Tuesday, Mar 9, 2021 • 18min

The Butcher of Berlin and His Bloody Bratwurst (Short)

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Simon Whistler

01:22

Hello everybody. Welcome back to another brand new episode of The Casual Criminalist. This is one of our shorts, but it is a bloody one. It's "The Butcher of

Berlin

and His Bloody Bratwurst" and this as always, it's written by Callum. I am going to read it. The story here is that I've never read this before. We're going to read it and enjoy it together hopefully.

01:41

And as this is a short one, let's just crack on. But before I do, just let me say, if you're listening to this in its podcast form well, a review of the show would be greatly appreciated. If you're watching it on YouTube well you know what to do, smash that like button or if you don't like the show, that's what the dislike button is for. Let's jump in.

02:04

Remember the

Horse Meat Scandal

? I do Callum. Wasn't Ikea accidentally allegedly, just throw that in just in case, allegedly, they had like

Horse Meat

in the meatballs or something somehow like that.

02:20

I remember I went to Morocco a few years ago with my wife and we went to the store and we bought some sausages and we'd be like, "Oh those would be nice for breakfast. They look good". And so we bought them, took them back, cooked them up for breakfast and then "these sausages taste a bit different but they're not bad" and then we found out that we had eaten horse sausages and it was like "good", I mean I don't care. It was tasty. I'm happy to eat horse.

02:40

But with the

Horse Meat Scandal

. The problem was we didn't know we were eating horse. It's that I'm happy eating horse, but not if it's advertised as cow or pig or whatever.

02:49

Back in 2013, Britain was up in arms, because it was discovered that some of our favourite beef products actually contained hefty portions of equine goodness, 100% in the case of those

Findus

microwave lasagnes. Meanwhile, the French just looked on confused, thinking "Yes, horse lasagne, it’s delicious. What’s the problem"?

03:07

Yeah, the French love eating horses. I mean, why not? I don't understand what the big problem is. I mean, people like, "Oh yeah, we ride them and they're so beautiful". It's like you could ride a cow if you wanted to. You probably couldn't. I mean it wouldn't like it and it's slow

03:22

If you want a case of mistaken meat which would shock even our friends across the channel, you need only look to

Germany

. Back in the early 20th century, a brutal criminal sent a wave of panic through the city of

Berlin

, spawning an urban legend which will have you thinking twice whenever you go to munch on a currywurst.

03:38

I’m talking about the case of the

Berlin

Butcher, not to be confused with "The Butcher

Berlin

", which is a burger restaurant with a respectable 4.2 star Google rating. Shout out! No, the butcher we’re covering today has some of the worst reviews in the history of the food and beverage industry, on account of the fact he may have turned hundreds of unwitting Berliners into accidental

Cannibals

. Well that is dark and intense.

04:01

The Hot Dog Man.

04:05

If you had walked down the streets of

Berlin

in 1920 we might have spotted a strange little man running a hot dog stand outside the

Silesian

Train Station, now called

Ostbahnhof

, maybe.

04:20

With

German

pronunciation I tend to just say it in a

German

accent like Oost Vahhof. That sounds more Dutch. Ost-bahn-hof maybe? This was advice and I was like "Doesn't it just sound a bit racist?" and people were like, "No, but it does actually sounds closer to the real pronunciation" so I was like "Okay"!

04:36

This was

Carl Grossman

, a local bratwurst slinger in his mid fifties, and a familiar face to the commuters who came and went through this crime-ridden district.

04:46

The hot dog man looked skinny in his oversized suit, with a menacing scowl seemingly permanently fixed to his mustached face. Whenever the sausage business was slow, he was known to revert to his old profession, begging for change on the streets. Despite these humble career paths

Carl

is actually relatively wealthy for this side of town.

05:03

He had held many jobs over the years, working in textile factories, butcher’s shops, farms, and even had a brief stint in the military during World War One. After his medical discharge, it was rumoured that he used his experience as a butcher to trade in black market meat well into the post-war period, when food was strictly rationed.

05:20

By the 1920s, he had settled down in

Berlin

for a while and was renting a tiny apartment in a building on Langestrasse. Again, maybe. I did my

German

accent thing.

