Heinrich Pommerenke

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Heinrich Max Pommerenke (born July 6, 1937 in Bentwisch ; † December 27, 2008 in Asperg ) was a German violent criminal and serial killer . Imprisoned from 1959 onwards, he was the longest incarcerated prisoner in the Federal Republic of Germany when he died .

Origin and first offenses

Heinrich Pommerenke came from Bentwisch in Mecklenburg near Rostock, where his father worked in the port . After his father was killed in the war and his mother left her two children at the age of twelve and ten after the war in 1949 and moved to Switzerland , Pommerenke grew up with her grandparents in Mecklenburg. As a schoolboy, he committed rape . After leaving school, he completed an apprenticeship as a painter. After being raped again, Pommerenke fled the GDR to West Berlin in 1953 . There he was picked up by the police. The authorities contacted the mother. When she agreed to take her son in with her in Zurich , Heinrich Pommerenke was sent there. The sister, who had been in a children's home for three years, had already been able to move in with her mother the year before. He found work at a fair in Schaffhausen, Switzerland . When he again attracted attention there for being raped, he was expelled from Switzerland and was not allowed to travel there for ten years. Other crimes such as robberies and sex crimes he committed during this time in southern Germany and in Austria's Bregenz .

Chronology of the acts of violence and manhunt 1959

With a dense series of murders and attempted murders in 1959, Pommerenke terrified the Black Forest in particular . He showed a certain affinity to trains, stations and embankments, but without proceeding according to a uniform modus operandi , so that his deeds were not linked for a long time and could only be fully assigned to him after his arrest. Pommerenke lived in Hornberg at this time .

According to Pommerenke's later confession, a visit to a film screening of the film The Ten Commandments by Cecil B. DeMille in a cinema in Karlsruhe in February 1959 was the trigger for his series of murders, in which a total of four women fell victim. After portraying the dance around the golden calf by scantily clad women, he came to the realization that women are the cause of all evil and that his mission is to punish them.

That same evening he committed the first murder in a park near the cinema. The body of his victim, the raped 49-year-old Hilde Konter, who was murdered by slitting his throat, was found on February 26, 1959 at the Karlsruhe- Durlach motorway junction .

In March 1959, Pommerenke abused 18-year-old Karin Waele in a wooden hut on the outskirts of Hornberg, killed the young woman with a stone and threw her body over the river embankment at the nearby railway embankment; her body was discovered on March 25, 1959 on the banks of the Gutach .

On May 30, 1959, Pommerenke in Singen penetrated through an open window into the bedroom of an 18-year-old clerk in her parents' house and tried to strangle her; however, the victim was able to free himself and call for help, whereupon Pommerenke fled. The woman was able to give the police an exact description of her person the following day; the crime was initially not associated with the two previous murders.

On May 31, 1959, shortly before midnight at Heidelberg Central Station, Pommerenke boarded the special holiday train D 969 to Finale Ligure on the Italian Riviera . In the train he killed the 21-year-old Dagmar Klimek by a knife in the chest, her body cast on the Rheintalbahn direction Basel shortly after Freiburg near the breakpoint Ebringen from the moving train, and then pressed the emergency brake , so that the train about two Kilometers further south at Schallstadt came to a standstill. Pommerenke got out, went back to the body of his victim and dragged it to a nearby dirt road, where he sexually assaulted the dead woman. The following morning, when the train had already reached Bellinzona , Switzerland, Dagmar Klimek was reported missing by friends traveling with him; a connection with the emergency braking at Schallstadt, during which two witnesses claimed to have seen a figure climb out of the train, was not initially established. It was not until June 5, 1959, that Klimek's body was found on the railway embankment near Ehaben; the forensic medical examination revealed the knife stab as the cause of death, while the other injuries as a result of the fall from the train did not prove to be fatal. The investigations by the Freiburg police initially fizzled out, also because the wagon in question, which with the help of the Federal Criminal Police Office was transferred to Freiburg for investigation after a few days, had meanwhile been completely cleaned several times so that no usable traces could be secured. The survey of fellow travelers at their vacation spots in Italy, which was carried out at great expense in terms of travel technology, did not yield any concrete information.

