Fritz Honka

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Friedrich Paul Honka (born July 31, 1935 in Leipzig , † October 19, 1998 in Hamburg ) was a German serial killer .

Life

Life and career

Fritz Honka was born on Seeburgstrasse in Leipzig as the third of ten children of the carpenter Fritz Honka (senior) and his wife Else Honka, who works as a cleaner; three of the siblings died in childbirth. When he was questioned, Honka said of his youth: “My father was sent to a concentration camp . I too was sent to the youth concentration camp. I was freed by the Russians. My father too. Later on there wasn't much going to be with school. ”Honka grew up in children's homes in Leipzig . His father worked as a stoker in Leipzig. The reason for the father's imprisonment in a concentration camp is said to have been his commitment to the KPD . He died in 1946 from the consequences of excessive alcohol consumption and the long-term effects of imprisonment.

The mother was considered overwhelmed with the many children. At the beginning of the 1950s, Honka began an apprenticeship as a bricklayer, which he had to abandon due to an allergy. Honka fled to West Germany in 1951 and initially hired herself as an unskilled worker on farms in the small village of Brockhöfe in the Lüneburg Heath . There it was called "Fritze Bollmann" because of its "proper style", based on the Brandenburg original Fritze Bollmann . The son Heinrich emerged from his affair with a woman named Margot. Honka had to pay 3,000 DM alimony and left the heath village. In 1956 he came to Hamburg and was employed by the Howaldtswerke as a shipyard worker. After a serious traffic accident on a street near Barsbüttel , his facial features were disfigured by a smashed nose and pronounced squint. In 1957 he married Inge, but the marriage broke up and was divorced in 1960. His son Fritz came from this marriage. Neighbors reported violent scenes between the couple in their apartment on Wümmeweg in Hamburg- Neuwiedenthal . He and Inge got together again until their marriage was divorced for the second time in 1967.

In 1967 he moved from Neuwiedenthal to Zeißstraße 74 in Hamburg-Ottensen . In 1972 he lived there with Irmgard Albrecht for some time. When he tried to force Ruth Dufner to have sex with him and Irmgard on August 15, 1972, it was almost rape . Dufner fled naked from Honka's apartment and reported him to the police. She was then treated in the hospital. Honka, who was drunk at 2.4 per mille at the time of the crime, was registered for the first time and sentenced on April 4, 1975 by an Altona jury to a fine of 4,500 DM. A rape charge was dropped. In the following years Honka was unable to find relationships with women due to his alcohol problems. He looked for sexual contacts with prostitutes , whom he mostly met in bars near the Reeperbahn .

Murders

The serial killer Fritz Honka lived in this house in Hamburg
Hamburger Berg with the "Elbschlosskeller"

All of the murdered were of an advanced age and came from the drinking environment of the Reeperbahn. They were considered to be unattached " tramps " who prostituted themselves for accommodation and alcoholic beverages or even small amounts of money.

The disappearance of the women had no consequences, no one reported missing persons to the police. Complaints from other tenants of the house about the strong smell of corpses were also ignored.

  • Gertraud Bräuer (42 years old), hairdresser and occasional prostitute, probably murdered in December 1970. Bräuer was taken to his apartment by Honka's friend Annie Wachtmeister, where Honka demanded sex for three. When Bräuer refused, Honka killed her. Experts later estimate Honka's blood alcohol level at the time of the crime to be 4 per thousand. Bräuer's head, breasts, hands and one leg were found in a junkyard near Honka's apartment on November 2, 1971. After the head, forensic medicine reconstructed the original facial features for identification of the victim. Bräuer's torso was only discovered years later in Honka's attic apartment on Zeißstrasse.
  • Anna Beuschel (54 years old), housewife, murdered 1974. Honka met the prostitute in the pub " Zum Goldenen Handschuh ", took her into his apartment when she was drunk and strangled her because, according to him, she "lay there like a board" have. The body was mutilated and its remains were hidden in the attic.
  • Frieda "Rita" Roblick (57 years old), prostitute, murdered in December 1974 when Honka discovered that she had stolen 200 DM from him, although he had already paid her the same amount for sexual intercourse.
  • Ruth Schult (52 years), prostitute, murdered in 1975. Schult, who also came from the environment of the "Golden Glove" and had moved in with Honka, was stunned by being hit on the head with a grain bottle and then strangled with a woman's stocking. The autopsy report noted: “Legs sawed off at the thighbones. Both breasts severed. Auricles cut off smoothly. Tip of nose and tongue cut off. "

