Peter Kürtenknown as the Vampire of Dusseldorf, Kürten had been responsible for a number of attacks on people in 1913 and later in 1929, during which he committed as many as nine murders and attempted to kill a further thirty-one people. After his capture, the serial killer was sentenced to death for his crimes, and executed by guillotine in 1931.
In the city of Köln, then part of the German Empire, a burglary occurred at a tavern in Mülheim am Rhein on May 25, 1913. The perpetrator had stood across from the inn, surveying it from outside before breaking in to steal whatever items of value he could find. As he went from room to room, the man came across a young girl sleeping in her bed.
Many years later, the killer would recount the story to police. “I broke into a house in the Wolfstrasse — an inn owned by Klein — and went up to the first floor. I opened different doors and found nothing worth stealing; but in the bed I saw a sleeping girl of about ten, covered with a thick feather bed.”
Seizing the girl by the neck and with both hands, the man throttled her. The child, who struggled for some time, eventually fell unconscious. The man then drew her head over the edge of the bed and penetrated her genitals with his fingers. “I had a small but sharp pocket knife with me and I held the child’s head and cut her throat,” he later said.
“I heard the blood spurt and drip on the mat beside the bed. It spurted in an arch, right over my hand. The whole thing lasted about three minutes. Then I went locked the door again and went back home to Düsseldorf.” The man later confessed that he ejaculated upon hearing the blood dripping from her wounds.
When he body was found, the corpse was said to be pallid, with hardly any post-mortem staining, while the tongue was severely bitten. Two wounds on the throat were separated from each other, one shallow, being only 1-to-2mm deep; the other deep, 9cm in length. The upper wound suggested a single stroke, while the lower had been made by four swift movements.
The victim, ten-year-old schoolgirl Christine Klein had been found by her father, tavern owner Peter Klein. When police searched the crime scene, they came across a handkerchief with the initials “P.K.”. Suspicion soon fell on Peter’s brother Otto, with police suspecting he had borrowed his brothers handkerchief.
His motive, his brother’s refusal to give Otto a loan, which had sent him into a violent rage. Subsequently, Otto had been heard to threaten his brother that he “would remember all his life,” his refusal to lend him money. The fact that the murder seemed otherwise motiveless seemed to deepen suspicion of Otto Klein as the perpetrator.
The child had been throttled unconscious, her throat had been cut with a sharp knife, and although there were signs of some sexual molestation, but not rape, it was theorized that Otto Klein had penetrated the child’s genitals in order to provide an apparent motive, casting suspicion away from himself.
Charged with Christine’s murder, Otto Klein was put on trial, however the jury, although partly convinced of his guilt, felt that the evidence was not sufficiently strong enough and he was ultimately acquitted. Many years later, the killer of Christine Klein confessed to her murder, and told police his actions after her death.
The day following the murder, the killer went back to Mullheim and in a café opposite the Kleins’ inn sat and drank a glass of beer. He watched and listened to those around him talking about the crime, and confessed “all the horror and indignation did him good,” and the he felt safe from capture.
He further confessed to having his sadistic impulses awakened, and with his bloodthirsty appetite whetted, he soon began a series of strangulation and axe attacks on the unsuspecting people of Düsseldorf. The killer, Peter Kürten, would go on to become known as the Vampire of Düsseldorf.
In the week following Klein’s funeral, Kürten travelled occasionally to Mülheim am Rhein to visit the child’s grave, and told investigators that when he handled the soil covering the grave, he spontaneously ejaculated. Kürten continued to carry out a series of burglaries over the course of the following two months.
During one incident on July 14th, he broke into a home with the use of a skeleton key, and there discovered a 17-year-old named Gertrud Franken asleep in her bed. Kürten knelt over the sleeping girl and proceeded to manually strangle her, ejaculating at the sight of blood spouting from her mouth, before leaving the crime scene. Much as he had done at the earlier Klein murder, Kürten escaped undetected, however this time his victim survived.
Just a few days after Peter Kürten’s attempted murder of Gertrud Franken, he was arrested after police identified him as the culprit in a series of burglaries and arson attacks. Tried and found guilty, he was sentenced to six years imprisonment. During his incarceration, he repeatedly grew insubordinate.
These acts of defiance saw his prison sentence increased by a further two years, which he served in a military prison in the town of Brieg. Upon his release in April 1921, Kürten relocated to Altenburg, and there became acquainted, through his sister with whom he lived, with a woman three years older named Auguste Scharf.
A sweet shop proprietor and former prostitute, Scharf had previously been convicted of shooting her fiancé to death. Upon meeting, Kürten initially posed as a former prisoner of war, and the two began a relationship. Two years later, the couple married and appeared to have a normal, healthy marriage.
