Anselm Hemberger

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The murder of senior teacher Anselm Hemberger (born December 23, 1859 in Hettingen (Buchen) , † 1918 in Berlin ) was one of the most sensational crimes of the period immediately after the First World War . For some historians, the crime instigated by a woman and the criminal trial are considered to be signs of brutalization of men by the war and of resistance of women to marital violence .

Sequence of events

Excavated limbs and head of Anselm Hemberger
Torso of the victim recovered from the Landwehr Canal

The marriage between Anselm and Elisabeth Hemberger, geb. Grassme was closed on April 27, 1909; she was 24, he 49 years old. The marriage resulted in two sons. Because of brutal assaults and rape , according to the unanimous assessment later in the process, Elisabeth moved with her sons to another apartment. Her husband kidnapped the children off the street and put them in a foundling home . Elisabeth had a relationship with her 13 years younger nephew Walter Protze , who served as a soldier in the war and was married in Breslau, and asked him in 1918 to help her kill her husband. Protze shot the teacher two times in the head in Berlin's Urbanstrasse . The couple put the corpse in the bathtub, separated the head and extremities from the trunk with a butcher's knife and a wood saw, packed the body parts in bags and baskets and sank them in the Landwehr Canal or buried them at the airfield in Tempelhof . Elisabeth Hemberger then reported her husband as missing.

A little later, on December 26, 1918, the police in Grünau found the body of a suicidal person (who later turned out to be Georg Hermann Gottfried Böttcher). Elisabeth Hemberger identified her as her husband. That seemed to close the case.

There are two versions of the crucial detail of how the case came to light. One says that in June 1920 the criminal investigator Riemann received a letter from Walter Protze's wife in Breslau with the information that Elisabeth Hemberger had instigated her husband to murder Anselm Hemberger. Riemann started an investigation and brought Elisabeth to a confession. The second variant says that Walter Protze, because of his bad conscience, turned himself in to the police in 1920, who initially thought he was crazy, but then investigated the matter. Protze was arrested on June 5th, 1920, and made the official confession on June 9th. The body parts were recovered.

Criminal trial

The murder trial against the nephew and his aunt began on October 6, 1921. The rush of onlookers was so great that on the days after, there were protests among the Berlin population not to be allowed into the courtroom. In the German press, the trial ran under the headline of the "spouse murder trial". The commentators split into two camps: While one of the accused showed understanding because she was exposed to the extreme violence in the marriage, the other demonized her: Elisabeth Hemberger had cold-bloodedly exploited her much younger and war-traumatized nephew and drove him to husband murder . The foreign press also reported on the trial, which lasted only four days, because it contained a unique mixture of sex, politics, psychology, chauvinism and women's emancipation.

On October 11, 1921, the jury announced the surprising verdict: Elisabeth Hemberger received two and a half years in prison, her lover Werner Protze five years. A riot broke out in the courtroom. There were an unusually large number of women in the hall who, unlike the men, did not consider the sentence for the instigator to be too low.

The case occupied criminal psychological research in the following years. One of its founders, Erich Wulffen , came to the conclusion that the judgment was unbalanced because the court overlooked the fact that Protze, as a psychological cripple, was only a tool for the intellectual woman.

literature

  • Sace Elder: Murder Scenes: Normality, Deviance, and Criminal Violence in Weimar Berlin , University of Michigan Press, 2010
  • Agnes Eszterházy: The vicious woman , Ullstein, 1989
  • Grete Meisel-Hess : Marital crises and their consequences . In The New Generation , Issue 16

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Register Office Berlin XII a, Marriage Register No. 190/1909. State Archives Berlin.
  2. ↑ Grünau registry office, death register no. 2/1919. State Archives Berlin.
  3. ↑ Sace Elder: Murder Scenes: Normality, Deviance, and Criminal Violence in Weimar Berlin , University of Michigan Press 2010, p 164ff. ISBN 978-0-472-11724-6
  4. ^ Huntington Herald, October 8, 1921
  5. ↑ Berliner Lokalanzeiger, issue 472 of October 7, 1921
  6. ↑ Erich Wulffen: The woman as a sex criminal. Langenscheidt, Berlin 1926, p. 229 f.
personal data
SURNAME Hemberger, Anselm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German spouse murder victim
DATE OF BIRTH December 23, 1859
PLACE OF BIRTH Hettingen (Buchen)
DATE OF DEATH 1918
Place of death Berlin