Honka on the removal of the corpses: “It was just too difficult. When I wanted to remove the body, I stumbled in the stairwell and tumbled down. ”Fritz Honka looked for his victims in the street“ Hamburger Berg ”in Hamburg-St. Pauli at a late hour in the pubs “ Zum Goldenen Handschuh ”, “ Elbschlosskeller ” and “Hong-Kong”, where he was known under the name “Fiete”. The local milieu was seen as a gathering point for “society's flotsam” such as drinkers, older prostitutes and other failed livelihoods. The lonely night watchman Honka, according to his own statements, was looking for “people to talk to”, but according to an expert assessment above all “sex according to his ideas of power fantasies”. Honka only said: “I just banged her.” Drunken, toothless women are said to have belonged to his preferences, some of whom he splashed full of champagne and to whom he acted as a superior guard. He is also said to have played the role of an SS man in uniform . Honka had already become a police officer at the time of his marriage. His lesbian wife invited girls into his apartment who were mistreated by Honka. The police investigation was stopped.

Very large quantities of alcoholic beverages, mainly corn brandy , were found in Honka's apartment , which he himself consumed excessively and also used to make his victims submissive. The police also found dolls and more than 300 porn pictures and photos of naked pin-up girls taped to the ceiling, but none with sadistic motifs. The main hearing revealed that Honka's apartment must have been binge drinking with the victims. Honka had accused his victims of polluting his apartment and stealing from him. There were also fights as a result of the immense alcohol intoxication. The next morning Honka woke up next to a dead woman without being able to remember the exact course of events. According to Honka's own account, he was heavily drunk when he dismembered the three women's corpses with a foxtail saw. The large number of scented stones in his apartment was an indication of Honka's culprit for the police: he wanted to cover up the smell of decay of the corpses hidden in the apartment.

Personality and motives

Fritz Honka was a petite, slender man and with a height of 1.68 meters short of stature. He suffered from a speech impediment for which he was ashamed. In addition , Honka squinted very badly, which also severely affected his self-esteem. Honka spent his youth in a home for children of concentration camp inmates and, after 1945, in an orphanage. As a result of work accidents and fights, his appearance was disfigured, which made it difficult for him to contact women. One of the women he had a relationship with falsely accused him of paternity. Both of his marriages failed due to heavy alcohol consumption by the two partners. Honka, for whom order and cleanliness were high moral values, liked to appear in black uniform and was called a "general". Witness statements described Honka as a completely inconspicuous person:

“Honka, he always looked down when he saw me. I said hello first, here you greet each other and nothing more. Honka, however, imagined he was better, in his uniform he looked to me like a railroad worker at first, and I really thought he was with the railway. But he was only a night watchman "

The following is said about Honka's motives:

“Under the effects of considerable amounts of alcohol, the expert found, Fritz Honka developed aggression and took it out on 'relatively helpless women' . Honka's need to bring out the superior role of the man played a role. In the end he even saw himself as 'Lord of life and death'.
... The picture that the psychologist gained of Fritz Honka shows the following: The defendant is originally looking for a clean housewife, a willing bed companion and a good buddy in his female partner. He has a strong sexual need, but at the same time he is repelled by women who meet him. There is a psychological barrier that he cannot break. His turning to older women may speak for his need to be sexually mothered. However, these women are so shabby that Honka can rightly or wrongly feel socially superior to them. He expects them to give in to all of his sexual desires and encounters resistance because these women in particular are used to rationing their favors. "

- Jost Nolte : lust murder or lust for murder . Fritz Honka and the dispute over his experts. In: The time . December 17, 1976 ( online ).

discovery

Honka's murders were only exposed by accident. On July 17, 1975 , a fire broke out in the house at Zeißstrasse 74 in Hamburg-Ottensen , where Honka's rented apartment was located, while Honka was absent. During the extinguishing work, a firefighter discovered body parts, whereupon the apartment was searched by the police. The partly decaying remains of the three women were found and could later be identified. Honka was arrested and on July 29, 1975 confessed to killing the women. The connection to the murder of Gertraud Bräuer has now also been proven. Honka was interrogated by Peter Seeler and Chief Inspector Hans-Peter Untermann from the Hamburg homicide squad.

