Peter Kürten

Peter Kürten was born into a poverty-stricken, abusive family in Mülheim am Rhein on 26 May 1883, the oldest of thirteen children (two of whom died at an early age).[9] Kürten's parents were both alcoholics who lived in a one-bedroom apartment,[10] and Kürten's father frequently beat his wife and children, particularly when he was drunk. When intoxicated, Kürten's father often forced his wife and children to assemble before him before ordering his wife to strip naked and have sex with him as his children watched.[11] He was jailed for eighteen months in 1897 for repeatedly raping his eldest daughter,[12] who was aged 13.[13] Shortly thereafter, Kürten's mother obtained a separation order, and later remarried and relocated to Düsseldorf.[14]

In 1888, Kürten attempted to drown one of his playmates. Four years later, he befriended a local dog-catcher who lived in the same building as his family, and began accompanying him on his rounds. This individual often tortured and killed the animals he caught, and Kürten soon became an active and willing participant in torturing the animals.[12]

Being the eldest surviving son, Kürten was the target of much of his father's physical abuse and frequently refused to return home from school as a result.[15] Although he was a good student, he later recollected his academic performance suffered due to the extensive physical violence he endured. From an early age, Kürten often ran away from home for periods of time ranging from days to weeks. Much of the time Kürten spent on the streets was in the company of petty criminals and social misfits.[16] Via these acquaintances, Kürten was introduced to various forms of petty crime, which he initially committed as a means of feeding and clothing himself when living on the streets.[17]

Kürten later claimed to have committed his first murders at the age of nine,[18] when he pushed a school friend who he knew was unable to swim off a log raft. When a second boy attempted to save the drowning youngster, Kürten held his head under the water, so that both boys drowned. Both deaths were ruled by authorities as being accidental.[11]

At the age of 13, Kürten formed a relationship with a girl his age and, although she allowed Kürten to undress and fondle her, she would resist any attempts he made to engage in intercourse.[19] To relieve his sexual urges, Kürten resorted to acts of bestiality with the sheep, pigs and goats in local stables, but later claimed he obtained his greatest sense of elation if he actually stabbed these animals just before his achieving orgasm.[20] Thus, he began stabbing and slashing animals with increasing frequency to achieve orgasms, although he was adamant this behaviour ended when he was observed stabbing a pig. He also attempted to rape the same sister his father had earlier molested.[21]

In 1897, Kürten left school. At his father's insistence, he obtained employment as an apprentice molder.[13] This apprenticeship lasted for two years before Kürten stole all the money he could find in his household, plus approximately 300 marks from his employer,[22] and ran away from home. He relocated to Koblenz, where he began a brief relationship with a prostitute two years his senior who, he claimed, willingly submitted to every form of sexual perversion he demanded of her.[11] He was apprehended just four weeks later and charged with both breaking and entering and theft, and subsequently sentenced to one month's imprisonment. He was released from prison in August 1899 and reverted to the life of petty crime he had lived before his arrest.[n 1]

Shortly thereafter, in 1900, Kürten was arrested for fraud. He would be rearrested later the same year on the same charge, although on this second occasion, charges pertaining to his 1899 Düsseldorf thefts, plus the attempted murder of a girl with a firearm, were added to the indictment.[11] Consequently, Kürten was sentenced to four years' imprisonment in October 1900. He served this sentence in Derendorf, a borough of Düsseldorf.[21]

Released in the summer of 1904, Kürten was drafted into the Imperial German Army; he was deployed to the city of Metz in Lorraine to serve in the 98th Infantry Regiment, although he soon deserted. That autumn, Kürten began committing acts of arson, which he would discreetly watch from a distance as emergency services attempted to extinguish the fires. The majority of these fires were in barns and haylofts, and Kürten would admit to police he had committed around 24 acts of arson upon his arrest that New Year's Eve. He also freely admitted these fires had been committed both for his sexual excitement and in the hope of burning sleeping tramps alive.[n 2]

As a result of his desertion, Kürten was tried by the military court and convicted of desertion in addition to multiple counts of arson, robbery and attempted robbery (the latter charges pertaining to acts he had also committed that year), and was subsequently imprisoned from 1905 to 1913. Kürten served his sentence in Münster, with much of his time spent in solitary confinement for repeated instances of insubordination.[27] He would later claim to investigators and psychologists this period of incarceration was that in which he first encountered severe forms of discipline, and as such, the erotic fantasies he had earlier developed while incarcerated in Derendorf expanded to include graphic fantasies of his striking out at society and killing masses of people; these fantasies became ever more paramount and overbearing in his mind, and Kürten later claimed that he derived the "sort of pleasures from these visions that other people would get from thinking about a naked woman",[28] adding that he occasionally spontaneously ejaculated while preoccupied with such thoughts.[29]

