawyers, must have come from the wastebins of the Anatomical Institute in Göttingen upstream or from careless grave-robbers.

Peter Kürten’s Lustmord spree occurred considerably later and could not be attributed to Inflation madness. Between February 1929 and May 1930, over 40 girls and young women in Düsseldorf were attacked at dusk by a maniac wielding a hammer, knife, short-handled axe, scissors, or his bare hands. Nearly a dozen died from his attacks, which included victims as young as five years old. Berlin police commissioners and private detectives, psychics, amateur crime-fighters, clairvoyants, and graphologists from throughout the German-speaking world came to Düsseldorf to assist the authorities, who curiously welcomed them.

The vampire killer seemed to require blood from his prey in order to achieve orgasm. He mocked the Düsseldorf police unceasingly, leaving trails of nutty riddles and farcical clues. Kürten’s favored means of sexual assault was squeezing or slashing at the female genitalia or, in the case of small children, battering the head with a mallet until blood poured from the skull. Either method produced in the beast an instanteous ecstatic release. Kürten also visited the cemeteries of the women he murdered and fingered the soil around their graves until he spontaneously ejaculated in his pants.

Not the city-wide dragnet but a foolish misstep resulted in Kürten’s capture. A girl he took home and later fondled in the park told her assailant that she forgot his address. After Kürten freed her, the stalwart child led the police to the ghoul’s apartment. Naturally, Kürten’s wife and neighbors refused to believe their gentlemanly Peter was Düsseldorf’s blood-sucking vampire. But during his year’s confinement, Kürten confessed to 23 brutal slayings.