Fritz Haarmann: the Hanover killer who worked for the police

• Born25 October 1879, Hanover, Germany
• Full nameFriedrich Heinrich Karl Haarmann
• KillingsSeptember 1918 to June 1924, Hanover
• ArrestedNight of 22–23 June 1924
• Convicted19 December 1924, Hanover assize court: 24 of 27 murders charged
• SentenceDeath
• Executed15 April 1925, by guillotine, in the courtyard of Hanover’s court prison

Fritz Haarmann was a small-time thief and fence in Hanover who, in the years after the First World War, also worked as an informant for the city’s police. Between September 1918 and June 1924 he took boys and young men, aged between 10 and 22, back to his rooms in the old town, killed them and cut up their bodies. In December 1924 a Hanover court convicted him of 24 murders and sentenced him to death. He was executed in April 1925.

The case shocked Weimar Germany, and not only because of what he did. Haarmann found his victims among the runaways, the unemployed and the drifters who slept in the waiting rooms of Hanover’s main station, and he did it for years while passing information to detectives. Families who reported their sons missing were often not taken seriously. The philosopher Theodor Lessing, who covered the trial and wrote a book about it, was barred from the courtroom for saying so.

This account rests on Lessing’s 1925 book, now freely available, and on later reporting by the German press: Der Tagesspiegel, Die Welt, Deutschlandfunk, NDR, Der Spiegel, taz, Deutsche Welle and the dpa news agency, among others, listed at the end. Where they disagree, it says so. The boys and young men he killed, and their families, are not named here.

A Hanover childhood

Friedrich Heinrich Karl Haarmann was born in Hanover on 25 October 1879, the youngest of six children. Accounts agree that he was close to his mother and on very bad terms with his father.

In 1895 he was sent to a preparatory school for army NCOs at Neubreisach. In 1896 he was prosecuted for sexual offences against young children; the case was dropped on grounds of mental incapacity, and in February 1897 he was committed to the provincial asylum at Hildesheim. He escaped before the year was out; Lessing dates the escape to Christmas Day 1897 and says he fled to Switzerland.

In 1900 he was called up again, to a rifle battalion in Alsace, and in 1902 he was discharged as unfit. Over the next decade he was in and out of prison for theft, fraud and burglary. In 1913 he was sentenced to five years in a penitentiary, which meant he spent the whole of the war behind bars. He was released in April 1918.

Informant, fence and killer

Hanover after the war was hungry and full of displaced young men. Haarmann settled back into the city’s underworld, dealing in stolen goods and black-market meat, and at the same time began working for the police as an informant on the criminal scene around the station. He carried a police identity card that let him into the station’s waiting rooms at night. Der Spiegel calls it an official pass; Lessing, writing in 1925, left open whether it was official, noting that many witnesses said it was. Either way, detectives used him, and he used them.

The first killing he was convicted of was committed at the end of September 1918, in a room he rented on Cellerstraße. When a missing boy was traced to that address, police came to the room, found Haarmann with another boy and arrested him for that, but missed what was hidden there; Haarmann later said the murdered boy’s head had been behind the stove at the time. After that the record falls silent until February 1923. From then until his arrest sixteen months later the killings came quickly, most of them in a cramped attic room in the Rote Reihe, a narrow street in the Calenberger Neustadt where he lived from June 1923. The house no longer stands.

His method of finding victims was always the same. He approached young men in the station’s waiting rooms and concourse, sometimes showing his pass, and offered them food, a bed for the night or the prospect of work. In his own statements he described killing them by biting into their throats while strangling them. His accounts changed over time, and the court rejected his claim that he had acted in a frenzy, finding instead that he had killed deliberately. He cut up the bodies and dropped the remains in the Leine, the river that runs through the city.

For much of this time Haarmann shared his life, and at times his rooms, with Hans Grans, a young man about twenty years his junior who was his lover and business partner. Grans sold the victims’ clothes and belongings. Haarmann at one point accused him of picking out boys for him, and later withdrew the accusation.

Skulls in the Leine

In May and June 1924 human skulls turned up in and beside the Leine, the first of them found by children playing on the bank; accounts give four or five. Rumour spread through the city. When the river was searched, the police recovered around 500 bones and body parts; from the thigh bones alone, examiners concluded that at least 22 young males had died.

Haarmann, already under suspicion, was arrested on the night of 22 to 23 June 1924 after a quarrel with a youth at the station; most sources give the date as 22 June, Lessing gives 23 June, the day he was booked into prison. In his room police found bloodstains and bloodstained clothing, and families recognised clothes belonging to their missing sons.

At first Haarmann denied everything. The police broke him by force and by fear: he was beaten, and his cell was decorated with human skulls whose eye sockets were lit from inside at night. On 1 July he confessed, to seven murders by most accounts, and the list grew in the following weeks. Over the summer of 1924 the psychiatrist Ernst Schultze examined him at Göttingen and found him legally responsible for his actions.

The trial

The trial opened before the assize court in Hanover on 4 December 1924. Haarmann was charged with 27 murders. He admitted nine, called another twelve possible and denied six. On 19 December the court convicted him of 24 and acquitted him of three, and sentenced him to death for each of the 24. Some popular accounts wrongly say he was convicted of all 27.

Grans was sentenced to death as well, for inciting one of the murders. A letter from Haarmann clearing him of that charge led to a retrial in 1926, at which the death sentence was replaced with twelve years in a penitentiary. After serving it he was held in preventive detention and in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He survived the war and died in 1975.