Christine Klein

The first murder Kürten definitively committed occurred on 25 May 1913. During the course of a burglary at a tavern in Mülheim am Rhein, he encountered a nine-year-old girl named Christine Klein asleep in her bed. Kürten strangled the child, then slashed her twice across the throat with a pocket knife, ejaculating as he heard the blood dripping from her wounds onto the floor by her bed and on his hand.[31]

The following day, Kürten specifically returned to Köln to drink in a tavern located directly opposite that in which he had murdered Klein, so that he could listen to the locals' reactions to the child's murder. He later recollected to investigators that he derived an extreme sense of gratification from the general disgust, repulsion, and outrage he had heard in the patrons' conversations.[32] Moreover, in the weeks following Klein's funeral, Kürten occasionally travelled to Mülheim am Rhein to visit the child's grave, adding that when he handled the soil covering the grave, he spontaneously ejaculated.[33]

Two months later—again in the course of committing a burglary with the aid of a skeleton key—Kürten broke into a home in Düsseldorf. Discovering a 17-year-old girl named Gertrud Franken asleep in her bed, Kürten manually strangled the girl, ejaculating at the sight of blood spouting from her mouth, before leaving the crime scene.[34] Kürten managed to escape from the scene of this attempted murder and the earlier murder of Klein undetected.[35]

Just days after the attempted murder of Franken, on 14 July, Kürten was arrested for a series of arson attacks and burglaries. He was sentenced to six years imprisonment,[36] although his repeated instances of insubordination, while imprisoned, saw his incarceration extended by a further two years. Kürten served this sentence in a military prison in the town of Brieg (then part of the German Empire).[29]

Released in April 1921, Kürten relocated to Altenburg, where he initially lived with his sister. Through his sister, Kürten became acquainted with a woman three years his senior named Auguste Scharf, a sweet shop proprietor and former prostitute who had previously been convicted of shooting her fiancé to death,[37] and to whom Kürten initially posed as a former prisoner of war. Two years later, Kürten and Scharf married, and although the couple regularly engaged in sex, Kürten later admitted he could consummate his marriage only by fantasising about committing violence against another individual,[6] and that, after their wedding night, he engaged in intercourse with his wife only at her invitation.

For the first time in his life, Kürten obtained regular employment, also becoming an active trades union official,[38] although, with the exception of his wife, he formed no close friendships. In 1925, he returned with Scharf to Düsseldorf, where he soon began affairs with a servant girl named Tiede and a housemaid named Mech. Both women were frequently subjected to partial strangulation when they submitted to intercourse, with Tiede once being informed by Kürten, "That's what love means."[39] When his wife discovered his infidelity, Tiede reported Kürten to police, claiming he had seduced her; Mech alleged Kürten had raped her. The more serious charge was later dropped, although Tiede's allegations were pursued, thus earning Kürten an eight-month prison sentence for seduction and threatening behaviour. Kürten served six months of this sentence, with his early release being upon the condition he left Düsseldorf.[36] He later successfully appealed the ruling that he relocate from the city.[40]

Elizabeth Dörrier

On the evening of 30 September, Kürten encountered a 31-year-old servant girl named Ida Reuter at Düsseldorf station. He successfully persuaded Reuter to accompany him to a café, then for a walk through the local Hofgarten close to the Rhine River.[62] At this location, he repeatedly struck her about the head with a hammer both before and after he had raped her. At one stage in this assault, Reuter regained consciousness and began pleading with Kürten to spare her life. In response, Kürten simply "gave her other hammer blows on the head and misused her".[62]

Eleven days later, on 11 October, he encountered a 22-year-old servant girl named Elizabeth Dörrier outside a theatre. As had been the case with Reuter, Dörrier agreed to accompany Kürten for a drink at a café before the pair took a train to Grafenberg, with view to a walk alongside the Kleine Düssel river, where she was struck once across her right temple with a hammer, then raped. Kürten struck her repeatedly about the head and both temples with his hammer and left her for dead.[63] Dörrier was found in a coma at 6:30 a.m. the following morning; she died from her injuries the following day. On 25 October, Kürten attacked two women with a hammer; both survived,[64] although in the second instance, this may have been because Kürten's hammer broke in the attack.[63]

On 7 November 1929, Kürten encountered a 5-year-old girl named Gertrude Albermann in the Flingern district of Düsseldorf; he persuaded the child to accompany him to a section of deserted allotments, where he seized her by the throat and strangled her, stabbing her once in the left temple with a pair of scissors as per his modus operandi.[63] When Albermann "collapsed to the ground without a sound", Kürten stabbed the child 34 further times in the temple and chest before placing her body in a pile of nettles close to a factory wall.[65]

