Real-Life Sweeney Todd!
Okay so as I said in my last blog I found this great real-life horror story in The Vampire In Legend and Fact by Basil Copper. It's just too disgusting not to share! It's freakin' scary to think there are really people like this out there in the real world. Here, see what I mean...
Chapter 20: Fritz Haarman: Horror in Hanover
Hanover, a great railway town, in 1918, in common with most of Germany was in chaos; the centre for refugees, escapees from camps and detention centers, it was thronged with the human debris thrown up by the aftermath of the First World War. Its geographic and natural centre was Balinhof, the huge central railway station into which its floods of refugees ebbed and flowed with the movements of the timetables in endless tides of misery.
Among them, along with prostitutes [...] criminals and all the riff-raff dislodged from its natural habitat by war, were scores of homeless boys who had come to Hanover quite aimlessly, perhaps hoping for work, or more often merely to loiter at the centre of activity to see what life would bring with the dawn of each new day. These huddled masses of all ages and classes would doss down for the night in halls, corridors and third-class waiting-rooms and the traveller became used to picking his way through this bundled flotsam on his way to and from the trains.
One person who habitually used the station had more than a passing interest in an itinerant refugee population. He was well-known to the Hanover police force, who did their best to keep an eye on the teeming hordes of refugees, but as might be imagined, their numbers were thin for this almost impossible task of surveillance. This man sometimes helped the police in keeping watch, and from midnight until early morning, he would patrol the platforms and waiting areas, occaisionally questioning the youngsters as to why they were there; where they had come from; where they were going; or whether they had any relatives.
There was a method in these apparently aimless questions, which had developed a pattern in their repitition over the years. Very often a hungry and frightened boy would confide in this burly and not unsympathetic man in his late thirties. The stranger would listen in a kindly manner and when he had made up his mind would offer the hospitality of a bed and a meal in his living quarters at a cook shop he ran in the old quarter of Hanover.
Many of the boys who accepted the invitation of the kindly stranger were never seen again. Their host, who was later to be accused of no less than twenty-seven murders, was a man called Fritz Haarman, a small-time criminal, [pedophile], and police informer. He first held his victimes down by hand before killing them with one bite on the throat; it was this method of killing which was to cause the newspapers of the day to dub him the 'Hanover Vampire' and to cause a thrill of horror to run around the world when he was brought to trial in 1924.
Though Haarman cannot truly be called a real vampire, his method of killing his victims bore all the classic hallmarks of a vampire attack and the Gothic horror that surrounded the crimes is worthy of some examination. Some of the facts of the case were undoubtedly toned down by the authorities at the time; though twenty-seven victims was the official count, it was unofficially estimated that as many as fifty murders of young males between the ages of 12 and 18 could be laid at his door in almost five years of criminal activity, and horror was heaped upon horror when the court proceedings revealed that he had added cannibalism to his crimes.
The prosecution alleged that he had actually sold the flesh of his victimes for human consumption in his cooked meat shop; there was no doubt that Haarman had been able to outdo all the local butchers in the reasonableness of his prices and it was observed that he had never been short of meat in a time when it was particularly scarce in the aftermath of the war. He had once, it was alleged, cooked sausages containing human meat and ate them in his kitchen. One cannot help noting the resemblance of the Haarman case to that of [...] Prest's popular melodrama Sweeney Todd, whose demon barber sold the bodies of his human victims to provide the ingredients of the pies sold in Widow Lovat's shop next door. A case of nature imitating art, perhaps? Or was it possible that Haarman, ill-educated and ignorant as he was, had made himself familiar with the old story?
The vampire's first victim was a boy of 17 called Friedel Rothe who disappeared in early October 1918. His parents, who had received a postcard from him, posted from Hanover a few days earlier, instituted a thorough search for their son and Haarman's home, Cellarstrasse 27, was raided by the police, who found Haarman in an extremely compromising position with another youth. He was arrested and sentenced to nine months imprisonment for gross indecency; at the time of his arrest the head of the boy Rothe was hidden behind an oven in his home! Later, he threw the head into a canal. But for the lack of thoroughness in the police search in the meat shop, Haarman's vampiric activities would have come to an abrupt end and twenty-six lives have been saved.
