Gift Gottfried

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Gesche Gottfried, detail, lithograph by Rudolph Suhrlandt , 1829

Gesche Margarethe Gottfried , née Timm , (born March 6, 1785 in Bremen , † April 21, 1831 in Bremen) was a serial killer who poisoned 15 people with arsenic . What drove them to do these things is still unclear. Before it became known that she was responsible for the murders, Gesche Gottfried was known around her as the "Angel of Bremen". The last public execution in Bremen was carried out on Gesche Gottfried . The spit stone on the Domshof in Bremen reminds of the execution . Among other things, Rainer Werner Fassbinder took up the case with the film adaptation and the play " Bremer Freiheit ".

Life

Gesche Margarethe Timm was the daughter of the master tailor Johann Timm and the wool seamstress Gesche Margarethe Timm. She had a twin brother named Johann. Gesche attended the Klippschule , then the Ansgarii parish school and from 1798 went to Lutheran religious instruction at the cathedral . She was orderly and hardworking, took dance and French lessons and was considered somewhat vain. The family lived in poor conditions.

In 1806 she married the wealthy but easy-going master saddler Johann Miltenberg, whose wife had just died. Through this marriage she rose into a middle-class family. She had five children, three of whom initially remained alive: Adelheid (1809–1815), Heinrich (1810–1815) and Johanna (1812–1815).

Miltenberg led "a dissolute life in pubs and brothels " and thus lost his father's fortune. After the death of her husband in 1813, Gesche became impoverished. She had the opportunity to marry her long-time lover, the wine merchant Michael Christoph Gottfried - he promised her marriage on her deathbed in 1817. The common child, with whom Gesche was pregnant, was born still in the same year. Gesche Gottfried inherited a small inheritance, but lived lavishly. In 1821 she sold her house at Pelzerstraße 37 due to permanent lack of money and moved to Obernstraße . In 1822 she made a trip to Stade . After she returned to Bremen, she became engaged to the fashion merchant Paul Thomas Zimmermann. He died in 1823 before the marriage, but Gottfried considered it in his will .

In 1824 Gottfried moved back from Obernstrasse to her old house in Pelzerstrasse, which had meanwhile been acquired by the Rademachermeister couple Wilhelmine and Johann Christoph Rumpff. Gesche worked for them as a domestic help against board and lodging. The lady of the house died soon after. In 1827 Gesche Gottfried went to Hanover to meet her old friend Friedrich Kleine. He was one of her creditors and she had to pay him back money she didn't have. A little later he was dead.

The murders

Around 1812, Gottfried had received a paper bag with arsenic powder from her mother to fight an alleged mouse plague. With this arsenic, Gesche Gottfried killed eight people and seriously injured many because she also randomly distributed smaller, non-fatal portions. After the eighth murder in 1817 the poison was used up. It took six years before she had her maid and friend Beta Schmidt (a later victim) get her “mouse butter” from the pharmacy. Mouse butter consists of two parts clarified butter and arsenic. She killed seven other people with the mouse butter.

Parts of the Bremen population held Gottfried in high esteem and regretted the many alleged accidents in the family. They took an interest and gave the murderess the nickname "Angel of Bremen" because she took care of her dying relatives and friends.

List of murders:

  1. 0October 1, 1813: Johann Miltenberg (first husband)
  2. 0May 2, 1815: Gesche Margarethe Timm (mother)
  3. May 10, 1815: Johanna Miltenberg (daughter)
  4. May 18, 1815: Adelheid Miltenberg (daughter)
  5. June 28, 1815: Johann Timm (father)
  6. September 22, 1815: Heinrich Miltenberg (son)
  7. 0June 1, 1816: Johann Timm (brother)
  8. 0July 5, 1817: Michael Christoph Gottfried (second husband)
  9. 0June 1, 1823: Paul Thomas Zimmermann (fiance)
  10. March 21, 1825: Anna Lucia Meyerholz (music teacher, friend)
  11. 0December 5, 1825: Johann Mosees (neighbor, friend, advisor)
  12. December 22, 1826: Wilhelmine Rumpff (landlady)
  13. May 13, 1827: Elise Schmidt (three-year-old daughter of Beta Schmidt)
  14. May 15, 1827: Beta Schmidt (girlfriend, maid)
  15. July 24, 1827: Friedrich Kleine (friend, believer; murdered in Hanover)

Exposure and imprisonment

Gesche Gottfried continued to distribute small, non-lethal doses of poison. Their landlord, Johann Christoph Rumpff, became suspicious over time, and rumors about the numerous deaths were also circulating in the city. When Rumpff discovered small white grains in a ham one day, he had these determined by his doctor D. Luce (Luce had already examined some of the murder victims himself). The globules turned out to be arsenic. This exposed the poisoner Gesche Gottfried. On the evening of March 6th, 1828 - her birthday - she was arrested and taken to the town hall, on May 13th, 1828 transferred to the new detention house at the Ostertor . At the time, Gesche Gottfried was described by eyewitnesses as very confused and scared.