Two days after the murder of Gertrude Albermann, a local communist newspaper received a map revealing the location of the grave of Maria Hahn.[70] In this drawing, Kürten also revealed precisely where he had left Albermann's body (which had been found earlier that day), describing the exact position of her corpse,[71] which he stated could be found face-down among bricks and rubble.[69] An analysis of the handwriting revealed the author was the same individual who had anonymously informed police in a letter dated 14 October[72] that he had killed Hahn and buried her body "at the edge of the woods". Each of the three letters Kürten had thus far sent to newspapers and police describing his exploits and threatening further assaults and murders were examined by a graphologist,[73] who confirmed the same individual had written each letter, thus leading Ernst Gennat, chief inspector of the Berlin Police, to conclude that one man was responsible for most or all of the spate of assaults and murders.

The murder of Gertrude Albermann proved to be Kürten's final fatal attack, although he did engage in a spate of non-fatal hammer attacks and attempted strangulations between February and May 1930,[74] maiming ten victims in these assaults.[67] All the victims survived and many were able to describe their attacker to police.

On 14 May 1930, an unknown man approached a 20-year-old woman named Maria Budlick at Düsseldorf station.[75] Discovering Budlick had travelled to Düsseldorf from Köln in search of lodgings and employment, he offered to direct her towards a local hostel. Budlick agreed to follow the man, although she became apprehensive when he attempted to lead her through a scarcely populated park. The pair began to argue, whereupon another man approached the two, asking whether Budlick was being pestered by her companion. When Budlick nodded, the man with whom she had been arguing simply walked away.[76] The identity of the man who reportedly came to Budlick's aid was Peter Kürten.[77]

Kürten invited the distressed young woman to his apartment on Mettmanner Straße to eat and drink before Budlick—correctly deducing the underlying motive for Kürten's hospitality—stated she was uninterested in engaging in sex with him.[78] Kürten calmly agreed and offered to lead Budlick to a hotel, although he instead lured her into the Grafenburg Woods, where he seized her by the throat and attempted to strangle her as he raped her. When Budlick began to scream, Kürten released his grasp on her throat, before allowing her to leave.[52]

Budlick did not report this assault to police, but described her ordeal in a letter to a friend, although she addressed the letter incorrectly. As such, the letter was opened at the post office by a clerk on 19 May. Upon reading the contents of the letter, this clerk forwarded the letter to the Düsseldorf police. This letter was read by Chief Inspector Gennat, who assumed there was a slim chance Budlick's assailant might be the Düsseldorf murderer. Gennat interviewed Budlick, who recounted her ordeal, further divulging one of the reasons Kürten had spared her was because she had falsely informed him she could not remember his address. She agreed to lead the police to Kürten's home, on Mettmanner Straße. When the landlady of the property let Budlick into the room of 71 Mettmanner Straße, Budlick confirmed to Gennat this was the address of her assailant. The landlady confirmed to the chief inspector the tenant's name was Peter Kürten.[79]

As Kürten awaited his trial, then later as he awaited his execution, he was extensively interviewed by Dr. Karl Berg.[86] In these interviews, Kürten stated to Dr. Berg that his primary motive in committing any form of criminal activity was one of sexual pleasure, and that he had begun to associate sexual excitement with violent acts and the sight of blood via indulging in both day-dreams and masturbation fantasies — particularly when he had been isolated from human contact.[79] The majority of his assaults and murders had been committed when his wife had been working evenings, and the number of stab or bludgeoning wounds Kürten inflicted upon each victim had varied depending upon the length of time it had taken him to achieve an orgasm. Furthermore, the actual sight of his victim's blood had been integral to his sexual stimulation. Kürten further elaborated to Dr. Berg that once he had committed an attack or murder, the feeling of tension he experienced before the commission of the crime would be superseded by one of relief.[87]

In reference to the actual choice of weapon used in his attacks, Kürten stressed that although he had changed his actual method of attack to deceive investigators into believing they were seeking more than one perpetrator, the weapon he used was inconsequential in reference to his ultimate objective of seeing his victim's blood. Elaborating, Kürten stated: "Whether I took a knife or a pair of scissors or a hammer in order to see blood was a matter of indifference to me or mere chance. Often after the hammer blows the bleeding victims moved and struggled, just as they did when they were throttled."[88] Kürten further confided that although he had occasionally penetrated his female victims, he had only done so to feign the act of coitus as a motive for his crimes. He also confessed that many of his later strangulation victims had only survived his attacks because he had achieved an orgasm in the early throes of the assault.[89]

