In May and June of 1924, human skulls began washing up on the banks of the Leine river in Hanover. Children found the first of them. When the police dragged the river they recovered more than five hundred human bones, which the examiners later attributed to at least twenty-two separate people. The city had been losing boys and young men for years, most of them last seen at the central railway station, and suspicion fell almost at once on a man the police knew well: Fritz Haarmann, a small-time dealer with convictions for molesting children, who had been working for years as a police informer.
Friedrich Heinrich Karl Haarmann was born in Hanover on October 25, 1879. By the end of the First World War he was in his late thirties, living by petty theft, fraud and black-market trading in meat and secondhand clothes, and informing for the Hanover police, which gave him standing around the station and a reason to be seen there questioning young travelers. Postwar Hanover was full of people with nowhere to go: refugees from the east, demobilized soldiers, runaways and boys who had simply drifted to the city. The station was where they arrived.
The first victim who can be named was Friedel Rothe, seventeen, a runaway who disappeared on September 25, 1918. His friends told the police he had last been seen with Haarmann, and under pressure from Rothe's family officers went to Haarmann's rooms in October. They found him with a half-dressed teenage boy and charged him with sexual assault, for which he was sentenced to nine months. They did not find Rothe. Years later Haarmann claimed that during that visit the boy's head had been lying behind his stove, wrapped in newspaper. There is no way to test the claim, but the missed chance became one of the central charges against the Hanover police.
In 1919, while he was avoiding that sentence, Haarmann met Hans Grans, a young runaway selling clothes at the station, who became his lover. After Haarmann served his nine months, Grans moved in with him. Over the years that followed he took one young man after another from the station to his rooms. The victims ranged from ten to twenty-two, most of them teenagers: commuters, apprentices, runaways and occasionally young male prostitutes. Haarmann killed most of them, by his own account, by biting through the throat, sometimes while strangling them at the same time. He dismembered the bodies, threw much of the remains into the Leine, and sold the clothing and belongings, often through Grans. One of them was Adolf Hannappel, an apprentice who vanished from the station on November 11, 1923. The last was Erich de Vries, seventeen, on June 14, 1924.
The press gave him a string of names, among them the Butcher of Hanover, the Vampire of Hanover and the Wolf Man. The rumor that he sold human flesh as meat on the black market spread through the city at the time. It was never proved.
Once the bones had begun to surface, the police rounded up known sex offenders and questioned them, and then remembered the Rothe case. They put Haarmann under surveillance and arrested him on June 22, 1924. The search of his rooms turned up bloodstains and clothing and belongings that relatives identified as those of missing young men. Haarmann began to confess, and on the strength of his statements Grans was arrested on July 8. On August 16 Haarmann was sent to Göttingen for psychiatric evaluation before trial.
His trial opened before the Hanover assize court on December 4, 1924, and lasted about two weeks. More than two hundred witnesses were heard, many of them the parents of the missing. Haarmann admitted a great many of the killings, disputed others, and said when asked that he did not know how many there had been, putting the number somewhere between fifty and seventy. He had asked to be condemned to death. On December 19, 1924, the court convicted him of twenty-four of the twenty-seven murders with which he was charged and sentenced him to death. He was acquitted of the three he denied, even though belongings of some of those boys had been found with him or among his acquaintances. He did not appeal.
He was executed by guillotine at the Hanover prison on April 15, 1925, at the age of forty-five.
Grans's case did not end with the trial. The court found him guilty of inciting the murder of Adolf Hannappel, on witness evidence that he had pointed the boy out to Haarmann, and sentenced him to death. Then a letter from Haarmann came to light declaring that Grans was innocent, and a retrial was ordered. In 1926 Grans was convicted of aiding and abetting and sentenced to twelve years. Critics at the time, including the writer Theodor Lessing, argued that the court had never proved that he intended murder or even knew for certain of the killings, and later scholarship has also found the evidence against him weak. He served his sentence in Celle and was not released when it ended.
The case forced an argument in Weimar Germany about the police, who had used a known sex offender as an informer and failed to search his rooms when a missing boy was traced to him, and about the treatment of homosexuality, which the law punished and which the prosecution and the press folded into their account of the murders. It did not settle how many young men Haarmann killed. The court's figure was twenty-four. The river held the remains of at least twenty-two people, and his own estimates ran far higher.