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Carl Grossmann: The 'Butcher of Berlin'

Jun 6
3 min read

Updated: Jun 18

Carl Grossmann is one of the dark icons of the Weimar Republic's troubled early years — a former butcher who preyed on desperate, vulnerable women in the shattered Berlin that followed the First World War. Known as the 'Butcher of Berlin', he was linked to the murders of numerous women over several years, yet the full extent of his crimes was never established, because he killed himself before his trial ended. What remains is a chilling, half-confirmed legend that has both fascinated and misled people for a century.

Part of the work of understanding Grossmann is separating what is documented from what is rumour, because his case has accumulated more than its share of lurid mythology.

A disturbed beginning

Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Grossmann was born in 1863 in Prussia, one of several children of a poor family. Accounts describe a deeply disturbed temperament from an early age and a drift into transient work, including as a butcher's apprentice. He accumulated convictions for serious sexual offences over the years, reportedly serving a long prison sentence for crimes against children — a record that marked him as dangerous long before his Berlin killings.

Poster of stern man in a dark street, titled Karl Großmann: Germany’s Vampire Killer, with crime-themed text blocks.

Berlin after the war

Grossmann's murders unfolded against the backdrop of a devastated, impoverished Berlin in the years around 1918 to 1921. The post-war city was crowded with desperate, displaced people, and many women — including those with no family nearby and those working in the sex trade — were acutely vulnerable. Grossmann exploited that vulnerability ruthlessly, luring women to his apartment near a railway station with offers of food, shelter or work, the very things they most needed in a time of scarcity.

The apartment of horrors

Neighbours later recalled a steady stream of destitute young women entering Grossmann's flat — many of whom were never seen leaving. Over the same period, dismembered human remains were repeatedly recovered from nearby canals and waterways. Investigators came to suspect that the man in that apartment was responsible for a series of murders stretching across several years, hidden behind the anonymity and chaos of the post-war city.

The grisly legend

Because Grossmann had sold meat on the black market and reportedly ran a hot-dog stand near a station, a horrifying rumour took root: that he had sold the flesh of his victims to unsuspecting customers. It is important to stress that this cannibalism-and-sausages story, though endlessly repeated, was never proven, and it belongs as much to Weimar-era sensationalism as to established fact. The documented reality of his crimes is grim enough without the embellishment, and treating the legend as fact distorts the case.

Arrest

On 21 August 1921, neighbours in his building heard screams, banging, and then sudden silence. Police forced their way in and found the body of a recently murdered young woman, along with bloodstains suggesting that others had been killed there in the preceding weeks. Grossmann was arrested on the spot and charged with murder, and reports indicated he had been linked to far more disappearances than could ever be formally proven.

Death before judgment

Estimates of Grossmann's victims vary enormously, from a small number of confirmed killings up to the most lurid contemporary speculation of a hundred. The truth was never settled, in large part because the only body recovered intact was that of his final victim and because he never gave a complete confession. Convicted of murder, Grossmann did not face execution: on 5 July 1922, while awaiting the end of the legal process, he hanged himself in his cell, foreclosing any chance of learning the full scope of his crimes.

Alongside Fritz Haarmann and Peter Kürten, Grossmann became a symbol of the anxieties of Weimar Germany — a society reeling from war, poverty and rapid change — and his case influenced artists of the period and still features in studies of how social collapse breeds both predators and victims. Stripped of its legends, his story remains a sobering record of how the most marginalised paid the highest price in a desperate age.