Kürten later admitted that despite regularly engaging in sex with his wife, he could only consummate his marriage by fantasising about committing violence against another person. Indeed, after their wedding night, the couple only engaged in sexual intercourse at Auguste’s invitation.
During this time of apparent stability in his life, Kürten gained permanent work in a factory, and became active in trade union circles. Although he seemed to forge no friendships, besides that of his wife, Peter Kürten spent the next four years in relative peace, and for all intents and purposes, seemed to be living a perfectly normal and respectable life.
By 1925, Kürten went with his wife to Düsseldorf, where he had not visited since his childhood. It was there that he had committed his first crimes, and he later said he rejoiced that “the sunset was blood-red on my return,” interpreting this as an omen that his return had been fated to happen.
There he entered into a number of affairs, with a servant girl named Tiede and a housemaid named Mech. Both women would later recount how they were frequently ubjected to partial strangulation when they entered into sexual acts with Kürten. Tiede said she was once told by Kürten, “That’s what love means.”
When Auguste discovered his infidelity, Tiede reported Kürten to police, claiming she had had been seduced by him, while Mech alleged Kürten had raped her. This more serious charge was later dropped, however police pursued Tiede’s allegations, which saw Kürten recieve an eight-month prison sentence for attempted seduction and threatening behaviour.
After serving six-months of his sentence, he was granted early release upon the condition that he leave the city of Düsseldorf. He later appealed this, with the ruling that he relocate suspended. Peter Kürten returned to Düsseldorf once more, his murderous bloodlust in need of being satiated, he began a reign of terror.
The Düsseldorf police were first made aware that a dangerous killer was stalking the city came on February 9, 1929, when the body of an eight-year-old girl, Rosa Ohliger, was found under a hedge. She had been strangled into unconsciousness and then stabbed repeatedly with a pair of scissors.
The killer had used the sharpe instrument to cause wounds to the stomach, temple, genitals and heart. Kürten revealed later that he had spontaneously ejaculating as he knifed the child, and then inserted his semen into her vagina with his fingers. Several hours after hiding the body, he returned with a bottle of kerosene and made an attempt to burn the body. He recounted how he had achieved orgasm at the sight of the flames.
Unbeknown to police, Kürten had stalked Apollonia Kühn on February 3, 1929, waiting until the middle-aged woman was hidden from view of potential witnesses by bushes before he grabbed her by the lapels on her coat and shouted “No row! Don’t scream!”. He dragged her into the nearby undergrowth and stabbed her twenty-four times with the same sharpened scissors.
Despite the ferocity of the attack, with many of the wounds so deeply that the scissors struck her bones, Frau Kühn survived her injuries. It was at this time that Kürten discovered that he gained pleasure from returning to the scene of his crimes. “The place where I attacked Frau Kühn I visited again that same evening twice and later several times,” he said.
“In doing so, I sometimes had an orgasm. When that morning I poured petrol over the child Ohliger and set fire to her, I had an orgasm at the height of the fire.” Five days after the attack on Kühn, Kürten was conversing with police at the scene of another of his crimes, that of the murder of Rudolf Scheer in the suburb of Flingen Nord. The killer told the policeman he had heard about the murder over the telephone.
The 45-year-old mechanic had been stabbed twenty times, mostly about the back, head and eyes. Despite his suspicion, the detective had little reason for concern that Kürten was the perpetrator, and so spoke frankly about the crime, a revelation that would later emerge at the trial.
Police were convinced they were looking for the same suspect in all these crimes, despite the fact that the victims ranged in sex and age. All the attacks had occurred in the Flingern district of Düsseldorf at around dusk, and all had received multiple stab wounds, likely with the same weapon.
Investigators concluded that robbery had not been an obvious motive, and that the perpetrator was selecting his victims at random. For Düsseldorf police, this proved a bizarre and confusing factor in the crimes, and made the task more difficult in identifying such an abnormal criminal.
Shortly after these attacks, a man named Stausberg was arrested for assaulting two women with a noose. Suspecting they had captured the assailant of the February attacks, Stausberg, for some inexplicable reason, confessed to the crimes and was removed to a lunatic asylum.
In what could be considered an unfortunate coincidence, Stausberg committed similar assaults against women, and claimed responsibility for the crimes carried out by Peter Kürten, ensuring the police concentrated their efforts away from the actual perpetrator. This allowed Kürten to continue carrying out his sadistic crimes.
Between March and July 1929, a series of strangulation and stabbing incidents made the police aware that the madman had not been caught, and was once again on the prowl. In the western suburb of Lierenfeld, three people were stabbed while walking home at night, and all were accosted by their attacked.
The victims described for police how a police man had bidden “Good Evening” to them before launching an attack causing deep knife wounds in their ribs and back. One of the four victims Kürten claimed to have thrown into the Rhine River. Not further people are known to have been murdered until August 11, 1929, when a young girl was attacked.
