The Berlin Butcher
George Carl Grossman (1863 – 1922) was a German career criminal with a long rap sheet, who lived in a dingy apartment in a Berlin slum. His record included violent offenses, and sexual perversions ranging from child molestation to bestiality. Neighbors frequently heard screams coming from his apartment, but it was the kind of neighborhood where screams were normal and people minded their business, so nobody called the cops.
In the early 1920s, dozens of dismembered bodies began popping up around Berlin, and the police announced that a serial killer was on the loose. That might have made Grossman’s neighbors more attentive, because the next time loud screams were heard from his apartment, somebody finally called the police. The cops burst into Grossman’s apartment, and discovered the corpse of a recently killed woman on his bed.
Grossman was arrested and charged with murder. In the subsequent investigation, his neighbors recalled that over the past few years, Grossman had an unusually high number of young female visitors, many of them destitute looking. Now that they thought about it, his neighbors did not remember seeing any of his female guests leaving the apartment.
Acquaintances also remembered that during WWI, despite severe food shortages that caused widespread hunger, Grossman always seemed to have a steady supply of meat to sell on the black market. He even had a hot dog stand outside a Berlin train station. Turns out the meat came from his victims, whom Grossman literally butchered after raping and killing them.
Grossman’s modus operandi had been to hang out at a train station, where he would meet young women, many of them recently arrived in Berlin from the countryside, seeking a new life. It was estimated that over 50 such women were lured to Grossman’s apartment. There, they were sexually abused, murdered, dismembered, and their flesh consumed by Grossman and the unwitting customers who bought meat from him. He was convicted and sentenced to death, but hanged himself before the execution.