Hamburg rubble murderer
The so-called Hamburg rubble murderer is credited with an unsolved fourfold series of murders in the winter of 1947 . It occurred in post-war Hamburg .
Corpse finds
A total of four victims were found:
- January 20, 1947: The body of a young woman (approx. 18 to 20 years old) was found by playing children in an abandoned factory site on Baustraße (today: Hinrichsenstraße). A trace of drying out a millimeter wide on the dead man's neck indicated that she was being strangled with string.
- January 25, 1947: Hamburg-Eimsbüttel : On Lappenbergsallee, level with house number 2, was the corpse of an unclothed man between the ages of 65 and 70. Forensic doctors suspected the time of death between January 23 and 25, 1947. The body was found by scrap collectors on a site in ruins.
- February 1, 1947: A dead girl lay in the elevator shaft of a bombed-out house in a former mattress factory on Billstrasse, near the Bille Canal; six to eight years old, naked, strangled.
- February 12, 1947: The fourth body of the series of murders was found on Anckelmannstrasse in Hamburg-Hammerbrook ; a woman, around 30 to 35 years old, naked and also strangled.
The identity of the dead was never established. All victims were robbed, naked, and strangled. Another thing the murdered had in common was their well-groomed general condition. Some circumstances suggested that greed might have been the motive. The bodies were found at intervals of about seven days. The execution of the crime and the circumstances of the find were the same. However, the location did not correspond to the crime scene. Signs of struggle were not detected in either case. The investigators were able to make out grinding marks on sharp rubble stones. The perpetrator was never caught.
Investigative work
The police investigation was led by Commissioner Ingwersen. The Hamburg police warned the population not to allow strangers to speak to them in homeless shelters and waiting rooms. Car drivers are also dangerous.
None of the victims were reported missing. The identity of the little eight year old girl could not be clarified either. It was assumed that the people killed were travelers who were stopping over in Hamburg.
A reward of RM 5,000 and one thousand cigarettes were offered for tips that could lead to the perpetrator being caught. After a while the reward was increased to 10,000 RM. The police advised the population “ to go in the middle of the street so as not to be jumped out of a basement hole .” The perpetrator was searched for with 50,000 posters in all four occupation zones .
A request to the professional associations of dentists and dentists about the dental prosthesis of one of the victims also brought no trace. Registry offices were asked to issue death certificates. One theory looked for the perpetrator's motive to be an inheritance stealer who had murdered an entire family in order to gain possession of the inheritance. A total of 1,000 people who were not registered with the police were interviewed. At issuing points for food cards , people were specifically asked (including displaced persons ) who had not recently picked up their cards. Searches were carried out in station waiting rooms, restaurants and bunkers, which were used as asylum for bombed out people.
Kriminalrat Hans Lühr, head of the "homicide inspection" and one of the most renowned experts in this field, assumed that the perpetrator must be an individual. He also considered the four victims to be family members and the perpetrator to be the "fifth link in the chain".
One landlord testified that the male victim could have been her tenant. This lead led astray, because the missing man later reported to his landlady.
The case of the Hamburg rubble killer showed certain parallels to the serial perpetrator Rudolf Pleil , who killed twelve or more predominantly female people in the border area out of greed and sexual motives. Pleil was brought to the scene of the crime near the Berlin Gate, but made it plausible that he was not the "dead man" in this case. A connection to a series of murders of taxi drivers that occurred at the same time in Hamburg could not be established either. In the statistics from 1946 to 1964, 268 of a total of 320 murder cases were cleared up by the Hamburg police. The case of the "rubble killer" was not one of them. The investigation files are accessible in the Hamburg State Archives.
Press releases
“ On Monday afternoon in St. Georg, the naked body of a young girl was found in the rubble of an industrial property on Baustraße. According to the homicide squad, the woman must have been strangled and thrown into the rubble on Monday night. She is a slim, medium-blonde, well-groomed woman with half-length hair, blue eyes and full teeth who has undergone appendectomy. The Hamburg police asks you to notify the nearest office immediately if a young girl of the kind described is missing anywhere. Hamburg police, Hamburg, January 21, 1947, girl murder in St. Georg, Who knows the dead? "
Commissioner Ingwersen commented on the status of the investigation as follows:
“ Detective agents 'frisking' black marketeers everywhere, searching barter shops and buying and selling shops and shadowing travelers at the stations. Every offer of lingerie, clothes, fur coats and shoes is carefully checked by our people; however, we don't even know exactly what the victims were dressed in. Was the little girl perhaps the daughter of one of the two murdered women and the old man her grandfather or the father of the two women or one of them ...? "
Literary processing
The subject matter of the unsolved criminal case was processed by Cay Rademacher in his novel The Rubble Murderer. Rademacher describes the investigative work of Chief Inspector Frank Stave, who is entrusted with the case. In 2016 the novel Trümmerkind by Mechthild Borrmann was published, which ties in with the rubble murders and contains a fictional story of the victims as a family.
literature
- Cay Rademacher: The rubble killer. Dumont Book Publisher; Edition: 7 (October 12, 2011), ISBN 978-3832161545 .
- Mechthild Borrmann: Rubble child . Droemer Verlag, 2016, ISBN 978-3-426-28137-6
Web links
- ZEIT Online, May 28, 1965 It happened in the winter of 1947, memories of the Hamburg rubble murderer?
- Beast in human form, Hamburg's scariest series of murders, Does the strangler from the rubble still live among us? BILD Hamburg, September 25, 2012
Notes and individual references
- ↑ a b c d e f The rubble killer can still live among us. Hamburg's criminal police have been looking for twenty years - now finally barred. In: Hamburger Abendblatt Nr. 38 , February 14, 1967, accessed on April 16, 2016 .
- ↑ Hamburg rubble murderer, pictures of the crime scenes and search efforts, BILD-Regional
- ↑ a b c d e f Riddle about the rubble killer. Hamburg police interrogated over 1000 people - a hint from Berlin. In: Hamburger Abendblatt No. 225. September 27, 1952, accessed on April 16, 2016 .
- ↑ Nickname Pleils
- ↑ Questionable confession. In: Hamburger Abendblatt No. 28 March 7, 1949, accessed on April 16, 2016 .
- ↑ Homicide Squad is waiting. In: Hamburger Abendblatt No. 25 February 28, 1949, accessed on April 16, 2016 .