According to Kürten, he first encountered a young woman named Maria Hahn, whom he described as “a girl looking for marriage,” on August 8th, and had arranged to take her on a date to the Neandertal district of Düsseldorf the following Sunday. After spending several hours in Hahn’s company, Kürten decided to lure her into a meadow so that he could kill her.
During the attack, as Hahn was alternately strangled and stabbed her in the chest and head, she pleaded for Kürten to spare her life as he sat astride her body and watched as she died. Approximately one hour after the attack, Maria Hahn died of her injuries. With his clothing bloodstained, Kürten worried that his wife might suspect him of the killing.
He decided to hide Hahn’s body, burying it in a cornfield. Several weeks later, he returned with the intention of nailing the decomposing remains to a tree, as part of a mock crucifixion that he wanted to shock and disgust the local community. However, the corpse proved too heavy for Kürten to carry out his ghoulish plans.
Instead, he returned her body to the grave, then embraced and caressed as he lay beneath the decomposing remains. Kürten later admitted that before and after his attempted impalement of Hahn’s corpse, he had “went to the grave many times and kept improving on it; and every time I thought of what was lying there and was filled with satisfaction.”
Having seemingly gotten away with Hahn’s murder, Kürten sent an anonymous letter to police in which he made a confession to her murder, and directed investigators to her remains buried in the field, and also drew a crude map that described the location of the body. With the letter, police managed to locate Maria Hahn’s remains on November 15, 1929.
In the aftermath of Maria Hahn’s murder, Peter Kürten decided to change the weapon he had used in his crime, from a pair of scissors to a knife, in an effort to convince police that there was more than one person responsible. In the early morning hours of August 21, three people were randomly attacked.
The victims, an 18-year-old girl, a 30-year-old man, and a 37-year-old woman, were stabbed during the attacks, and all were seriously wounded. They stated to police that their assailant had not said a word as he launched his unprovoked attacks. On the night of August 23, 1929, Kürten attended the annual fair in the ancient town of Flehe.
There were hundreds of people at the fairground, and Kürten began stalking his prey. He saw two foster sisters, five-year-old Gertrude Hamacher and 14-year-old Luise Lenzen, as they left the fair and started walking through the adjoining allotments to their home. Approaching the girl, Kürten sent the older girl, Lenzen, on an errand.
“Would be very kind and get some cigarettes for me? I’ll look after the little girl,” he told Lenzen, with the promise of being given 20 pfennig upon her return. Luise took the man’s money and ran back towards the fairground. When she was out of view, Kürten gently picked up Gertrude in his arms and strangled her, before slowly cutting her throat with a clasp knife.
The body was discarded in a patch of runner beans, and when Lenzen returned a few moments later, she was dragged off the footpath before being strangled and decapitated. Witnessing the blood spurt from the wound, Kürten bit and twice cut her throat before sucking blood from the wounds.
When the bodies were discovered, police saw that Lenzen’s footprints were found within seven meters of her body, suggesting she may have attempted to escape from her attacker before being overtaken. There appeared to be no sign of sexual interference with the children, leaving the motive a mystery.
The next day Kürten accosted a 27-year-old servant girl named Gertrude Schulte, whom he attempted to persuade to have sex with him. When she rebuffed him saying, “I’d rather die,” he answered, “Well, die then” and proceeded to repeatedly stab her in the head, neck, shoulder, and back.
Despite this frenzied attack, Schulte survived and was able to give police a clear description of her assailant, whom she described as a pleasant-looking, nondescript man of about forty years of age. In late August and early September, a further two victims were attacked.
One of these victims was almost strangled, while the other was stabbed by an assailant who quickly escaped. In both these incidents the victims were injured but survived. After these attempts, Kürten decided to use a hammer in any subsequent attacks. Around this time, the press began referring to the unidentified killer as the Düsseldorf Monster or Vampire of Düsseldorf.
Peter Kürten had by that time, reached the apex of his sexual desires. With increasing frequency, the ferocity of his attacks had grown and medical experts believed the “Vampire” had lost all control over his sadistic impulses. Düsseldorf was thrown into a panic comparable to that caused by the crimes of Jack the Ripper as the murders continued to rise.
On the evening of September 30, 1929, Kürten was at the Düsseldorf station where he encountered 31-year-old servant girl named Ida Reuter. After introducing himself, the young woman agreed to accompany him to a café, and then for a walk through the local Hofgarten close to the Rhine River.
When they arrived at the river, Kürten repeatedly struck Reuter about the head with a hammer, then proceeded to rape her, before hitting her again. At some point during the assault, Reuter regained consciousness and pleaded with her attacker to spare her life. Kürten’s reply was to give “her other hammer blows on the head and misused her”.
