Armin Meiwes

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Armin Meiwes (* 1. December 1961 in Essen ) is a for murder to life imprisonment of convicted German computer technician. He became known as the "cannibal of Rotenburg " because he had eaten parts of the body of his victim.

Life

Meiwes' father, his mother's third husband, left the family when Meiwes was nine years old. After his two older half-brothers moved to Berlin, Meiwes grew up alone with his mother in Essen-Holsterhausen . He developed his first cannibalistic fantasies around the age of twelve . According to his own statements, he was inspired, among other things, by a film adaptation of Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe . According to the assessment of a psychiatrist who examined him after the crime, Meiwes had suffered from inferiority complexes and an attachment disorder since childhood . After secondary school and a discontinued commercial training, Meiwes signed up for twelve years as a contract soldier in the German Armed Forces in 1981 , where he was stationed most of the time in Rotenburg an der Fulda in northern Hesse . There he lived with his mother in a large house in the remote Rotenburg-Wüstefeld . He completed his training as a sergeant and administrative clerk and ended his service with the rank of sergeant major . Later he worked as a computer technician for a bank data center in Kassel.

After his mother's death in 1999, he used the internet to search for people who were willing to volunteer as victims of cannibalism. In February 2001 he got to know the then 43-year-old engineer Bernd Jürgen Brandes, who was employed in a managerial position at Siemens AG in Berlin and, according to a witness, had already expressed the desire for mutilation in the Berlin prostitute scene . On March 9, 2001, Meiwes and Brandes met at the Kassel train station and drove to Meiwes' house in Rotenburg-Wüstefeld. Meiwes stated repeatedly and without contradicting himself that Brandes had consented to the severing of the outer part of his penis and the attempted consumption of his genitals as well as to the killing by Meiwes which followed a few hours later. Brandes had previously been given 20 sleeping pills and cough syrup for the pain. After killing Brandes with a stab in the neck, Meiwes dismantled the body and froze pieces of meat for later consumption. Meiwes documented most of the events on film. Psychiatrists who examined Meiwes after the crime suspected that he had wanted to assume the identity of his victim and "merged" with him.

On December 10, 2002, Meiwes was arrested during a house search. The police got on his trail through a tip from a student from Innsbruck , who had become aware of a contact ad from Meiwes. Meiwes was sent to the Kassel-Wehlheiden prison.

In December 2003, Meiwes was charged with the murder of Brandes in the Kassel district court . At the beginning of the trial, Meiwes made a full confession, emphasizing that he had not killed for sexual reasons. His defense attorney stated that Meiwes was driven by his obsessive desire for human flesh and called for "appropriate punishment" for killing on demand . According to the public prosecutor's office, the victim suffered from an extreme form of masochism and no longer controllable fantasies of self-destruction. She moved to be convicted of murder, but did not plead for a particular gravity of the guilt . On January 30, 2004, the Kassel Regional Court sentenced Meiwes to eight and a half years imprisonment for manslaughter . The court found Meiwes guilty and classified his victim as incapable of a will. In this respect, it was at fault to comply with his request to kill. The present four and a half hour video of the crime, which was recorded by Meiwes and in which the event was documented, served as the basis for the forensic investigations. These were carried out by the physician Manfred Riße , who published a book in September 2007 in which the work on this particular case is processed and presented.

On April 22, 2005, the Federal Court of Justice overturned the judgment and referred the case to the Regional Court of Frankfurt am Main for renegotiation on the basis of the following grounds : "The conviction for manslaughter only and not for murder does not stand up to legal scrutiny". The main hearing before the 21st criminal chamber of the jury court began on January 12, 2006, on May 9, 2006 Meiwes was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder and disturbance of the peace of the dead , which in the opinion of the court constituted the consumption of a corpse. The Federal Court of Justice confirmed this decision in February 2007. A constitutional complaint directed against this by Meiwes was not accepted for decision by the Federal Constitutional Court on October 7, 2008.