In the nearly three years that she spent in the detention house, she was regularly interrogated by Senator Franz Friedrich Droste , the examining magistrate. Court secretary Johann Eberhart Noltenius recorded the interrogations. Gottfried reported on her deeds, but also on the fears that plagued her. The city's judicial officers and also their defense lawyer Friedrich Leopold Voget tried to understand their actions. While in custody, Gottfried is said to have considered killing herself several times with mouse butter that she had smuggled into the prison. However, she did not trust herself because she was afraid of the pain and suffering she had witnessed in her victims.

During these three years an almost friendly relationship developed between Gottfried and Senator Droste. So Droste told her the day before the execution that he had looked at her smiling and happy all these months, but that he now had to look seriously on the scaffold , as the protocol prescribes. But that is not directed against them, but necessary. She should remember him kindly. They would meet again in heaven.

Motifs

There was a lot of discussion about the motives for murder of Gesche Gottfried. However, no conclusive result was reached because the defendant could not give any real reasons and the application of her defense counsel for a psychiatric report was rejected by judges from Bremen and Lübeck. The most important sources are therefore the defense of their defense lawyer Friedrich Leopold Voget and his biographical book on Gesche Gottfried, published a few years later. Both works by the author contradict each other with regard to their motifs.

The biography shows that Gesche's motifs were of a selfish nature because her husband Johann Miltenberg stood in the way of a love affair and a marriage with Michael Christoph Gottfried. The parents were also killed because they had opposed the relationship and a marriage. The children should have died because she had the impression that Gottfried did not want to marry her because of them. Later murders occurred for financial reasons.

This contrasts with the portrayal of Voget as a defender. As such, he negates these motives and states that Gottfried's first husband was not opposed to the love affair, but rather allowed it. The parents' relationship with her was also too loving and close for them to stand in the way. The financial benefits of the acts were rather minor and in some cases nonexistent. Instead, Voget emphasizes that Gesche Gottfried felt an inner urge to murder by poison. He relies on Gottfried's own statements that he felt an urge to kill, especially in the later murders. At the time, the prosecution interpreted these accounts as a need of Gottfried to have control over the lives of their victims.

The biography published after the end of the trial is, however, not a psychological representation, despite an opposing foreword by Voget, but rather as a moral script of a man who is inclined to deep religious ideas and shows all the characteristics of such a script. Gesche Gottfried puts selfishness and sinfulness in the foreground. Statements of good repute to which Voget had invoked in his defense are attributed to Gesche Gottfried's hypocrisy. Relatively small events are interpreted as harbingers of the crime.

Nowadays humanities scholars and police psychologists suspect that Johann Miltenberg, Gottfried's first husband (and first victim), had to die so that he would not stand in the way of his wife's looming affair with Michael Christoph Gottfried. Here, however, Gesche Gottfried may have made a mental error. Probably she did not consider that she would be practically destitute after the death of her husband. In addition, she now had to feed her children and weak parents on her own, with no livelihood and only a small inheritance. This task should have grown beyond her head, both financially and in terms of effort. Because of this, she will have killed children and parents. She killed her second husband and her fiancé with high probability out of financial difficulties, since in these cases she did not administer the deadly dose of poison (after many smaller ones) until the men had considered it in the will.

Why Gottfried killed her friends and landlords, however, is still unclear. In the 18th and 19th centuries, criminology generally assumed that poisoning was a typical offense against women, because women were unable to commit other violent offenses due to physical weakness. The lawyer and one of the first criminal psychologists, Paul Johann Anselm von Feuerbach (1775–1835), represented in his biography the most famous German multiple poisoner after Gesche Gottfried, Anna Margaretha Zwanziger , née. Schönleben (1760–1811) from Nuremberg , the opinion that it is the feeling or even the addiction or the intoxication of the secret power over people and over life and death that leads to the repetition of a successful poisoning.

Trial and sentencing

Law Historically the trial of Gesche Gottfried found at the transition between the early modern, from the Carolina certain 16th-century criminal takes the modern criminal trial. The defense relied on the Carolina's strict rules of evidence, while the prosecution under Johann Carl Friedrich Gildemeister relied on the modern principle of free assessment of evidence . It was one of the first trials in the world in which the criminal defense pleaded the accused's incapacity . The prosecution and the court rejected this objection, using the formula later developed by courts in the Anglo-Saxon region that Gesche Gottfried knew what she was doing and that she had been wrong.