On October 11, eleven days after Reuter’s murder, Kürten came across Elizabeth Dörrier outside a theatre. In a similar ruse with which he had lured Reuter, Kürten persuaded the 22-year-old servant to go with him for a drink at a café, before taking a train to Grafenberg, where they would walk alongside the Kleine Düssel river.
There he struck her across the head with a hammer, then raped her. Afterwards the victim was hit several more times over the head and left for dead. Dörrier was discovered at roughly 6:30am. Left in a coma from the sustained and vicious attack, she died the following day from her injuries.
Police received an anonymous letter, dated October 14, 1929, in which the author announced that he was responsible for the murder of Maria Hahn on August 8th. By this time, police had still not recovered Hanh’s body, and the killer revealed that he had buried her body “at the edge of the woods”.
Two women were attacked on October 25, 1929, and both survived being struck with a hammer by the Düsseldorf Vampire. It was believed the second victim survived only because Kürten’s hammer broke during the attack. On November 7, 1929, Kürten was in the Flingern district of Düsseldorf when he spotted a young child.
He managed to persuade the 5-year-old girl named Gertrude Albermann to accompany him to a section of deserted allotments. There she was seized by the throat and strangled, with Kürten stabbing her once in the side of the head with a pair of scissors. When the child “collapsed to the ground without a sound”, Kürten went on to stab her a further thirty-four times in the head and chest. Her body was then hidden in a pile of nettles close to a factory wall.
By late summer of 1929, the investigation into the series of murders had become a priority for the Düsseldorf police, as the increasingly savage crimes had received considerable national and international attention. The Vampire of Düsseldorf, as the perpetrator had been nicknamed by the German press, had so far eluded capture.
Because of the savagery of the assaults, seemingly random selection of victims, and the differing methods with which they had been killed, such as suffering strangulation, knife wounds, stab wounds and the use of a hammer in the latest attacks, it was believed the police were searching for more than one suspect.
The citizens of Düsseldorf were growing fearful that a killer of killers, who seemingly targeted men, women and children, was on the loose and remained at large despite a number of assaults committed against women who survived. Some of the these victims had given detailed descriptions of the man responsible, however police had not made any arrests.
Police began their search for the killer by cooperating with surrounding police forces, and pursuing a number of leads that came in from the public. By the end of 1929, as many as 13,000 letters had been sent to police from citizens, who offered information on potential suspects. Each of these leads were painstakingly investigated.
At the turn of the new year, Düsseldorf police had interviewed more than 9,000 individuals, and followed-up on 2,650 potential leads, which led to the accumulation of a suspect list containing 900,000 different names. As detectives began looking into each of these names, the killer made contact with authorities once more.
On November 9, 1929, just two days after the brutal murder of young Gertrude Albermann, a local communist newspaper received a map revealing the location of Maria Hahn’s grave. The crude drawing also revealed the precise location where he had left Albermann’s body, which had been recovered earlier that day, described the exact position of her corpse, which could be found face-down among bricks and rubble.
The letter underwent analysis by a handwriting expert, who stated his belief that the author was the same individual as the writer of the October letter. Each of the three letters sent to authorities and describing the crimes, and threatening further assaults, were examined by a graphologist, who confirmed they were written by the same individual.
This revelation led Ernst Gennat, chief inspector of the Berlin Police, to the conclusion that a single perpetrator was responsible for most, if not all of the spate of assaults and murders. With this information, police doubled down of their effort to locate and apprehend the Düsseldorf Vampire.
Throughout the period between February and May of 1930, a continued spate of strangulation and hammer attacks occurred, although none with fatal consequences. Subsequently the murder of Gertrude Albermann would turn out to be Kürten’s final murder. Of the ten victims attacked in early 1930, all survived and gave police a description of their assailant.
On 14 May 1930, an unidentified man approached 20-year-old Maria Budlick at Düsseldorf station. The two entered into conversation, and the man learned that the young woman had travelled to Düsseldorf from the cathedral city of Köln in search of lodgings and work, and so he offered to direct her towards a local hostel.
Maria Budlick agreed to follow the man through the brightly-lit streets for a while, although she became increasingly apprehensive by his attempts to lead her through a scarcely populated park. Remembering the newspaper stories of the Düsseldorf killer, she refused to go any farther.
The two began to argue as the man insisted she follow him, at which point another man approached and asked whether Budlick was being pestered by her companion. When she nodded, the man with whom she had been arguing, clearly intimidated by the newcomer’s arrival, walked away, leaving Fraulein Budlick alone with her rescuer. The man who came to Budlick’s aid was Peter Kürten.
He then invited the young woman, who was distressed by her experience, to his apartment on Mettmanner Straße where she could eat and drink. However, Budlick correctly deducing that Kürten’s hospitality was hidden behind an underlying motive, and she told him she was uninterested in engaging in sexual intercourse.