Meiwes is now in the Kassel II correctional facility . This is a socio-therapeutic institution . There he joined the “Green Prison Group”, which sees itself as a discussion and self-help group within the prison that is politically close to the Greens , which in 2007 caused outrage on the part of the CDU Hessen . However, the green member of the state parliament Andreas Jürgens stated that Meiwes had not become a full member of the Greens. Meiwes described his act in a newspaper interview in July 2013 as wrong and "completely abnormal". A release from custody was possible in December 2017 at the earliest. In November 2017, Meiwes applied for early release from custody. The Kassel Regional Court rejected the application, whereupon it filed a complaint with the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court. With a decision of September 27, 2018, the OLG rejected the complaint because "the LG correctly assumed that the convicted person could not currently make a favorable forecast ". This order can not be contested.

Artistic processing

  • The songs Mein Teil by Rammstein , Armin Meiwes of the rapper Felix Krull and Oettigang , slaughter of the wild boys , Eaten by Bloodbath , cannibals of Suicide Commando , The Wustenfeld Man Eater of death metal trio Macabre , Perverted appettite of Death Metal band MOSHQUITO , sacrament of the Thuringian metal band Macbeth , and the Cannibal of Rotenburg of Vicki Vomit process the history of music. In the song When the Ripper Grabs You by Blokkmonsta and Dr. Faustus from Hirntot Records , in the song Horrormusic by Kool Savas and in the track Fernsehkompatibel by Pimpulsiv , Meiwes is mentioned. In the song The Consumption of People by the songwriter The 3 Lustigen Two , Meiwes is referred to as a "revolutionary".
  • Several plays are inspired by this case, for example 69 by Igor Bauersima and a meat by Christoph Prückner. Furthermore, in the play Abendwinds Abendmahl - No Evening for Vegetarians, staged by Bruno Max at the Vienna Theater Scala, the conversations between Meiwes and the examining psychiatrist are performed. In the final scene of her play Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel) Elfriede Jelinek lets the "cannibal of Rotenburg" appear and hold a four-minute dialogue with his victim.
  • In January 2004, the satirical magazine Titanic jokingly brought up Meiwes as the successor to Florian Gerster as head of the Federal Employment Agency (“Already 10 unemployed fewer”).
  • The Hamburg comic artist Wittek and copywriter Karl Nagel were inspired by the Meiwes case for their comic Hunger .
  • In the British sitcom The IT Crowd , the character Moss replies to a personal ad from a German living in England, which he mistakenly believes is an offer for a cooking class. However, the advertiser is a cannibal who wants to cook the interested party himself and not with them.
  • The horror film Rohtenburg , which was due to hit German cinemas on March 9, 2006, portrays the life of the cannibal Oliver Hartwin , played by Thomas Kretschmann , who murdered and consumed a man. Meiwes took legal action against the work, as he had not given his consent to the processing of his life in this form and the film, in particular with regard to ongoing criminal proceedings, violated his personal rights. On March 3, 2006, at the request of Armin Meiwes, the Frankfurt am Main Higher Regional Court issued an injunction prohibiting the film from being shown. The plaintiff's personal rights are to be valued more highly than a possible artistic processing of the subject, especially since the correspondence between film and reality could be demonstrated 'sufficiently credibly'. On 17 July 2008, the Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt am Main upheld a decision of the District Court of Kassel, which is the marketing prohibited the film, and thus essentially its decision dated March 3, 2006. The verdict was revision appealed to the Federal Court, which on 26th May 2009 was granted, so that the film can be shown in Germany.
  • In the horror film Cannibal - from the diary of the cannibal by Marian Dorora with the main actors Carsten Frank and Victor Brandl, exactly the same act is depicted, with the mutilation and slaughter being shown very clearly. This film was confiscated nationwide by AG Neuburg / Donau on May 25, 2007 for violent pornography (Section 184a StGB).
  • In the plot of the drama Your heart in my brain by Rosa von Praunheim from 2005 with the main actors Martin Ontrop and Martin Molitor , the "Cannibals of Rothenburg" (spelling according to von Praunheim's catalog raisonné on the Internet) is alluded to.
  • The Australian thriller Feed by Brett Leonard shows in the first few minutes of the film how a police squadron storms the house of the "cannibal of Rotenburg" and catches him in the act as he feeds his victim with his own body parts.
  • In the story Diesseits des Van Allen Belt by Wolfgang Herrndorf (2004), the “cannibal of Rotenburg” becomes the subject of a conversation about the forlornness of man. Quote on page 11: "I thought, maybe because both were so normal ," he began again. "That that is the explanation. One engineer, the other also something boring. "-" Then be afraid of the future. "(...)
  • In the novel Eiroremonts (EuroRemont, 2005) by Pauls Bankovskis , the paragraph “I read newspapers. Some reports seem so chiseled out that they are difficult to distinguish from your own fantasies, for example this: “The Latvian translation of a newspaper article about Meiwes and Brandes (p. 263 f.).
  • In the series Bones (Season 3, Episode 4 “Organic Waste and its Secrets”) the “Cannibal von Rotenburg” is mentioned by name as an allusion.

