Ernst Wagner (murderer)

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Ernst August Wagner (born September 22, 1874 in Eglosheim , † April 27, 1938 in Winnenden ) was a German teacher , murderer and poet . He became famous for the mass murder he committed in 1913, which claimed a total of 14 lives.

Course of action

On the morning of September 4, 1913, Ernst August Wagner, a teacher, killed his wife and four children with a club in Stuttgart-Degerloch . He justified the murders by saying that he wanted to spare his family the consequences of his planned act and the horrors that followed. Then he rode his bike to Stuttgart and from there by train to Mühlhausen an der Enz , where he had been a teacher from 1901 to 1902. On the way to Mühlhausen, Wagner posted several letters and visited his brother. At night in Mühlhausen he set fire to four houses in different places and waited for people to flee from the flames. He then shot and killed nine people and seriously injured eleven others. He was aiming exclusively at the men from Mulhouse; that he also shot three girls and injured a woman was the only thing he later regretted during the interrogation at the Heilbronn district court . Wagner was eventually overwhelmed and imprisoned in Heilbronn . In the course of the following investigations it turned out that Wagner was planning to kill his sister and her family and finally to burn down the castle in Ludwigsburg and burn himself to death in the Duchess's bed.

Background and consequences

Wagner's father died early. His mother had several lovers afterwards, drank and possibly also prostituted herself. Wagner had already written several verse dramas in the run-up to his act, including about Emperor Nero . He had planned his act several years earlier, during which he obtained the pistols and ammunition and carried out target practice in the forest. The police found hundreds of books in his house, including by Ernst Haeckel , Henrik Ibsen , Maxim Gorki and Friedrich Nietzsche . Wagner also wrote a 300 page autobiography. He addressed his letters of confession “to my people”.

Wagner explained:

“There is far too much of the people, half should be killed right away. It is not worth the feed because it is of a bad body. "

As a motive for the act, Wagner stated that the residents of Mühlhausen mocked him in 1901 for allegedly committed but unspecified sodomist acts. However, interviews with witnesses revealed that no one had any knowledge of Wagner's alleged acts of sodomism and that he was considered a respected citizen until he ran amok. In the process in Heilbronn, the experts attested Robert Wollenberg and Robert Gaupp Wagner therefore paranoia . Gaupp described Wagner as a serious, grieving, but polite and educated man. Gaupp concluded from his studies over several years that Wagner's suppressed homosexuality, which he revealed immediately after the crime, had led to his pathological disgust for the world. Instead of being sentenced to death, Wagner was admitted to the Winnenthal sanatorium near Winnenden on February 4, 1914 . For the first time in the legal history of Württemberg, a process due to insanity was discontinued.

In the institution Ernst Wagner wrote several dramas which he unsuccessfully offered to the director of the National Theater in Mannheim and other theaters for performance.

In 1938 Wagner died of tuberculosis .

Hermann Hesse included the figure of the gunman Ernst Wagner in his story Klein und Wagner , published in 1919 .

In 1997, a symposium on the Wagner case was held at the University Psychiatric Clinic in Tübingen, at which the very different aspects and facets of this case were presented and discussed in detail in eight lectures. The publication of the lectures is accompanied by a transcription of the Winnentaler Krankenblatt from 1914 to 1938, which shows further details, including the special relationship between Wagner and his former expert Gaupp.

literature

  • Bernd Neuzner, Horst Brandstätter : Wagner - teacher, poet, mass murderer. Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 3-8218-4143-5 .
  • Robert Gaupp: main teacher Wagner. On the psychology of mass murder. Sindlinger-Burchartz publishing house, Frickenhausen 1996, ISBN 3-928812-13-0 .
  • Klaus Foerster (Ed.): Madness and mass murder. Perspectives and documents on the Wagner case. Sindlinger-Burchartz publishing house, Frickenhausen 1999, ISBN 3-928812-19-X .
  • Rolf van Raden: patient mass murderer. The Ernst Wagner Case and the Biopolitical Discourses. (= Edition DISS. Volume 25). Unrast-Verlag, Münster 2009, ISBN 978-3-89771-754-1 .
  • Philipp Blom: The tumbling continent - Europe 1900–1914. Carl Hanser-Verlag, Munich 2009, pp. 421–452 (Chapter: 1913 - Wagner's Wahn ).
  • Fred Uhlman : The partial sanity. Dissertation at the University of Tübingen, 1925 [typed]

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The mass murder in Mühlhausen - the burial of the victims. In:  Neue Freie Presse , September 9, 1913, p. 9 (online at ANNO ).Template: ANNO / Maintenance / nfp
  2. ↑ The bloody deed of the teacher Wagner - The last interrogation with the murderer. In:  Die Neue Zeitung , September 10, 1913, p. 3 (online at ANNO ).Template: ANNO / Maintenance / nzg
  3. ^ A written statement by Ernst Wagner as PDF, Baden-Württemberg State Archive
  4. ↑ a b Dagmar Dehmer: rampage: even single perpetrators have precursors . In: Der Tagesspiegel . July 27, 2011.
  5. ^ A b c d Philipp Blom : Paranoid hatred: Ernst August Wagner, 1913 - "Appoints me to the executor" . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . July 28, 2011.
  6. ↑ Wagner, Ernst August , biographical article on regional studies discover online .
  7. ↑ Testimony of the Ernst Wagner case as PDF, Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg
  8. ↑ Mass murderer Wagner insane. In:  Vorarlberger Volksblatt , February 6, 1914, p. 4 (online at ANNO ).Template: ANNO / Maintenance / vvb
  9. ^ From cruel murderer to poet, Baden-Württemberg State Archives
personal data
SURNAME Wagner, Ernst
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wagner, Ernst August (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German teacher, murderer and poet
DATE OF BIRTH September 22, 1874
PLACE OF BIRTH Eglosheim
DATE OF DEATH April 27, 1938
Place of death Winnenden