“The girl told me that she was out of work and had nowhere to go,” Kürten later said. “She agreed to come with me to my room on the Mettmanner Strasse and then she suddenly said she did not want sexual intercourse and asked me whether I could find her somewhere else to sleep.”
In response, Kürten calmly offered to lead Budlick to a nearby hotel, and the pair went by tram to Worringerplatz before he began to lure her into the Grafenburg Woods. There, she was seized by the throat and asked if he could have her. he attempted to strangle her as he raped her. When Budlick began to scream, Kürten released his grasp on her throat, before allowing her to leave.
“I thought that under the circumstances she would agree and my opinion was right. Afterwards I took her back to the tram, but I did not accompany her right to it because I was afraid she might inform the police officer who was standing there. I had no intention of killing Budlick as she had offered no resistance.”
Despite the harrow experience she suffered at the hands of Peter Kürten, who unbeknown to her was the Düsseldorf Monster, Budlick did not report the assault to police, but instead decided to describe her ordeal in a letter to a friend, Frau Bruckner. However, as she addressed the letter incorrectly, it was opened at the post office by a clerk on May 19, 1930.
When the clerk, Frau Brugmann, read the contents of the letter, it was forward to the Düsseldorf police. This letter was read by Chief Inspector Gennat, who stated his belief that there might be a chance, however small, that Budlick’s assailant was the Düsseldorf Vampire. Questioned extensively by Gennat, Budlick recounted her ordeal.
She told Gennat that one of the reasons her attacker had spared her was because she had falsely informed him she could not remember his address. After some hesitation, she agreed to lead the police to the suspects home, on Mettmanner Straße. When the landlady of the property let Budlick into the room of 71 Mettmanner Straße, she recognized the empty room.
She confirmed to Gennat that this was the address of her assailant. The landlady confirmed to the chief inspector the room was occupied by one Peter Kürten. At that point, Budlick saw the man who had attacked her, enter the house and begin climbing the stairs towards her. He looked briefly startled, but carried on to his room and shut the door behind him.
“I did not think that Budlick would be able to find her way back to my apartment in the rather obscure Mettmanner Strasse,” Kürten later said. “So much the more was I surprised when on Wednesday, the 21st of May, I saw her again in my house.” A few moments later he left the house with his hat pulled down over his eyes, passed the two plainclothes men standing in the street and disappeared round a corner.
Upon the realisation that his identity was known to police and capture was inevitable, Kürten chose to explain the circumstances of the attack on Budlick to his wife. Up to this point, nothing linked him to the crimes of the Düsseldorf Vampire, however the attempted rape of Budlick, along with his previous crimes, could be enough to ensure fifteen years of penal servitude.
With his wife’s consent, he found lodgings in the Adlerstraße district of Düsseldorf, and did not return to his own home until May 23, 1930. “Throughout the night I walked about. On Thursday, the 22nd of May, I saw my wife in the morning in the flat and so fetched my things away in a bag and rented a room in the Adlerstrasse. I slept quietly until Friday morning.”
He later described the events of Friday morning. “Today, the 23rd, in the morning, I told my wife that I was also responsible for the Schulte affair, adding my usual remark that it would mean ten years’ or more separation for us — probably forever. At that, my wife was inconsolable. She spoke of unemployment, lack of means and starvation in old age.”
“She raved that I should take my life, then she would do the same, since her future was completely without hope. Then, in the late afternoon, I told my wife that I could help her.” Kürten decided to tell his wife everything, the he was the infamous ‘Düsseldorf Vampire’ and disclosed to her every detail of the murders he had committed.
Kürten then hinted to his wife that a substantial reward had been offered in identifying and apprehending of the ‘Vampire’, and that she could get hold of that money if she would report the confession and denounce him to the police. “Of course, it wasn’t easy for me to convince her that this ought not to be considered as treason, but that, on the contrary, she was doing a good deed to humanity as well as to justice.”
“It was not until late in the evening that she promised to carry out my request, and also that she would not commit suicide. It was 11 o’clock when we separated. Back in my lodging, I went to bed and fell asleep at once.” On May 24, 1930, Auguste Kürten went to the police and told them everything she knew about her husbands crimes.
She informed detectives that she had arranged to meet Peter outside St. Rochus church at 3 o’clock that afternoon. At the appointed time, the whole area had been surrounded and four officers rushed forward with loaded revolvers the moment Peter Kürten appeared. The man suspected of being the Düsseldorf Vampire simply smiled, telling the officers “there is no need to be afraid,” as he offered no resistance.
The crimes of Peter Kürten can be unquestionably traced back to his childhood. The Düsseldorf was not born a monster, but became one through repeated and sustained abuse throughout his early years. Kürten was born into a poverty-stricken and abusive family in Köln-Mülheim am Rhein on May 26, 1883, as the oldest of thirteen children.
