The Haarmann case and its forgotten victims
Hanover, 1925: a serial killer is executed. His victims often came from a world nobody asked about.
On 15 April 1925, Fritz Haarmann was beheaded in the courtyard of the court prison in Hanover. This ended one of the most sensational criminal cases of the Weimar Republic. Behind the horror image that the press and popular songs still cultivate today lies a story about young men whom hardly anyone was looking for.
Between 1918 and 1924, Haarmann killed at least twenty-four boys and young men aged between ten and twenty-two. Many were runaways who had washed up around the railway station in the chaos of the post-war period. Some of them moved in Hanover's homosexual milieu, which Haarmann himself also frequented. It was a world on the edge of legality, for sex between men was a crime under Paragraph 175. Those who disappeared there were often not even reported missing.
On top of that came a failure of the authorities. Haarmann was known to the police and at the same time supplied the criminal investigation department with information from the milieu as an informer. Leads pointing to him were long not followed up; after all, they knew each other. Only when human bones were found on the banks of the Leine in the spring of 1924 did the investigation get moving. The arrest followed in June, and in December the Hanover regional court sentenced him to death.
The philosopher Theodor Lessing followed the trial as a reporter and drew attention to the role of the police. An expert in forensic psychiatry later also cast doubt on his criminal responsibility, which had been affirmed at the time. How many people Haarmann actually killed is still unknown today.
What has remained is an almost folkloric fascination with the perpetrator. Hardly anyone knows the names of his victims. For queer history, it is worth turning the perspective around: towards young men on the margins of society who found no protection between poverty, criminal law and people looking away.