On June 2, 1959, before the Klimek murder became known, Pommerenke attacked a 25-year-old waitress near the Triberg train station , hit her with an iron-studded stick and stole her handbag.

On June 6, 1959, as a cyclist in Karlsruhe, Pommerenke seriously injured two women with knife stabs in the back.

On June 8, 1959, Pommerenke broke into the room of a fifteen-year-old woman through an open window at night and severely injured her with knife stabs in the neck, but was put to flight by her father, who hurried to help. The police were able to secure a sole print of the perpetrator at the crime scene.

On June 9, 1959, Pommerenke raped 16-year-old Rita Walterspacher near Baden-Baden , strangled her and dumped her body in a wooded area, where she was found the following day. This time, too, as in the previous murders, the investigators initially lacked any useful lead.

On June 10, 1959, Pommerenke captured a small-caliber rifle and an air pistol while breaking into an arms shop in Baden-Baden . On June 18, 1959, he attacked a clerk at the Karlsruhe-Durlach train station with this pistol, stole DM 540 and escaped undetected. On the same day he picked up a suit under his own name from a tailor in Hornberg. In addition to his worn-out clothing, he also left behind a package that contained the small-bore rifle captured in Baden-Baden and that he wanted to pick up in the next few days.

A footprint secured at the crime scene in Durlach train station, which corresponded to the one secured on June 8, 1959, and the description of the pistol provided the police with the first evidence of a connection between the break-in and the series of murders. On June 19, 1959, the tailor from Hornberg reported that the small-bore rifle had been found and provided the investigators with the personal data of the person wanted; On the same day, Pommerenke was recognized in Hornberg and was finally arrested on the station forecourt.

Confession and condemnation

In the course of the interrogations that followed, Pommerenke admitted a total of 65 crimes, including four murders, seven other attempted murders, two completed and 25 attempted rapes, six robberies, ten break-ins and six simple thefts.

The trial against Pommerenke began on October 3, 1960 before the regional court in Freiburg im Breisgau . 38 of the offenses he admitted were not prosecuted because he had not yet reached the age of 21 at the time of the offenses. The procedural experts Hans Ruffin and Christoph Staewen declared the defendants fully culpable . On October 22nd, he was sentenced to six life imprisonment and a further 15 (from individual sentences of an additional 165) years in prison; it was the hitherto strictest guilty verdict by a West German court in the post-war period.

From 1960 Pommerenke was imprisoned in the Bruchsal correctional facility ; A suspension of the sentence on probation was refused several times on the grounds that he still posed an excessively high security risk.

At the end of 2006, Pommerenke was transferred to the prison at Hohenasperg Fortress , where the central hospital of the Baden-Württemberg penal system is also located. There he should undergo social therapy . However, the therapy was discontinued after almost a year; since then Pommerenke has been in the Heilbronn prison.

In December 2008, Pommerenke was again transferred to the Hohenasperg correctional hospital because of a leukemia disease , where he died on December 27, 2008 at the age of 71. The body was cremated and the ashes scattered at sea . When he died, he was the longest prisoner in the Federal Republic of Germany. In this regard, he has since been replaced by Hans-Georg Neumann .

Documentation

As early as 1961, the Pommerenke case was the subject of an extensive publication in the specialist journal Kriminalistik .

In 2004, ARD broadcast a television documentary by Michael Busse about Pommerenke, produced by SWR , under the title Before you sit the devil , which received a wide response in the print media.

The series The Great Criminal Cases, broadcast on ARD in 2010, also addressed the Pommerenke case.