He grew up in a sparse one room apartment, along with his siblings and parents, both of whom were alcoholics. His father in particular was a violent drunkard, and there was a long history of mental illness on the paternal side of the family line. As such, the senior Kürten would frequently arrive home drunk, assault his children and force himself upon their mother.
“If they hadn’t been married, it would have been rape”, Kürten once remarked. Sometimes he would even make the children watch as he raped his wife. Considered irascible and self-possessed, Mr. Kürten was ineffective at controlling his sexual urges, and was later jailed for three years for committing incest with Peter’s eldest sister, aged 13.
On his mother’s side, Kürten appears to have originated from fairly respectable stock, with Mrs. Kürten, the daughter of an affluent proprietor, had five brothers and sisters, all of whom lived to a ripe age. After her husband was jailed, a separation order was secured and, in 1911, she remarried and relocated to Düsseldorf..
It is strongly believed the violent scenes witnessed by Peter Kürten in his household during his childhood had awakened sadistic impulses. “The whole family suffered through his drinking, for when he was in drink, my father was terrible. I, being the eldest, had to suffer most. As you may well imagine, we suffered terrible poverty, all because the wages went on drink. We all lived in one room and you will appreciate what affect that had on me sexually.”
In 1888, five-year-old Kürten attempted to drown one of his playmates. Four years later, he befriended a dogcatcher who lived in the same building as his family. This man, a degenerate, showed the young boy how to masturbate and torture dogs. Far from being repulsed by such behaviour, the young Kürten became an active participant and a strong bond developed between them.
Although considered a good student, his academic studies suffered as a result of the abuse he had suffered at the hands of his father. He would often run away from home for periods of a few days to weeks at a time. Kürten spent much of this time on the streets, in the company of vagrants, social misfits and petty criminals.
As a result, he became adept at committing petty crimes, the proceeds of which were used to feed and clothe him during his time on the streets. His sexual urges developed rapidly around this time, and he was soon committing bestiality with goats and sheep in nearby stables.
He soon discovered that his most powerful sexual pleasures came when he repeatedly stabbed a sheep as he had intercourse, an act that he began acting out with increasing frequency. The sight of blood had a profound affect on the young boy, and would be a significant fantasy during his adolescence.
Kürten later confessed to committing his first murders while playing on a raft in the Rhine. He said he pushed a school friend into the water, knowing he could not swim. When the boy’s friend dived in to rescue him, he, too, was pushed under the raft and held down until he suffocated. These deaths were investigated and ruled as accidental by authorities.
At the age of 13, Kürten became acquainted with a girl his age and the two formed a relationship. Although she allowed Kürten to undress and fondle her, she would resisted any and all attempts he made to engage in sexual intercourse. In frustration, he would resort to bestiality to relieve his sexual urges.
In 1897, sixteen-year-old Kürten left school and at his father’s insistence, obtained employment as an apprentice moulder. However, this lasted on two years before he stole 300 gold marks from his employer before taking all the money he could find in his household. He relocated to Koblenz, where he met and began living with a woman twice his age.
According to Kürten, this woman, an ill-treated masochistic prostitute, willingly submitted to every form of sexual perversion he demanded of her. He was soon to receive the first of twenty-seven prison sentences that would take up twenty-four years of his life. He was charged with breaking and entering, and theft, and sentenced to one month’s imprisonment.
Released from prison in August 1899, he quickly reverted to a life of petty crime. However, this first period of confinement left the young Kürten bitter and angry at the conditions of the penal system. “I do not condemn those sentences in themselves, but I do condemn the way they are carried out on young people.”
During his internment, Kürten developed a fantasy world whereby he could achieve orgasm by imagining violent sexual acts. This became an obsession, so much so that he would deliberately break minor prison rules so that he could be sentenced to solitary confinement. There, he could enjoy his sadistic daydreams without interruption.
Shortly after his release from prison, he decided to enact the dangerous fantasies he had developed while in prison. In his later confessions he told police he “picked up an 18-year-old girl at the Alleestraße” and persuaded her to accompany him to the Hofgarten. There, he claimed, the two engaged in sexual intercourse.
During the act, he strangled her into unconsciousness with his bare hands before leaving the scene, believing her to be dead. With no existing contemporaneous records to corroborate Kürten’s claims, it is believed that if this attack did indeed take place, that the victim likely survived the assault.
According to Kürten, by committing this act, he had finally proven to himself that the most pleasurable gratification could only be achieved by taking a life. More imprisonment followed on charges of petty crime, and with each jail term, his feelings of injustice were strengthened.
Most worryingly for the people of Düsseldorf, his desire for revenge against the injustices he perceived to have suffered, would now be the catalyst for his murderous spree that saw him enact his sadistic fantasies as an act of retribution against the very society that saw him imprisoned.