When the verdict was announced, the decision was made as generally expected: death by the sword . The judgment was confirmed by the higher appeal court in Lübeck .

execution

On April 21, 1831 at around 8 o'clock, the emaciated and prematurely aged Gesche Gottfried was picked up from the prison in a horse-drawn carriage and driven to the cathedral courtyard, where around 35,000 spectators were already waiting around the scaffold . She was led to the wooden scaffolding, where the presiding judge read her the verdict again. Then Senator Droste broke a wooden stick as a symbol that the judgment was final. Then the defendant was handed a glass of red wine, but Gottfried only sipped it and then shook hands with each individual judge. A little later she was strapped to the chair. She started to pray. An assistant grabbed her hair to pull her head up. A few moments later, the executioner ended the life of Gesche Margarethe Gottfried.

The severed head was shown around again, then the body was placed in a coffin and skeletonized in the Pathological Institute of the Bremen Hospitals (now the Bremen-Mitte Clinic) and kept in a cupboard until 1912. During the First World War the Institute of Pathology burned down and the last remains were destroyed.

It was the last public execution in Bremen.

Afterlife and memory

Death mask from the Focke Museum

After the beheading, imprints were taken from the head and further death masks were made of them, which were sent to England and France. The casts were used to study the physiognomy of offenders, a common practice at the time. The Bremen cast was lost in the course of the Second World War, as was the real head of Gesche Gottfried, which was soaked in formaldehyde . In 2005, the Focke Museum in Bremen (Museum of Art and Cultural History) received a copy of the death mask from the prison doctor's inventory in Winchester, England . It is exhibited in the foam magazine under “Z” for “To be carried to the grave”. Three portraits of the poisoner can also be seen in the Focke Museum.

In the district of Gröpelingen , in the allotment area In den Wischen , the Gesche-Gottfried-Weg was named after her.

Spitstone

"Spitstein" at Bremen Cathedral

The "spit stone", an inconspicuous basalt stone with a notched cross, which is paved exactly 18 meters across from the bridal portal on the north side of Bremen Cathedral in the cathedral courtyard, commemorates the end of Gesche Gottfried. The scaffold on which she was beheaded during the last public execution in Bremen is said to have stood here. Another version says that the poisoner's head that had fallen down rolled into this spot and finally stayed where it was.

In 1931 the Senate had the stone removed and brought to the Focke Museum after Reichsbanner people changed the cross to a swastika. The stone was later sanded, given a new cross and put back in place. Even today, some people from Bremen and tourists express their disgust for the murders by spitting them on this stone in passing. During city ​​tours , Bremen's tour guides like to stop at Spuckstein and tell the "gruesome story of the legendary murderer Gesche Gottfried, who poisoned fifteen people with arsenic" at the alleged location of the beheading .

Aftermath

Film adaptations

Plays

  • Bremer Freiheit , by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1971)
  • The interrogations of the Gesche Gottfried von Peer Meter (UA 1996), ISBN 3-9804586-4-4
  • Heart of Poison by Andrea Funk (2012)

Opera

  • Bremer Freiheit , by Adriana Hölszky , libretto by Thomas Körner based on the play of the same name by RW Fassbinder (1988)

radio play

  • Engel von Bremen , by Carl Ceiss (Director: Ulrich Lamps Production: RB / SR 2009)
  • The interrogations of the Gesche Gottfried von Peer Meter (Director: Markus Hahn, Production: AS Theater & Film Ltd. Berlin 2012) ISBN 978-3-000403-00-2

music

  • The band Jennifer Rostock makes a lyrical reference to the deeds of Gesche Gottfried in “Blood licked” from their debut album “Into the Open Knife”.
  • "The Angel of Bremen" in the musical Nachts in Bremen

Comic

Multimedia presentation

  • The multimedia installation "Arsen & Die" in the crime library of the Bremen City Library / A joint project between the Bremen City Library and the HAW Hamburg