In 1976, with great media interest, the criminal trial against Fritz Honka began before the Large Criminal Chamber 21 ( jury court ) at the Hamburg District Court under the direction of Judge Reimer Hadenfeldt (1932-2010). Defense lawyer Rolf Bossi took over the defense .

judgment

Honka was sentenced on December 20, 1976 to a total of fifteen years imprisonment for murder in one case and manslaughter in three cases, committed in a state of reduced criminal responsibility; In addition, placement in a psychiatric hospital was ordered. The court came to the determination of reduced culpability because "a serious mental abnormality with disease value" had been identified. Only the killing of Gertraud Bräuer was classified as murder, the other three cases only as manslaughter . The plea of the public prosecutor's office for life imprisonment for murder in four cases was not complied with. The prosecution had doubts about the course of the rape murder and interpreted Honka's approach of covering the corpses with spruce needle fragrance stones and inviting new potential victims of his killing instincts to be a typical anticipatory act of a murderer. The defenders Rolf Bossi and Gunter Widmaier , however, saw Honka by the victims, who would have called him "bum", "bastard" or "pig", provoked by "serious offense". Honka herself had testified, “They insulted him. He killed her. ”During one of his interrogations, Honka had claimed that Jack the Ripper had ordered the murders. Bossi referred to Honka's troubled youth and saw his personal career as a spiral down to the level of his socially uprooted victims. He pointed out Honka's negative personality development and saw the murders as something like "milieu acts", which are not taken into account in this form in the criminal code. In the process, the terms "severe other mental abnormality" (§ 20), "profound disturbance of consciousness" and "nonsense" were used, which were used to assess Honka's personality.

The psychiatric report was drawn up by Elisabeth Müller-Luckmann . The defense described Honka "as a biographical cripple who got alcohol, into living conditions and situations - in which he killed out of the situation alone". Bossi tried to explain Honka's deeds also through his deviant sexuality, which would find expression in necrophilia and “complete abnormal instincts”. The fact that he kept body parts of the murdered women in his apartment and in the attic for a long time is an indication that Honka "must have felt an indomitable addiction to mutilate the dead women in addition". In November 1976, Honka retracted his admission of guilt before the jury and claimed that he could not remember anything.

"On the other hand, a neglect of life and personality after years of continuous decline finds its lowest point in the fact that Honka can finally be found in the lowest milieu of St. Pauli ..."

Last years

In 1993 Honka was released from psychiatry. The Hamburg defense attorney Alma Diepoldt obtained a name change for him. As Peter Jensen (the family name was that of one of his close relatives) he spent the last years of his life in a nursing home in Scharbeutz , where nobody knew his true identity. On October 19, 1998, Honka died at the age of 63 in the Ochsenzoll hospital in Hamburg-Langenhorn , presumably of the consequences of his excessive alcohol and nicotine abuse.

Public interest

The acts of Fritz Honka aroused great media interest at the time. The BILD newspaper heralded the murder case with headlines like Four Women - beheaded and chopped up by night watchmen , Did he kill her, strangle her with his huge shovel hands or saw her up while she was still alive? and infamous details from the dark world of the mass murderer . The Hamburger Morgenpost and the Hamburger Abendblatt followed suit . The newspapers referred to Honka as " Bluebeard von Altona" (evening paper) or as the "murderer with the Menjou beard" (BILD). In the BILD newspaper, his hands were described as “disgusting hands” with “huge fingernails that have grown into wide, long claws”, with which he “blindly slammed” or “brutally drove under her thin skirt” or “on the corpses snipped around ”should have. The alleged appearance of Honka in the bars and taverns of the Hamburger Berg with riding breeches, boots and a pinched cap, "He wanted to look like an SS man", was part of the article. Honka has been described, among other things, as a perpetrator with "hands like shovels". The pub “Zum Goldenen Handschuh”, where Honka often stayed and looked for female victims, was popularly renamed “Honka-Stube”.

reception

Under the pseudonym "Harry Horror", Carlo Blumenberg published the song Gern I have sawn women about the serial killer Fritz Honka in 1975 . The song developed into a considerable club hit. The distribution company RCA marketed the title despite initial concerns.

At the beginning of the 1980s there was the band Die Honkas , with Max Müller as singer, who had named itself after Fritz Honka. It is sung about in the song Für Fritz (1982), which says: "This is the song for Fritz, this is the song for Honka".

In 2014 the "homicidal operetta" Honka - Women Murderer from Altona was created at the Hamburger Lichthof Theater, which was performed again in 2016 under the name Taschenhonka as a "narrow pop-up version of the theater production".