Carl

wasn’t exactly popular among his neighbours mostly on account of his sexual proclivities. He was well known for drunkenly bringing prostitutes back almost every night and waking up the other tenants with the racket. Oh my!

05:42

Whenever he didn’t feel like paying his ladies in cash, he would go searching at Andreasplatz Park for young runaways and homeless women to coerce into coming home with him. He’d flash a fat stack of

papiermarks

, and offer them food, shelter, and employment as his housekeeper in exchange for sex. But what a pleasant man. Not really!

06:00

His live-in maids mustn’t have been doing a very good job of cleaning up the place though, because the neighbours often noticed a horrific smell emanating from

Grossman’s

doorway. He usually explained its was down to some spoiled chicken, left out on the window sill by accident.

06:13

I mean you can get away with that once, right? But then the next time they'll be like "Why do you keep spoiling chicken? What's wrong with you?"

06:19

Understandably, nobody wanted to really get more involved in

Grossman’s

business than they had to so they kind of just accepted his excuses and just left him to it. The kinds of arrangements he was striking up with these women weren’t particularly strange in interwar

Berlin

, where unemployment and poverty were rife.

06:36

What was strange though, was the fact that more women seemed to enter

Carl’s

apartment than ever left. Yeah, that is definitely strange. It sounds like he's killing them and because we're on The Casual Criminalist I'm going to absolutely bet that that is what is happening

06:49

Disappearances.

06:53

It was around the same time that the

Berlin

police were battling a spate of missing persons cases. Ooh, I wonder where they went missing? From the spring of 1918 the brutally dismembered bodies of young women had been periodically discovered in the

Luisenstadt Canal

and Engelbecken Reservoir. Many were never identified.

07:10

The killings continued over the next few years and in October 1920 a woman named Freida Schubert wound up as the latest victim. She had been working as a prostitute at the time, and when the police interviewed witnesses at her usual haunts they reported seeing her head off with a John on the evening of her disappearance.

07:26

A little more digging revealed it was none other than

Carl Grossman

, once again living up to his name. Ah, because like

Grossman

, Gross-man, gross man, he is a gross man. I guess I didn't really need to explain. Let's move on.

07:40

Police searched his apartment, and discovered Freida’s handbag.

Grossman

calmly explained that yes, he had hired her for the night but she had simply left in a hurry and forgotten her bag.

07:50

This guy is super guilty. I mean, also because this is about the Butcher Of

Berlin

and he fed her to, oh God!

07:57

The cases continued to pile up for another ten months bringing the total number of bodies to over twenty. Throughout this time

Mr Grossman

became a familiar face at the local police station. Not because he was under suspicion or anything, he was just having the worst luck with his housekeepers. He filed report after report claiming that his live-in maids were robbing him and then vanishing without a trace. Eventually, the police began to get sick of the sight of the guy.

08:21

By 1921 the spate of disappearances and/or murders, gonna guess probably both, had reached epidemic levels. The death of twenty four year old Johanna Sonowski was the most recent, and it prompted the police to launch a renewed appeal for information in the area around the station where it was believed the killer was based.

08:42

The Strange Sounds

08:46

The posters which they put up were spotted by several of

Grossman’s

suspicious neighbours, including husband and wife Helene and Mannheim Iztig. They were among the many residents who had heard sounds of violence erupting from

Grossman’s

room late at night, but nobody really complained unless it was keeping them up.

09:02

That was the grim reality of being an impoverished woman back then. Violence was seen as a plain fact of life and even if the violence had been reported, the police weren’t exactly in the habit of rushing to rescue of destitute runaways. After discovering that an infamous serial killer might be living in their neighbourhood however, the Iztigs started to take the plight of

Grossman’s

partners a bit more seriously.

09:21

These top-tier busybodies drilled a hole in his door. Whoa, dude, just call the police, that's what they're for. Although it doesn't seem like they're doing a very good job, but I mean they want information at this point. Don't go all

vigilante

. They reported what they saw to the police, but like I said,

Domestic Violence

against'fallen women' was barely even considered criminal back then.

