During the devastated years of post-World War I Germany, the city of Han-nover was the hunting ground of Fritz Haarmann, one of the most notorious vampiric serial killers of all time — and it would take years before it was discovered that the fiend had been committing his grisly crimes right under the noses of the police. The first evidence of Haarmann's butchery emerged on May 17, 1924, on the banks of the River Leine, which runs through the city and where a growing number of human bones and skulls began washing onto the riverbanks. These savage discoveries coincided with a groundswell of rumors that human flesh was being peddled on the flourishing black market — a fact that sent the community into a frenzy of public outcry to find the brutal beast who was littering their city with human remains.

A Match Made in Hell

At the age of forty-one, Fritz Haarmann was only one of a long list of “rehabilitated” sexual offenders who roamed the streets of Hannover, having been imprisoned for nine months in 1920 for molesting a young boy. Arrested for the crime in 1918, detectives had discovered the pair in Haarmann's bed while searching for another missing child. To their horror, they would learn many years later that the decapitated head of the child they were searching for was in the same dwelling, wrapped in a newspaper and stuffed behind the stove.

After Haarmann was released from jail, he renewed an enamored relationship with a young, handsome male prostitute named Hans Grans, and the pair soon became inseparable and well-known street figures. Despite Haarmann's sketchy past as a homeless vagrant who'd spent time in his late teens in a mental institution, he and his partner developed reputations as well-dressed, respectable gentlemen who earned a decent living selling used clothing and meat on the underground market that had become a vital source for scarce goods to the people of war-ravaged Hannover. Unknown to the public, Haarmann supplemented his income as a paid police informant. Also unknown was that the “respectable” gentlemen were a pairing of unspeakable monstrosity.

Arrested Development

It would be later learned that Haarmann employed his knowledge of the workings of the police by passing himself off as a detective at the Hannover train station, where he would accost homeless runaway boys and frighten them into accompanying him back to his home. Other times, he would offer work or lodging to lure boys to their deaths. But the train station ruse finally proved to be Haarmann's undoing in June of 1924, when he became embroiled in a nasty altercation with a boy of fifteen that attracted the attention of railway police. Panicked by police intervention, Haarmann claimed the boy was traveling with false papers in an effort to have him arrested.

The attempt at diversion failed, and both were dragged to the police station for questioning, where the boy accused Haarmann of sexually harassing him — an accusation that piqued the curiosity of detectives who were working on solving the grim mystery of the sickening discoveries on the riverbank. The detectives searched Haarmann's residence and found piles of clothing and property later identified as having belonged to the growing list of missing youngsters. The spreading news of those discoveries lead to a flood of evidence, with reports of Haarmann being seen leading victims from the train station and the identification of clothing of other victims that Haarmann had sold to unsuspecting buyers.

Beware the Butcher

Haarmann broke down under incessant interrogation and confessed to his repulsive crimes, taking the police on a macabre tour of the city to show them stashes of discarded bones and skulls. In horrific detail, Haarmann described the blood-curdling methodology of his psychotic rampage, during which he would persuade boys into his home, overpower and rape them, and then sink his teeth into their windpipes and tear out their throats. Stripped of their clothing, which was later washed and prepared for sale, Haarmann decapitated and butchered the corpses down to the bone, and then coldly and neatly packaged the flesh to pass off as pork. It was revoltingly obvious that the remains and belongings of the victims were the backbone of Haarmann's thriving black market clothing and meat business.

In the sensational trial of the “Hannover Vampire” that captured the attention of the entire country, Haarmann conducted his own defense and tried to implicate his boy toy, Hans Grans, in the murders. The jury convicted Haarmann of the murder of twenty-four boys and found Grans guilty of luring one unfortunate boy into Haarmann's den of depravity. The number of victims that were accounted for, sadly, was a fraction of how many innocents Haarmann had quite literally butchered over a five-year period. Haarmann died for his crimes in April of 1925, on the guillotine of the Hannover Prison — at the hands of an executioner who decapitated him in a last and final irony of justice.