In 2014, the German musician Andreas Dorau published the title Tannenduft , which is about Honka, on his album Aus der Bibliothèque . In 2016, the Hamburg rapper Swiss published the song Kopf der Gertraud Bräuer , which is on the album Missglückte Welt .

In 2016, the writer Heinz Strunk also dealt with the person of Fritz Honka and his desolate world. In the Hamburg State Archives , Strunk was given access to the files on the Honka case. His novel The Golden Glove was nominated for the 2016 Leipzig Book Fair Prize. A film adaptation of the novel was released in February 2019 . Directed by Fatih Akin , the main role of Fritz Honka was played by Jonas Dassler .

In the book Death gives no rest , published in 2018, the forensic doctor Klaus Püschel and the journalist Bettina Mittelacher dedicate the chapter "Offside" to the serial killer Fritz Honka and consider the case from a forensic perspective.

On July 30th, 2020 the German NDH band " OST + FRONT " released the song "Honka Honka".

Web links

literature

Notes and individual references

  1. Fritze Bollmann as the playboy-like "Bel Ami"
  2. in some sources: Gertrud
  3. Waldemar Paulsen: Meine Davidwache: Stories from the Kiez, rororo Verlag, 2012, ISBN 978-3-499-62839-9 .
  4. a b c d e f Ulf Rosin: Hamburg's biggest murder cases - Honka looked for his victims in the Kiez, BILD newspaper December 28, 2010
  5. Honka had stated that before the act he had consumed six liters of beer, 0.25 liters of wheat grain and one liter of brandy
  6. ^ Courtyard of the former Holsatia chocolate factory in Gaußstrasse
  7. The female murderer of St. Pauli - The female murderer of St. Pauli - Fritz Honka - ARD | The first. February 6, 2019, accessed December 19, 2019 .
  8. a b c d Olaf Wunder : The day on which Fritz Honka was caught. Hamburger Morgenpost, April 15, 2012. Retrieved May 22, 2014.
  9. a b c d e f g h i Jost Nolte: Incapable of guilt because of mental abnormality ?: Subject: Honka, Fritz, because of murder . In: The time . November 26, 1976, ISSN  0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed December 19, 2019]).
  10. ^ Jan-Eric Lindner: The bluebeard of Mottenburg. February 23, 2006, accessed December 19, 2019 (German).
  11. a b c d e Ben Witter : Four corpses under one roof. In the neighborhood of Mottenburg, the guard Fritz Honka was hunting women, DIE ZEIT July 25, 1975
  12. ^ A b c Peter & Julia Murakami: Lexicon of serial killers. 450 case studies of a pathological type of killing. Ullstein, 2000, ISBN 3-548-35935-3 , pp. 98-99.
  13. : "I have no memory of it" . In: Spiegel Online . tape 47 , November 15, 1976 ( spiegel.de [accessed December 19, 2019]).
  14. ^ Klaus Lohmann, Schleswig-Holstein am Sonntag: Series Murderous North: The Woman Murderer of St. Pauli | shz.de. Retrieved December 19, 2019 .
  15. Jost Nolte: Bossi's success, surprising verdict in the case of the Hamburg female murderer: the best solution for everyone, DIE ZEIT December 24, 1976
  16. : "And then I lost my nerve" . In: Spiegel Online . tape 48 , November 22, 1976 ( spiegel.de [accessed December 19, 2019]).
  17. HAMBURG'S BIGGEST MURDER CASES (4): Fritz Honka: The Beast of Altona. May 10, 2009, accessed on December 19, 2019 (German).
  18. CRIME: Meat on it . In: Spiegel Online . tape July 31 , July 28, 1975 ( spiegel.de [accessed December 19, 2019]).
  19. Jump up ↑ Records: Hit about Honka. In: Der Spiegel from October 20, 1975
  20. Taschenhonka - Friday, May 20. in the Ottensen district archive . In: Inside Ottensen . May 11, 2016 ( inside-ottensen.de [accessed August 4, 2017]).
  21. Heinz Strunk: The golden glove. Reinbek near Hamburg 2016. p. 4.
  22. Start of shooting for Fatih Akin's "The Golden Glove" . Süddeutsche Zeitung , June 29, 2018, accessed on August 25, 2020 . .
  23. Prof. Dr. Klaus Püschel, Bettina Mittelacher: Death gives no rest, fascinating cases from forensic medicine . Ed .: Ellert & Richter Verlag. tape 3 . Ellert & Richter Verlag GmbH, Hamburg 2018, ISBN 978-3-8319-0735-9 , Im Abseits, p. 328 .