23. The Butcher of Berlin
Georg Karl Grossmann (1863 – 1922) was a German career criminal whose record included perversions ranging from child rape to bestiality. He lived in a Berlin slum, where neighbors often heard screams coming from his apartment. However, it was the kind of neighborhood where people minded their business, so nobody called the police. 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 made Grossmann’s neighbors more attentive, because the next time screams came from his apartment, somebody finally called the cops. Bursting into Grossmann’s apartment, the police found the corpse of a recently killed woman on his bed. He was arrested and charged with murder. Neighbors recalled that Grossmann had many young female visitors, but now that they thought about it, they did not remember seeing any of them leaving the apartment.
Brutalizing and Cannibalizing
Acquaintances also remembered that during WWI, despite severe food shortages that caused widespread hunger, Grossmann 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 Grossmann literally butchered after raping and killing them. Grossmann’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 Grossmann’s apartment. There, they were sexually abused, murdered, dismembered, and their flesh consumed by Grossmann and the unwitting customers who bought meat from him. He was convicted and sentenced to death, but hanged himself before the execution.