In 1900, he was arrested several times, most notably for charges relating to his 1899 Düsseldorf thefts, along with the attempted murder of a girl with a firearm, that were added to the indictment. Sentenced to four years in October that same year, he served his term the Derendorf borough of Düsseldorf.
By the summer of 1940, he had been released and was drafted into the Imperial German Army, and deployed to the city of Metz in Lorraine to serve in the 98th Infantry Regiment. However, he soon deserted, and by the autumn had begun committing acts of arson, which involved him discreetly watching the conflagration from a distance as the local fire brigade attempted to extinguish the flames.
Most of these fires were begun in barns and haylofts, and upon his arrest that New Year’s Eve, he confessed to committing around twenty-four acts of arson. In his confession, he admitted that the fires had been started to both satisfy his sexual needs and in the hope that the fires would burn alive sleeping tramps.
Owing to his desertion, Peter Kürten was tried by a military court and convicted on this charge along with multiple counts of arson, robbery and attempted robbery. He was subsequently imprisoned in 1905, until his release in 1913. Once again he spent much of his time in solitary confinement, fantasizing about brutal acts of violence.
Kürten later claimed that he derived the “sort of pleasures from these visions that other people would get from thinking about a naked woman”, and said that he would occasionally spontaneously ejaculated while preoccupied with such thoughts. By the time of his release, Kürten’s mind was almost wholly dedicated to the pursuit of fulfilling his sexual desires.
During his first interrogation, Kürten freely admitted his guilt in every crime police had attributed to the Vampire of Düsseldorf. He made further admissions to carrying out the unsolved murder of Christine Klein and the attempted murder of Gertrud Franken in 1913. In total, he admitted to sixty-eight crimes including nine murders and 31 attempted murders.
No excuse was made for these crimes, except to justify that he had committed them because of the injustices he had endured throughout his youth and imprisonment. Despite the brutal nature of his crimes, he was adamant that he had not tortured any of his child victims. He then went into detail about his fascination and sexual gratification with blood.
He told investigators that the sight of his victim’s blood was, on most occasions, enough to bring him to orgasm. He claimed that if he were to experience ejaculation in the act of strangling a woman, he immediately became apologetic to his victim, proclaiming, “That’s what love is all about”.
In some of his most shocking confessions, Peter Kürten admitted to having drunk blood from the throat of one of his victims, from the head of another, and to have licked blood from a third victim’s hands. During the Hahn murder, he said he drank so much blood that it caused him to vomit.
His desire for blood saw him decapitate a swan during the spring of 1930, so that he could drink the blood from the animal’s neck, an act which caused him to achieve ejaculation in the process. It was this ghoulish aspect to his crimes that earned Peter Kürten the nickname of the Vampire of Düsseldorf.
While awaiting trial, he spoke to Professor Karl Berg, an eminent German psychologist, providing, with remarkable frankness, an insight into his psychological perversity. Berg would later write the most comprehensive guide to the criminal career of Peter Kuerten in a book entitled ‘The Sadist’.
From the beginning of their interactions, Berg was successful in winning the prisoner’s confidence, and their conversations provided a fascinating insight into the mind of a killer. Beg found that Kürten’s memory functioned with an almost photographic clarity, and he provided the most vivid details of each crime.
He believed it provided a measure of the gratification of the act which Kürten derived. When he spoke about matter that held little to no emotional value for him, Berg found that his memory was often highly defective and flawed. His obsession with murder, blood and his own sexual gratification was paramount.
What Berg and investigators found most astonishing was the manner in which Kürten enumerated all his offences. He was not accused of these crimes on a one by one basis, but rather reeled off his own account, beginning with his very first murder and ending with his 79th victim. Each of these cases were dictated to the stenographer and Kürten even showed a measure of satisfaction at the horrified faces of the many police officers that listened to his shocking recital.
This confession made by Kürten after his arrest, at first generated some amount of doubt owing to the fullness and accuracy of the disclosure. However, the majority of these statements were later relayed to the examining magistrate. In response to this scepticism, Kürten made sure he took time to describe each of the crimes with as much clarity as possible.
“It is very easy to describe crimes one has not committed. One could scarcely credit it that a confession could be founded on very full newspaper reports and yet be simply an invention. To that extent, I quite understand your doubts, Professor,” said Kürten. Ultimately, his primary motivation in disclosing his crimes were to procure a lucrative future for his wife.
Throughout the entirety of his confessions, it was noted the consistently high regard he paid towards Frau Kürten, and for Professor Berg, was one of the most fascinating and contradictory aspects of his murderous persona. Despite the fact he had been unfaithful throughout his marriage, Kürten still held and exceptional fondness for his wife and was desperate to ensure a substantial reward for her future years.
