Karl think

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Police photo after his suicide

Karl Denke , also known as "Papa Denke" or "Father Denke" (born February 11, 1860 in Oberkunzendorf near Münsterberg , Lower Silesia ; † December 22, 1924 in Münsterberg ), was a German serial killer .

Life

Denke was born on February 11, 1860 in Oberkunzendorf (since 1945 in Polish: Kalinowice Górne ) and moved to the town of Münsterberg in 1880, where he committed his deeds in the house at Teichstrasse 10 ( Lage ).

On December 21, 1924, screams could be heard from Denke's apartment. The homeless migrant worker Vincenz Olivier came out the door with a gash on his head. A neighbor who rushed to help, however, did not believe the homeless man that he had been attacked by the old man with a pickaxe. Thenke was seen as a bit “quirky” in the village, but also as a benefactor who always had a meal for the homeless and traveling companions. From 1893 to 1895 he was the bellows and cross bearer of the evangelical community, but from 1906 onwards he no longer paid church tax and considered himself to have left the church.

Instead of Denke, Olivier was arrested for vagrancy . When he was brought before a judge the next day, he was finally able to convince him to arrest Denke too. First of all, angry neighbors and residents protested against the arrest of the citizens, who were innocent in their eyes. When Denke was to be taken out of his cell for an initial questioning the next day, he was found hanged. The court ordered a search of his home and found human remains, including over 420 teeth, 480 bones and meals made from human flesh. Some were intended for direct consumption, some were preserved in pickling salt . In addition, three suspenders and laces made from human skin were found.

Important details of his actions and about his victims remained unresolved. In particular, the crime motive Denkes is still unknown today.

At the end of the investigation it was revealed that Denke had killed, processed, eaten and sold parts of their meat at the weekly market in Wroclaw, which was denied by the market spokesman. With the accuracy of an accountant, Denke had carefully written down the names and details about the "slaughter weight" etc. of 30 victims, mostly vagabonds, four of them women. The entries begin on February 21, 1903 (victim Ida Launer) and end on April 20, 1924 with no. 30 (Kaspar Hubalek). The number 31 for Vincenz Olivier was already entered.

In the same year, the serial killer Friedrich "Fritz" Haarmann was arrested in Hanover and the acts of Carl Großmann from Berlin were discovered at that time. Parallels came to light. After Haarmann, convicted four days before the discovery of Denkes' acts, Denke was also called "Silesian Haarmann". Other names were "Papa Denke" or "Kannibale von Münsterberg."

A judicial error in favor of Denkes: the Trautmann case

The butcher Eduard Trautmann was arrested in 1910 for a murder committed by Denke and sentenced to fifteen years in prison in Glatz in 1911. The innocent prisoner was released in 1922 for good conduct, and the miscarriage of justice was only discovered after Denkes suicide. Ernst von Salomon , who served his prison term in the 1920s for his involvement in the murder of Walther Rathenau in Striegau , refers to his fellow inmate Trautmann in The Questionnaire . Joseph Roth supported his claim for damages in an article published in 1925.

Literary and musical processing

  • Bertolt Brecht took the reporting on Denke in the Berliner 8 Uhr-Abendblatt from December 1924 as an opportunity for a satire from around 1931 , which has been handed down in fragments in the Tuiroman complex . He gives the little cannibal the first name of the humanist Fichte and turns the inconspicuous Karl Denke into a Johann Gottlieb Denke, the founder of "Denkismus", whom because of his "merits" as an alleged ideological pioneer of apparently thoughtless mass consumption in the First World War a "salvation of honor" should be granted, which could serve “the people of poets and thinkers” as an adequate example of significant intellectual achievements: “Is the step from caring for people, as observed in hospitals, to slaughtering them, is not infinitely greater than that of this slaughter to eat? […] In any case, the fact is that the immense thought of the world war was thought through to the end by only one man under the most unfavorable circumstances on a very small scale: by Denke. "
  • As in the case of Fritz Haarmann , Karl Denke's popular operetta song, Wait, just wait a while, will soon be repositioned accordingly , as was the case with Walter Kollo : “Wait, just wait a while, then come Also think of yourself with the little cleaver and make salt meat out of you. "
  • The German death metal band Eisblut dedicated the song Menschenfleischwolf to him .
  • The German NDH group Ost + Front uses this refrain in their 2012 published and the acts in question Denke Think song .
  • Moritat Münsterberg you beautiful town in the folk song archive
  • The Polish sludge band ODRA released an album in 2012 called Karl Denke Blües .

literature

  • Matthias Blazek: Karl Think. In: (ders.): Carl Großmann and Friedrich Schumann - Two serial killers in the twenties. Ibidem, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-8382-0027-9 , pp. 133-134.
  • Michael Horn, Michael Kirchschlager, Petra Klages, Wolfgang Krüger: Historical serial killers II - human monsters from the late Middle Ages to the middle of the 20th century. Kirchschlager, Arnstadt 2009, ISBN 978-3-934277-25-0 .
  • Hans Pfeiffer : The wolverine. In: (ders.): The compulsion to series - serial killers and their motives. Area, Leipzig 1996, ISBN 3-86189-087-9 , p. 123 ff.
  • Hans Pfeiffer : The compulsion to series - serial killers without a mask. Militzke Verlag, OA (1996), ISBN 3-86189-729-6 ( online (p. 91 ff.) , Accessed on May 30, 2014).
  • Peter and Julia Murakami: Lexicon of Serial Killers . 10th edition. Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-548-35935-9 , p. 67-69 .
  • Armin Rütters: Historical serial killer III: Karl Denke - The cannibal of Münsterberg: A German serial killer. Kirchschlager, 2013, ISBN 978-3-934-27742-7 .
  • Izabela Szolc : The butcher's wife . (Żona rzeźnika). Wydawnictwo Amea, Liszki 2013.
  • Mark Benecke : Murder Methods - New Spectacular Criminal Cases - told by the world's most famous criminal biologist . Bastei Lübbe, Cologne 2002, ISBN 978-3-404-60545-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Handwritten addendum to the death certificate from December 22, 1924.
  2. ↑ a b c Johanna Lutteroth: The man eater of Münsterberg. one day on Spiegel Online , April 8, 2014.
  3. ↑ Ernst von Salomon : The questionnaire . European Book Club, Stuttgart et al. 1951; P. 158 ff.
  4. ↑ Joseph Roth: A Dark Chapter. Frankfurter Zeitung, April 18, 1925, reprinted in: Joseph Roth: Das journalistische Werk, Volume 2: 1924–1928. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2009 ( online ).
  5. ↑ See Polke, criminal director: The mass murderer Denke and the Trautmann case. A miscarriage of justice. In: Archiv für Kriminologie , 95 (1934), 1/2 (August), pp. 8–30.
  6. ↑ All quotations in this sentence from: Bertolt Brecht: Werke. Berlin and Frankfurt edition. Edited by Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei, Klaus-Detlef Müller. Volume 17, Prose 2, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main 1989, p. 13.
  7. ↑ Ibid., P. 15.
personal data
SURNAME I think Karl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Papa Think (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German serial killer
DATE OF BIRTH February 11, 1860
PLACE OF BIRTH Oberkunzendorf near Münsterberg , Lower Silesia
DATE OF DEATH December 22, 1924
Place of death Munsterberg