In 2013, the SWR produced a “criminal documentary radio play ” on the subject under the title Frauenmörder Heinrich Pommerenke - A Search for Traces .

literature

  • Silke Fiedeler: The constitutional principle of hope in the penal system. Lang: Frankfurt 2003 (with a chapter on the penal system with Heinrich Pommerenke)
  • Peter Hiess, Christian Lunzer: Murder Express. The greatest crimes in railway history. Deuticke, Vienna / Munich 2000, ISBN 3-216-30550-3 , pp. 99-106 (Death on the holiday train. The sex offender Heinz Pommerenke) .
  • Marcel Montarron: Histoire des crimes sexuels. In: Presses de la Cité , No. 1581, Paris 1971, ISBN 2-266-00511-1 , p. 33 ff. (French).
  • Thomas Alexander Staisch: Heinrich Pommerenke, murderer of women. A buried life. Klöpfer & Meyer, Tübingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-940086-88-4 .
  • Stefan Ummenhofer, Alexander Rieckhoff, Ralf Döbele: Murders on the doorstep. The most puzzling criminal cases in South Baden. Romäus, Villingen-Schwenningen 2008, ISBN 978-3-9809278-8-8 , pp. 25-38 (The "Black Forest Beast") .
  • Otto Zitzmann, Rudolf Gut: The drive criminal and robbery murderer R. In: Kriminalistik. Vol. 15, 1961, issue 2-5.
  • Six times for life and no end in sight. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . October 22, 2006 ( sueddeutsche.de ).
  • Bernd Dörries: Murderer Heinrich Pommerenke - A life behind bars. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , December 20, 2008 ( sueddeutsche.de ).
  • W. Janisch, M. Oversohl: Longest sentence in Germany: Woman murderer Pommerenke dead after 49 years in prison In: Welt Online , December 30, 2008 ( welt.de ).
  • Steffen Kraft: The days and nights of the inmate P. In: Der Tagesspiegel . February 27, 2007 tagesspiegel.de ( Memento from August 28, 2008 in the Internet Archive ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Peter-Philipp Schmitt: Woman murderer Heinrich Pommerenke: The "beast in human form" is dead. FAZ.net , December 30, 2008 ( faz.net ).
  2. Life imprisonment: Woman murderer Pommerenke dies after almost 50 years behind bars. In: Der Tagesspiegel. December 30, 2008 ( tagesspiegel.de ).
  3. a b ARD documentary in the series The great criminal cases from 2010.
  4. ↑ The exact course of events taking into account the forensic medical examinations documented in: Death in the holiday train. The sex offender Heinz Pommerenke. In: Peter Hiess, Christian Lunzer: Mord-Express. The greatest crimes in railway history. Deuticke, Vienna / Munich 2000, ISBN 3-216-30550-3 , pp. 99-106, here p. 99 ff.
  5. Hiess, Lunzer: Mord-Express. The greatest crimes in railway history. P. 100 f. (according to the original files).
  6. Pommerenke condemned. In: Badische Zeitung . October 26, 1960 ( badische-zeitung.de ).
  7. Hiess, Lunzer: Mord-Express. The greatest crimes in railway history. P. 106.
  8. Steffen Kraft: The days and nights of the inmate P. In: Der Tagesspiegel , February 27, 2007. According to a newspaper report in the Badische Neuesten Nachrichten of February 9, 2008, the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Justice in Stuttgart confirmed that Pommerenke is no longer in the JVA Bruchsal, but in another southern German prison that enables him to undergo social therapy; no more precise information about his whereabouts was officially given.
  9. Long-term prisoner Pommerenke: Relocated to Hohenasperg. In: Stuttgarter Nachrichten . December 19, 2008, stuttgarter-nachrichten.de ( Memento from February 12, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ).
  10. ^ After 49 years in prison: Woman murderer Pommerenke is dead. In: Stuttgarter Nachrichten . December 30, 2008, stuttgarter-nachrichten.de ( Memento of the original from December 31, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.stuttgarter-nachrichten.de
  11. Christian Bommarius: The forgotten murderer . In: Berliner Zeitung , September 29, 2004
  12. Johannes Weiß: Pommerenke: “The devil sits in front of you”. In: The world . September 29, 2004 ( welt.de ).
  13. SWR2: Woman murderer Heinrich Pommerenke | SWR.de. Retrieved December 13, 2013 .
  14. Bettina Schulte: The trauma of Hornberg. In: Badische Zeitung . December 20, 2013 ( badische-zeitung.de , December 23, 2013).