“I had already finished with my life when I first knew the police were on my track. I wanted to fix up for my wife a carefree old age, for she is entitled to at least a part of the reward. That is why I entered a plea of guilty to all the crimes.” Charged with a total of nine murders and seven attempted murders, Peter Kürten went to trial.
The trial of the ‘Düsseldorf Vampire’ opened on April 13, 1931, and special provisions were made to secure the defendant and ensure his safety from any potential hostility from those attending court. As such, a special shoulder-high cage had been built inside the courtroom to prevent any such escape.
Behind it was arranged some of the grisly exhibits of the ‘Kürten Museum’, which consisted of skulls of his victims and body parts that displayed the injuries inflicted by the killer, each of which were meticulously presented in a chronologically fashion. On show were a variety of weapons, knives, rope, scissors and a hammer, along with many articles of clothing and a spade he had used to bury a woman.
It proved to be a most gruesome exhibition. The initial shock of the items to the crowd, however, came a second to the nondescript physical appearance of the ‘Vampire’. Dressed in an immaculate suit and with sleek, neatly parted hair, Peter Kürten looked the image of a prim and proper member of society, not some type of beast in human form.
When he spoke, it was in a quiet voice, with a matter-of-fact tone. When asked to enter a plea, the Vampire denied his earlier confessions, and presented a not-guilty plea to the examining magistrate. He claimed, his confession to the crimes on the first occasion was merely to secure the reward for his wife.
Despite his persistence on this, Kürten was eventually worn down by the examining magistrate and, after a trying two months, reverted to his original and full confession. When the full details of his monstrous crimes were revealed to the public, it was more horrific than anyone could have imagined.
However, some of the most brilliant doctors in Germany testified that Kürten had been “perfectly responsible for his actions at all times”. The motive for the murders was made clear from the very beginning. He wanted revenge on what he perceived as an unjust society for the wrongs he had suffered in prison.
In answer to the judge’s question as to whether he had a conscience, Kürten replied, “I have none. Never have I felt any misgiving in my soul; never did I think to myself that what I did was bad, even though human society condemns it. My blood and the blood of my victims will be on the heads of my torturers.”
“There must be a Higher Being who gave in the first place the first vital spark to life. That Higher Being would deem my actions good since I revenged injustice. The punishments I have suffered have destroyed all my feelings as a human being. That was why I had no pity for my victims.”
In what was to become his trademark flat, unemotional voice, Kürten described his life in which a combination of less-than-fortunate factors — heredity, upbringing, education, the faults of the German penal system — had all conspired to bring out and foster the latent sadistic streak with which Kürten believed he had been born.
The court became enthralled with the dramatic extent of the many lurid revelations, with the killer at one point describing his thoughts on how to cause accidents involving thousands of people with no modicum of self-restraint. “I derived the sort of pleasure from these visions that other people would get from thinking about a naked woman,” he said.
When it came time for Kürten to narrate the awful details of each of his killings, each were presented in a manner of such organisation and efficiency never before encountered from a murderer. The confession proved so damning that the prosecution barely bothered to present any evidence against the accused.
Kürten’s defence counsel, Dr. Alex Wehner, had the unenviable and almost hopeless task of trying to prove his clients insanity in the face of insurmountable and damning evidence from the many distinguished psychiatrists who undertook examinations. “The man Kürten is a riddle to me,” he said.
“I can not solve it. The criminal Haarman only killed men, Landru and Grossman only women, but Peter killed men, women, children and animals; killed anything he found.” It took the jury just one and-a-half hours to reach a unanimous verdict; guilty on all counts. In response, Kürten entered into continuous self-righteous ramblings, so much so that the presiding judge, Dr. Rose, was forced to interrupt in order to sentence him to death nine times.
Upon hearing the sentences handed down, Kürten retained a dignified composure and did not challenge the judgement nor feign any hint of remorse. He did, however, note every discrepancy in the many accounts of the witnesses and survivors, and also protested against the observations of the experts, which were not, in his opinion, wholly accurate.
On the evening of July 1, 1931, Peter Kürten, the ‘Düsseldorf Vampire’ received his last meal, ordering Wiener schnitzel, a bottle of white wine, and fried potatoes. Upon eating the entire meal, he requested a second helping, with the prison staff granting his request. His execution was scheduled for 6:00am on July 2, 1931.
A guillotine erected in the yard of the Klingelpütz Prison, Cologne, and Kürten walked unassisted, flanked by the prison psychiatrist and a priest, to where the executioner, Carl Gröpler, stood waiting. Shortly before his head was placed on the guillotine, Kürten turned to the prison psychiatrist and asked a question.
“Tell me… after my head is chopped off, will I still be able to hear, at least for a moment, the sound of my own blood gushing from the stump of my neck?”. He savoured this thought for a while, then added, “That would be the pleasure to end all pleasures.” When asked whether he had any last words to say, Kürten simply smiled and replied, “No”.
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