In 1921, a year after the release of expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari in which the somnambulist Cesare abducts and murders young women, Kürten left prison, married and worked in a factory where he became a political activist involved in trade unionism. In the midst of the Weimar Republic’s political violence, his own pathological revolution fell into remission but, in 1925, he was imprisoned again for theft and arson. The fourteen years of the Weimar Republic—‘a tumultuous interregnum between disasters’[127]—instituted state violence, authoritarianism, and propaganda. A civilization of repression, aggression dislocation—subjects of special interest to Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm, all members of the contemporaneous Frankfurt School. Fromm would go on to write extensively about necrophilia and the necrophilious character.
During his spell in prison, Kürten’s sadistic fantasies intensified, on the 9th of February 1929, they spilled over into lust murder; this time, Rosa Ohliger—an eight-year-old-girl—would be his victim. He had perfected the attack with a series of assaults on women in the days leading up to the murder, stabbing one woman twenty four times. Düsseldorf police discovered her body half hidden under a hedge, they found thirteen stab wounds on her body and evidence that the killer had tried to burn it. Kürten had again returned to the scene and orgasmed as he had when setting fire to the young girl’s body. During the autopsy, doctors found knife wounds and semen traces in and around the girl’s vagina and ejaculate on her underwear.
Kürten killed the girl ten days after the first publication of Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) portraying the trauma experienced by soldiers in the First World War, the alienation they felt in trying to adapt to society, and the deprivation they faced in a time of economic depression. In prison throughout most of the war, Kürten must have felt an existential if not ethical kinship with these soldiers, traumatized as he was by his father, a criminal alienated within society, thieving to make a living.
If he did feel empathy towards the soldiers, he felt nothing for the ordinary citizens (and animals) of Düsseldorf. On the 14th of February—as Al Capone’s men were using machine guns and shotguns to mow down members of Bugs Moran’s gang in the St Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago—in Flingern, Kürten stabbed a 45-year-old mechanic 20 times and watched him bleed to death. He returned later and spoke to police investigating the crime.
On 21 August, Kürten heard the ‘backs on the street which cry out for the knife,’ bidding passers-by in Lierenfeld a ‘Good evening,’ and then stabbing them in their backs and in their ribs. At 10:30pm, two days later, in Flehe, Gertrude Hamacher (aged five) and Louise Lenzen (14) were walking home together after the annual fair. Kürten emerged from the trees, gave money to Louise and asked her to buy him cigarettes. When Louise left, Kürten strangled Gertrude and cut her throat with a knife. When Louise returned, Kürten pulled her into the bushes, strangled and then decapitated her. The next day, after propositioning a servant girl—Gertrude Schulte—for sex, he stabbed her and fled. The girl survived and gave the police a description of the ‘pleasant-looking’ man.
In September 1929, Kürten raped and beat to death Ida Reuter; on the 12th of October, he did the same to Elizabeth Dorrier; and on the 25th of October, he attacked Frau Meurer and Frau Wanders with a hammer. On the 9th of November, a local newspaper received a letter with a map showing the whereabouts of a dead child—police found the strangled and mutilated body of five-year-old Gertrude Albermann outside an abandoned factory. To avoid capture—or to shift the dynamics of his orgasms—over the next six months, Kürten changed his modus operandi, baffling police and terrorizing the city.
On the 14th of May 1930, Maria Budlick journeyed from Köln to Düsseldorf. At Düsseldorf station, a man approached her and said he would show her a cheap women’s hostel where she could stay while looking for work. She followed the man but, recalling what she had read in the newspapers about the Düsseldorf vampire, she became suspicious. She quarrelled with the man until a passer-by intervened and chased the man off. Maria Budlick’s saviour proved to be Peter Kürten and he took her to his room on Mettmanner Strasse. The young woman refused to have sex with Kürten and begged to leave, so Kürten took her to Worringerplatz by tram and from there through the Hellweg (salt road or way of the dead) to the Grafenberger Woods. Kürten had used the wood before, attempting to murder a girl while raping her, he had left the girl there but her body was never discovered. This time, under the cover of the trees, Kürten grabbed Maria’s throat and repeated his demands for intercourse. Whatever her reply, he attempted to rape her and then showed her the way to the tram station. Fraulein Budlick then wrote to a friend—Frau Bruckner—but the post delivered the letter by mistake to a Frau Brugmann who, after reading the contents, took it to the police. Kürten did not think the young woman would remember the direction to his apartment at 71 Mettmanner Strasse, but a week later, after she had been questioned by the police, Chief Inspector Gennat escorted her to the address. While they were there, Kürten returned home, passed them on the stairs, and went into his room, changed and left the building under the observation of two plainclothes police officers. He returned to his wife, admitted the crime, and two days later told her about the other attacks and confessed that he was the Düsseldorf Vampire. He told her that if he had to go to prison for the rest of his life, she should inform on him to the police and collect the reward money. On the 24th of May, Frau Kürten contacted the police and told them of her husband’s confessions. If they came to St Rochus church at 3pm, her husband would be there to meet her. Armed police ambushed Kürten but the vampire went with them peacefully, saying, ‘There is no need to be afraid.’
While awaiting trial, the psychologist Professor Karl Berg interviewed Kürten who openly confessed his crimes and perversions. Whereas Bertrand had little recollection of his deeds, blinded by a quasi-epileptic light, Kürten had almost total recall. For him, remembering the details of his crimes was almost as stimulating as dismembering the corpses. However, he struggled to recall other facts about his life and blamed society for what he had become. A stenographer recorded the sadistic events as Kürten admitted nearly 80 sexual and violent crimes against men, women, and children, smiling as he shocked the attendant police officers with the precision of his recall.
On the 13th of April 1931, standing in a specially constructed cage, Kürten answered charges of nine murders and seven attempted murders. The prosecution displayed the clothes, skulls, and mutilated body parts of the Vampire’s victims, along with the tools of his crime—a hammer, a spade, rope, scissor, and various knives. Contemporary photos of Kürten show a respectable, well-dressed and well-built middle-aged man. Despite his confession, he denied the charges and pleaded not guilty. After two months of examining and cross-examining, the prosecution eventually pressured Kürten into changing his plea to guilty and the court heard his original confession, despite Dr Berg’s promise to him that it would be kept between them. The medical profession attested to Kürten’s sanity. Kürten held to his belief that the motive for his homicidal sexual attacks had been to take revenge on a society that had subjected him to the brutalities of the prison system. Kürten admitted to the judge that he had no conscience, no empathy or sympathy for his victims, just as his torturers (prison guards and father) had no guilt for what they had done. He did not believe his actions were evil; they were revenge for the injustices inflicted upon him, what had happened to him had made him a pitiless non-human. He blamed god, his father, the courts, prison, and Germany for his sadistic nature, which included fantasies of mass murder, admitting, ‘I derived the sort of pleasure from these visions that other people would get from thinking about a naked woman.’ Kürten’s veracity of narrative matched the voracity of his crimes, and the prosecution sat back and allowed him to damn himself while his defence counsel, Dr Wehner, attempted to prove his client’s insanity. Faced with the confession, evidence, and Kürten’s obvious selfish enjoyment in the retelling, the jury took just 90 minutes to find him guilty of all charges. Dr Rose, the judge, sentenced him to death on each of the nine murder counts. Kürten accepted the penalty, even though he fastidiously questioned the evidence of the witnesses when it clashed with his apparent superior memory of events, and he thought the medical and psychological evidence inaccurate.