Hans Helmcke

Hans Helmcke (* 1917 in Cuxhaven ; † August 16, 1973 in Hamburg ; with full name Hans Heinrich Helmcke ) was, among other things, an influential West Berlin brothel entrepreneur .

Helmcke, the son of a Cuxhaven grocer , went to the USA in 1953 , from where he returned to Germany in 1959 with an inheritance of 250,000 dollars (at that time over one million D-Marks ) obtained under unclear circumstances .

Helmcke, who dominated Berlin's red light district in the post-war period , became known as the operator of Pension Clausewitz , a celebrity brothel that he had acquired with part of his inheritance at the beginning of the 1960s. It came into the public eye when the Pension Clausewitz had to close in 1965 because there were indications that the Stasi was using the brothel for espionage purposes. Regardless of this, Helmcke remained the leading figure in the red light district, which is also expressed in the terms brothel king and king of puff with which he was assigned.

In addition to prostitution , Helmcke was also active in the fields of drug trafficking and gambling . He also tried to use his contacts to the business world and the political circles of West Berlin, both of which were closely intertwined, for profitable investments in real estate and construction projects . He invested three million Deutschmarks in the construction of the Steglitz roundabout . When it became clear in 1970 that the project could fail and the money invested would have been lost, Helmcke ordered the murder of the architect in charge, Sigrid Kressmann-Zschach ; however, the attack did not materialize.

On June 27 of the same year, Helmcke launched a fight for supremacy in the West Berlin red light district against a gang of Iranians at gunpoint, with his people, led by his bodyguard Klaus Speer, shooting a competing Iranian pimp and seriously injuring three others in Bleibtreustraße .

On August 16, 1973, Hans Helmcke was killed by a hostile brothel entrepreneur from Hamburg-St. Pauli strangled with his own tie . His partially burned body was found two days later on the edge of Autobahn 1 between Hamburg and Lübeck .

literature

• Günter Prodöhl: The loveless death of the brothel king . The New Berlin, Berlin 1977.
• Gerhard Mauz: A strong heart without convolutions . In: Der Spiegel . No. 38 , 1974, p. 74-76 ( online ).
• Bed whispers . In: Der Spiegel . No. 7 , 1965, pp. 30-32 ( online ).