literature

  • Klaus M. Beier: Sexual cannibalism - Sexological analysis of anthropophagy. Elsevier, Urban & Fischer, Munich 2007, ISBN 3-437-23930-9 .
  • Thomas Knecht: Cannibalism as a motive for killing. In: The Criminalist. 2005, No. 2, p. 69 f. and No. 3, pp. 127-129.
  • Egon Petricius, Bernd Ramm: The cannibal case of Rotenburg. Industry forum Schmidt, Alheim 2004, ISBN 3-00-012910-3 .
  • Manfred Riße: Last Supper of the Murderers. Cannibals - Myth and Reality. Militzke, Leipzig 2007, ISBN 3-86189-776-8 .
  • Hans-Uwe Scharnweber: Cannibalism, homicides and a judicial scandal. AtheneMedia-Verlag Dinslaken 2012, ISBN 978-3-86992-082-5
  • Jörg Scheinfeld: The cannibal case. Constitutional objections to the classification as murder and the imposition of life imprisonment. Mohr Siebeck 2009, ISBN 978-3-16-150116-6 .
  • Günter Stampf: Interview with a cannibal - The secret life of the cannibal von Rotenburg. Seeliger, Wolfenbüttel 2007, ISBN 3-936281-24-6 .
  • Hans-Volker Werthmann: The emptiness was gone. Psychoanalytic comments on the Rotenburg cannibalism case. In: Psyche. 2006, No. 8, pp. 763-775.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Martin Knobbe, Detlef Schmalenberg: Crime: The cannibale. In: Stern . July 22, 2003, accessed November 30, 2018.
  2. ^ A b c Matthias Bartsch: He wanted to be like Crusoes Friday. In: Spiegel Online . January 16, 2006, accessed December 1, 2018.
  3. ↑ Alexandra Frank: cannibals and love. In: Zeit Online. September 13, 2007, accessed November 30, 2018.
  4. ↑ Michael Mielke: Armin Meiwes is the "cannibal of Rothenburg". In: Welt Online. January 30, 2014, accessed November 30, 2018.
  5. ↑ The Rotenburg cannibal shocked ten years ago. December 12, 2012, accessed March 26, 2019 .
  6. ^ A chronicle of the cannibalism case of Rotenburg. In: faz.net. January 30, 2004, accessed December 1, 2018.
  7. ↑ Petra Klages: The case of Armin Meiwes. In: NGO Online . Accessed December 1, 2018.
  8. ↑ Cannibal Trial: Defender attacks the media. In: Spiegel Online. January 26, 2004, accessed December 1, 2018.
  9. ^ BGH judgment of April 22, 2005, Az. 2 StR 310/04 Lexetius.com, accessed on December 1, 2018.
  10. ↑ Press release of the BGH from February 16, 2007
  11. ^ Order of the Federal Constitutional Court
  12. ↑ a b Meiwes joins "Grüner Knastgruppe" , Welt.de , November 19, 2007.
  13. ↑ Interview with Armin Meiwes , Hessische / Niedersächsische Allgemeine from July 26, 2013
  14. ↑ No favorable prognosis for Armin Meiwes: "Cannibale von Rotenburg" remains in prison even after 15 years. In: Legal Tribune Online . Wolters Kluwer Germany , October 5, 2018, accessed October 9, 2018 .
  15. ↑ https://genius.com/Felix-krull-armin-meiwes-lyrics
personal data
SURNAME Meiwes, Armin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German criminals and cannibals
DATE OF BIRTH December 1, 1961
PLACE OF BIRTH eat