Almost a year after his arrest, in September 1919, Haarman met a handsome youth called Hans Grans, who was to be his downfall. Grans was almost more decadent than the older man and is described by Montague Summers as 'one of the foulest parasites on society.' Certainly he was a male prostitute, thief, informer and murderer, apart from having various sidelines such as blackmail and agent provocateur. He was responsible for many of the murders, urging Haarman to kill in one instance because he coveted a youth's shirt; he often acted as the decoy, bringing the hapless victim to the vampire's den. This is not too strong a term as the squalid circumstances of the murders involving Haarman and Grans were unspeakably sickening.
The court proved and the two men confessed that when they were in the cook shop premises, Haarman held his victims down and then murdered them, usually by a single strong bite on the throat. In many cases the victim's body was then cut up, sometimes being cooked and eaten in various forms by Haarman and Grans. Those portions of the twenty-seven unfortunates not eaten by the vampire or his friend were then cooked and sold to the public over the counter of the shop.
Another man, a butcher, was also involved in the disposing of the 'meat' supplied by the infamous pair, but he seems to have been a minor figure compared to them. Haarman was trapped when a quarrel broke out between him and a potential victim at Hanover Station in June 1924. Both men were arrested and the horror revealed when Haarman's room in the aptly-named Red Row section of the city was searched. Haarman then implicated Grans in his crimes and the unholy couple stood trial in a case which was a cause celebre on a world scale.
The News of the World was only one of scores of newspapers which had a field day with the trial; a typical heading in large type was 'Vampire's Victim'. Haarman's background was interesting. [...] He had spent some time in an asylum after being convicted of offences against children and had an angry and quarrelsome relationship with his violent father, the two men often coming to blows. In 1903 he was medically examined with a view to his being sent to a home, but the doctor involved felt there were no grounds for returning him to an asylum. He became a tramp, street hawker and thief and later, at the time of his association with the Hanover police, was known as 'Detective Haarman', in view of his work as a police informer.
There doest not seem to be any tangible clue to the reason for his vampiric traits, and his mental and moral disintegration seems to have been a gradual descent aided by the general degredation of the company he kept and the complete collapse of all standards in Germany following the great war.
When his methods of killing his victims in the fashion of a vampire and his eating of the remains were described in court, Haarman sat unmoved and impassive throughout the most horrific evidence. Most interesting though, was his denial of insanity; he protested that he was in a state of trance when he attacked his victims and did not realize what he was doing. But the prosecution argued tellingly that this could not be so as the method of killing, which involved holding the victim as he bit into his throat, argued premeditation of the crime.
The macabre details were increased when Haarman and Grans described the crimes, the bones and skulls of the murdered boys being thrown into the river, which abutted onto the vampire's quarters. The producers of a Grand Guignol film on this theme could hardly improve on the horrendous circumstances of the crimes or the mise-en-scene. Though Haarman was undoubtedly a vampire of sorts, he seemed at the trial hardly to be the dominant parter; he alleged that sometimes Grans beat him for failing to bring down the 'game' brought to him. Bodies were often stacked in a cupboard awaiting dismemberment and once the police were actually present when a corpse was hidden only a few yards from them.
Hanover, and to some extent the world, breathed with relief when Haarman was decapitated by sword in April 1925. Surprisingly, his equally infamous companion Grans escaped with life imprisonment, later commuted to twelve years' penal servitude.
Creepy, eh? All true - you can look it up. I wonder why people (including myself) enjoy stories like that? Certainly the reality is horrible and none of that should ever have happened. And yet some sort of sick thrill comes with reading stuff like that. Hopefully it's a very, very long time before anyone like Haarman or Grans ever show up again.