Theodor Lessing, a philosopher who had taught at Hanover’s technical university since 1908, reported on the trial and openly criticised both the court and the police, who had protected one of their own informants while young men disappeared. He was barred from the courtroom. His book, Haarmann: Die Geschichte eines Werwolfs, appeared in 1925 and remains the main contemporary account of the case.

Execution

He was executed by guillotine at about six in the morning on 15 April 1925 in the courtyard of Hanover’s court prison. Sources record his last words differently. The victims’ remains had been buried together in February 1925 in a grave at Stöcken cemetery in Hanover.

His head was preserved in formalin and kept for almost ninety years at the institute of forensic medicine in Göttingen. In 2014 it was cremated and buried anonymously; the news became public in January 2015.

How many?

Haarmann was convicted of 24 murders. He himself said he could not remember how many there had been. The bones from the Leine came from at least 22 young males, and historians and journalists have long suspected the true number was higher; NDR puts it at more than 30, and other missing boys who matched his victims were never accounted for. No figure beyond the court’s 24 has been proved.

The meat and the vampire

Two legends grew up around the case. The first is that Haarmann sold the flesh of his victims as meat. He did deal in cheap black-market meat, and rumours that human flesh was on sale in Hanover’s butcher shops went round before his arrest. The court thought it probable that he had disposed of flesh in some way but could not prove it, and no one has proved it since.

The second is the “vampire” or “werewolf” of Hanover, the names the press gave him. They come from his own description of biting his victims’ throats; there is no evidence of anything beyond that. A grim street rhyme from 1924, beginning “Warte, warte nur ein Weilchen” (“just wait a little while”), is still known in Germany; in it Haarmann comes with a chopper.

The case has had a long afterlife on screen. Fritz Lang’s film M (1931) is usually linked to the Düsseldorf killer Peter Kürten, though some film historians argue it also echoes the Haarmann case. Romuald Karmakar’s Der Totmacher (1995), built from the transcripts of Schultze’s interviews, starred Götz George as Haarmann and won him the best actor award at the Venice Film Festival.

Where the accounts differ

• The skulls: four or five were found in the Leine in May and June 1924.
• The police pass: official according to Der Spiegel; left open by Lessing.
• His addresses: house numbers in the Neue Straße and the Rote Reihe are given differently from one account to the next.
• Arrest: 22 or 23 June 1924, depending on whether the night of the arrest or the booking is meant.
• His confession: seven murders on 1 July 1924 in most accounts, six in some.
• Convictions: 24 of 27 charged; some popular accounts say all 27.

The portrait

The drawing above is a crop of Haarmann’s coloring page in the True Crime Activity Book for Adults. The full page surrounds him with the case: a policeman, bared fangs for the “vampire” name, market stalls hung with sausages for the meat rumours, and a skull marked 27, the number of murders he was charged with. For other case files from the same book, see Elizabeth Báthory, Harold Shipman and Andrew Urdiales.

If you find an error in this account, write to hello@truecrimeart.com and it will be corrected.

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Questions people ask

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Sources

Every date and name on this page was checked against at least two of the following. Where they disagree, the disagreement is stated in the text rather than resolved silently.

1. Theodor Lessing, Haarmann: Die Geschichte eines Werwolfs (Die Schmiede, Berlin, 1925)Project Gutenberg
2. Friedrich Haarmann: Der Werwolf von HannoverDer Tagesspiegel, 1 July 2014
3. Fritz Haarmann: 24-facher Mörder – „Ich habe ihren Adamsapfel durchbissen“Die Welt, 21 December 2023
4. Spektakuläre Kriminalfälle: Fritz Haarmann war der Vampir von HannoverDie Welt, 1 October 2008
5. Das Monster von HannoverDeutschlandfunk, 15 April 2005
6. Fritz Haarmann: Der Triebtäter war PolizeispitzelNDR, 23 June 2014
7. „Warte, warte nur ein Weilchen“ – Tod eines Serienmörders (dpa)beck-aktuell, 9 April 2025
8. Kinder finden Schädel – dann beginnt in Hannover die Suche nach einem Mördert-online Hannover, 21 May 2023
9. Serienmörder Fritz Haarmann: „Der Schlächter von Hannover“Deutsche Welle, 14 April 2025
10. „Fritz, du bist doch der Beste!“taz, 10 March 2007
11. Grans, HansNiedersächsische Personen (Niedersächsische Bibliographie)
12. Fritz Haarmann: Kopf von Massenmörder eingeäschertDer Spiegel, 24 January 2015
13. Fritz Haarmanns Kopf eingeäschertn-tv, 24 January 2015
14. Neuerscheinung eines Klassikers: „Haarmann – Die Geschichte eines Werwolfs“ von Theodor LessingKriminalia, 23 June 2011
15. Publizist Theodor Lessing: Keine Solidarität für den SchriftstellerFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 8 February 2022
16. Theodor Lessing: Ermordung eines deutschen ProfessorsLegal Tribune Online, 26 August 2018
17. Der Massenmörder Fritz HaarmannCalenberger Neustadt (local history site)
18. Der Totmacherfilmportal.de
19. Der TotmacherRomuald Karmakar (official site)
20. Fritz Lang’s M: the blueprint for the serial killer movieBFI, 5 September 2014
21. M (1931)Deep Focus Review

The facts on this page come from public records and the published sources above. If you find an error, write to hello@truecrimeart.com and it will be corrected.

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