However, Kürten contradicted these claims by proclaiming to both Dr. Berg and legal examiners that his primary motive in all his criminal activities was to both "strike back at [an] oppressive society" for what he considered the injustice of his being repeatedly incarcerated throughout his life, and as a form of revenge for the neglect and abuse he had endured as a child.[90] These desires had fomented in his mind throughout the long periods he had been in solitary confinement for various forms of insubordination,[79] and Kürten explained that he deliberately broke minor prison rules as a means of guaranteeing that he would be sentenced to solitary confinement in order that he could indulge in these psychosexual fantasies.[91] To Dr. Berg and the legal examiners, Kürten did not deny that he had sexually molested his female victims, or to have stroked or digitally penetrated their genitals as he stabbed, slashed, strangled or bludgeoned their bodies, although throughout his trial Kürten consistently claimed the sexual assault of his victims was not his primary motive.

Both Berg and other psychologists concluded Kürten was not insane, was fully able to control his actions, and appreciated the criminality of his conduct. Each ruled Kürten was legally sane and competent to stand trial.[92][n 4]

The trial lasted ten days. On 22 April, the jury retired to consider their verdict. They deliberated for under two hours before reaching their verdict:[106] Kürten was found guilty and sentenced to death on nine counts of murder. He was also found guilty of seven counts of attempted murder. Kürten displayed no emotion as the sentence was passed, although in his final address to the court, he stated that he now saw his crimes as being "so ghastly that [he did] not want to make any sort of excuse for them".[107]

Kürten did not lodge an appeal of his conviction, although he submitted a petition for pardon to the Minister of Justice, who was a known opponent to capital punishment.[108] The petition was formally rejected on 1 July. Kürten remained composed upon receipt of this news, and asked for permission to see his confessor,[108] to write letters of apology to the relatives of his victims, and a final farewell letter to his wife. All of these requests were granted.[92]

• The first film to draw inspiration from the murders committed by Peter Kürten, M, was released in May 1931. Directed by Fritz Lang, M starred Peter Lorre as a fictional child killer named Hans Beckert. In addition to drawing inspiration from the case of Peter Kürten, M was also inspired by the then-recent and notorious crimes of Fritz Haarmann and Carl Großmann.[115]
• The 1965 thriller Le Vampire de Düsseldorf (The Vampire of Düsseldorf) is based on the case of Peter Kürten. Directed by Robert Hossein (who also cast himself as Peter Kürten), the film also stars Marie-France Pisier.[116]
• The 2009 film Normal is based on the crimes of Peter Kürten. Directed by Julius Ševčík, Normal is a film adaptation of playwright Anthony Neilson's Normal: The Düsseldorf Ripper. The film stars Milan Kňažko as Kürten, and is portrayed from the point of view of his defense lawyer.

• Berg, Karl (1938) The Sadist ISBN 978-9-333-35227-7
• Berg, Karl; Godwin, George (1937) Monsters of Weimar: Kürten, the Vampire of Düsseldorf ISBN 1-897743-10-6
• Cawthorne, Nigel; Tibballs, Geoffrey (1993) Killers: The Ruthless Exponents of Murder ISBN 0-7522-0850-0
• Elder, Sace (2010) Murder Scenes: Normality, Deviance, and Criminal Violence in Weimar Berlin ISBN 978-0-472-11724-6
• Godwin, George (1938) Peter Kürten: A Study In Sadism ASIN = B00191ENHA
• Lane, Brian; Gregg, Wilfred (1992) The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers ISBN 978-0-747-23731-0
• Nash, Jay Robert (2004) The Great Pictorial History of World Crime, Volume 2 ISBN 978-1-461-71215-2
• Swinney, C.L. (2016) Monster: The True Story of Serial Killer Peter Kürten ISBN 978-1-987-90215-0
• Wilson, Colin; Wilson, Damon (2006) The World's Most Evil Murderers: Real-Life Stories of Infamous Killers ISBN 978-1-405-48828-0
• Wilson, Colin; Wilson, Damon; Wilson, Rowan (1993) The Giant Book of World Famous Murders ISBN 978-0-752-50122-2
• Wynn, Douglas (1996) On Trial For Murder ISBN 978-0-3303-3947-6

• Normal: The Düsseldorf Ripper is a play focusing on the case of Peter Kürten. Scripted by Anthony Neilson, the play was first performed at Edinburgh's Pleasance Theatre in August 1991. Normal: The Düsseldorf Ripper has since become inspiration for one film.[117]

• The BBC commissioned a documentary upon the murders committed by Peter Kürten. This documentary, Profiles of the Criminal Mind, largely focuses on the forensic profiling of Kürten's crimes, and was first broadcast in 2001.[118]