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GROSSMANN Karl Friedrich Wilhelm

*1863

+1921

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aka Berlin Butcher

1910

1921

Berlin

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Urteil:

Large and ugly, with a surly disposition, Grossmann was a sexual degenerate and sadist who included bestiality among his various perversions. Twenty-five arrests throughout his criminal career included three convictions for molesting children -- one of whom was killed. Once employed as a butcher, Grossmann preferred to live by begging in the streets, invariably spending his receipts on sleazy prostitutes who nightly shared his bed. Protected by his rap sheet from the military draft in World War I, he soon devised a way to turn a profit on his appetites. Before the outbreak of hostilities, Grossmann rented a squalid upstairs flat in the slums of Berlin, near the terminus of the Silesian railway. Sour and secretive, he was loathed by his neighbors but paid his rent on time, and the landlord left him alone. Grossmann's flat had been constructed with a separate entrance, and the other tenants seldom thought of him before the early morning hours, whö.½ DG½ F
½ en he stumbled home from all-night drinking bouts with giggling prostitutes in tow. He could afford the booze and women now, because he had devised another source of income. While the war and subsequent depression nearly ruined Germany, with famine a result of failure on the battlefield, Georg Grossmann peddled fresh meat in the streets. His neighbors might be starving, but the man upstairs was never phased by rationing or shortages. In August 1921, the landlord was disturbed by sounds of violent struggle, emanating from the butcher's flat. Police were summoned, and they found a freshly murdered woman in the kitchen, trussed up like a hog for slaughter. Evidence recovered from the flat suggested Grossmann had dispatched at least three women in as many weeks; his diary and his statements to police revealed that he had used the women sexually, then sold their flesh as beef or pork, disposing of the "useless" remnants in a nearby river. Grossmann's case inevitably called up recent memories of Karl Denke in Silesia, and newspapers dubbed it the case of the "bread and butter brides." (A "bride," in Germany, may either be a newly-married woman or a one-night stand.) Georg laughed when he was sentenced by the court to die and cheated justice, as had Denke, by hanging himself in his cell. An interesting sidelight of the Grossmann case involves the search for Anastasia, the Russian grand duchess believed, by some, to have escaped the Marxist firing squad that killed her family. At one point, it was claimed that "Anastasia" was in fact a Polish peasant girl, Franziska Schamzkovski, but supporters of the would-be duchess countered that Schamzkovski had been killed by Grossmann during August 1920. Their authority -- an entry in the killer's diary for "Sasnovski" -- failed to silence critics of the would-be Anastasia. Prison Suicide

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