See also

literature

  • Ute Krauß-Leichert and Erwin Miedtke: Gesche Gottfried - from serial offender to library icon . In: BuB: Forum Library and Information; 2012, Vol. 64, Issue 11/12, p786-789, 4p.
  • Peer Meter: Gesche Gottfried - A long wait for death - the three years of their imprisonment, Gosia, Lilienthal 1995, ISBN 3-9804586-2-8
  • Peer Meter: Gesche Gottfried - A Bremen tragedy . Edition Temmen , Bremen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8378-1012-7 .
  • Herbert Black Forest : The Great Bremen Lexicon . Edition Temmen , 2003, ISBN 3-86108-693-X .
  • Regina Contzen: Gottfried, Gesche, b. Timm . In: Women's history (s) , Bremer Frauenmuseum (ed.). Edition Falkenberg, Bremen 2016, ISBN 978-3-95494-095-0 .
  • Johannes Feest / Petra Seling-Biehusen: Gesche Gottfried and the Bremen criminal justice system - extracts from files with comments by Petra Seling-Biehusen and Johannes Feest in: Criminalia - Bremer Strafjustiz 1810-1850 ; Contributions to the social history of Bremen - Issue 11, 1988, ISBN 3-887-22173-7 , ISSN  0175-6303 .
  • Christian Marzahn: hideous complacency or monomania addicted to suicide? The Gesche Gottfried in the dispute between the professions in: Criminalia - Bremer Strafjustiz 1810-1850 ; Contributions to the social history of Bremen - Issue 11, 1988, ISBN 3-887-22173-7 , ISSN  0175-6303 .
  • Stachow: Contributions to the assessment of the Bremen doctors involved in the case of the poisoner Gesche Margarethe Gottfried in: Zeitschrift für Staatsarzneikunde , 18th year, 3rd quarterly issue of 1833 pp. 110–191.
  • Friedrich L. Voget: Life story of the poisoner Gesche Margarethe Gottfried, née Timm , Keizer, 1831, part 1 , part, 2 . ( Digitized version )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ FL Voget, life story of the poisoner Gesche Margarethe Gottfried, née Timm. First part: After the highest instance has been penalized, Bremen 1831; Second part: after execution of the death sentence, Bremen 1831
  2. ↑ See Christian Marzahn, Horrible Self-Complacency or Monomania Addicted to Homicide? Die Gesche Gottfried in the dispute of the professions, in: Criminalia - Bremer Strafjustiz 1810-1850, contributions to the social history of Bremen, issue 11, Bremen 1988, ISBN 3-88722-173-7 , pp. 195 ff.
  3. ↑ See Christian Marzahn, Horrible Self-Complacency or Monomania Addicted to Homicide? Die Gesche Gottfried in the dispute between the professions, in: Criminalia - Bremer Strafjustiz 1810–1850, contributions to the social history of Bremen, issue 11, Bremen 1988, ISBN 3-88722-173-7 , pp. 207–210, cf. also Gesche Gottfried and Bremen's criminal justice - file extracts with comments by Petra Seling-Biehusen and Johannes Feest, in: Criminalia - Bremer Strafjustiz 1810-1850, contributions to the social history of Bremen, issue 11, Bremen 1988, ISBN 3-88722-173-7 , P. 151 ff., P. 176-179
  4. ↑ Petra Seling-Biehusen and Johannes Feest, in: Criminalia - Bremer criminal justice 1810-1850, contributions to the social history of Bremen, Issue 11, Bremen 1988, ISBN 3-88722-173-7 , pp 176-179
  5. ↑ Petra Seling-Biehusen and Johannes Feest, in: Criminalia - Bremer Strafjustiz 1810–1850, contributions to the social history of Bremen, Issue 11, Bremen 1988, ISBN 3-88722-173-7 , pp. 179–181, Christian Marzahn, Horrible Complacency or poisonous monomania? Die Gesche Gottfried in the dispute of the professions, in: Criminalia - Bremer Strafjustiz 1810-1850, contributions to the social history of Bremen, Issue 11, Bremen 1988, ISBN 3-88722-173-7 , pp. 215-220, 221-218
  6. ↑ Marzahn, Horrible Complacency or Monomania Addicted to Homicide? Die Gesche Gottfried in the dispute of the professions, in: Criminalia - Bremer Strafjustiz 1810–1850, contributions to the social history of Bremen, issue 11, Bremen 1988, ISBN 3-88722-173-7 , pp. 215–220, 221–228
  7. ↑ Between spit stone and death mask: How does Bremen remember the poisoner Gesche Gottfried? Homepage of Radio Bremen, April 21, 2016 ( Memento from April 21, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  8. ↑ Ernst Grohne : The Gesche-Gottfried-Stein on the Domshof in legal history and folklore . In: Niedersächsisches Jahrbuch "Heimat und Volkstum", 1956, pp. 44–51.
  9. ↑ Review by Nina Grunenberg, Mord mit Moral, in: Die Zeit No. 50 of December 8, 1978, p. 54
  10. ↑ Effigie - The poison and the city. Retrieved February 18, 2019 .
  11. ↑ Heart of Poison: Heart of Poison. Retrieved February 18, 2019 .
  12. ↑ Ute Krauß-Leichert and Erwin Miedtke: Gesche Gottfried - from serial offender to library icon. In: BuB: Forum Bibliothek und Information; 2012, Vol. 64 Issue 11/12, p786-789, 4p
  13. ↑ https://brebistat.wordpress.com/2012/11/30/arsen-sterben-in-der-krimibibliothek/
  14. ↑ Peer Meter: Peer Meter - - Gesche Gottfried Sachbuch. Retrieved February 22, 2019 .
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on November 11, 2006 .
personal data
SURNAME Gottfried, Gesche
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gottfried, Gesche Margarethe
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German serial killer
DATE OF BIRTH March 6, 1785
PLACE OF BIRTH Bremen
DATE OF DEATH April 21, 1831
Place of death Bremen