09:42

It would be another couple of weeks before the incident that finally brought the police back to

Grossman’s

door. On the 21st of August, while walking through Andreasplatz Park he happened across a young woman named Marie Nietsche. She had just been released from the

Moabit

Prison after serving a month-long sentence and she took him up on his offer of lunch and a few drinks.

10:02

Late that night, the residents of 88 and 89 Langestrasse were once again awoken by the sounds of screaming on the 4th floor, but this time it was so loud and tortured that even that laissez-faire lot decided that they had to intervene.

Grossman’s

landlady, who lived in the apartment above got the police.

10:18

When they kicked the door to the apartment open they found Marie on the bed with her hands and feet tied. She had been bludgeoned to death.

Grossman

stood over the body in the process of cutting it to pieces.

10:27

Finally the neighbours understood that for the last two years, they had been listening to the

Murder

and

Dismemberment

of innocent women and none of them had done a damn thing about it.

10:35

Yeah. This is pretty shocking. Like, I mean, really? And by pretty shocking, I mean horrifically shocking.

10:45

The Past Arrests.

10:49

Perhaps if his neighbours had been offered a peek at

Carl’s

criminal record they might not have been so chill about his late-night hobbies. His most recent charge was for first-degree

Murder

, but the list of offences went back over three decades.

11:03

It started with a short jail sentence for begging and then took a bizarre turn when he was arrested for an indecent act with a sheep in 1896. This is really bizarre, but we know the guy's a weirdo, but I mean that is a pretty special level of weirdo isn't it? I know you want me to make a joke about the Welsh here but I’m better than that and so should you be.

11:29

I don't know if that's a joke that,'cause Callum's British, I'm obviously British. We might make fun of the Welsh for relations with sheep, but obviously we're taking the high road here.

11:41

Things took an even darker turn the following year when

Grossman

was convicted of the

Sexual Assault

of an underaged girl in

Nuremberg

. Following that was another case of

Sexual Assault

on two minors which landed him a fifteen-year stint of penal servitude.

11:53

So how did he manage to go about his deadly business even after twenty five convictions were

Hanging

over his head? Well, throughout his youth,

Grossman

spent much of his time traveling around the country in search of agricultural work. It’s likely nobody in his neighbourhood had any idea what he got up to in those distant rural districts.

12:10

Even if they did, some of them had a reason to keep their mouths shut. Like I mentioned before,

Grossman

was relatively wealthy in the slums of

Berlin

and he had lent out money to a good few of his neighbours, including the Iztigs.

12:21

I mean on the other hand though, if he goes to prison, you're probably not gonna have to pay that money back because he's going to prison forever. Did they execute people back in

Germany

at this time? Maybe you'd just be killed

12:32

Revelations.

12:36

And that wasn’t all this good samaritan did to enrich his local community. Remember when I mentioned his stint as a black market meat dealer during the war? Well, it turns out that many of the people in the area had been buying from him.

12:47

When the media caught wind of this story, they gave

Grossman

his iconic nickname, The

Berlin

Butcher, and began to indulge in some macabre speculation. See, given the hacked-up state of the bodies and

Grossman’s

past work experience the police were entertaining the idea that he might have actually disposed of his victims by selling their meat to his customers.

13:05

This means that the bratwursts at his cart might have actually contained pieces of the women he murdered. Of course, 1920s forensics was pretty much still stuck in the dark ages so there’s no way to know for sure but the tabloids took this angle and ran with it, turning it into the most popular version of events.

13:20

What I will say is that it wouldn’t be completely unprecedented. Another

German

serial killer named

Karl Denke

had been killing and

cannibalising

homeless people around the same time that

Grossman

was active.

Denke

also ran a small meat shop in his town and was strongly suspected of selling off the meat of his victims to turn a profit from his crimes. What is wrong with you?

13:40

Whether either of these men really did sell their victims as food is lost to history, as is the true extent of their crimes. As for the

Berlin

Butcher, reports from the time vary as to how many women’s lives he claimed. What we know for sure is that the police found blood stains believed to be from three more victims, meaning four had died there in recent months.

Grossman

eventually admitted to that same total during interrogations.

13:60

A newspaper report from 1921 however, puts the number much higher. Based on police reports and the killer’s personal diary, this report claimed that

Grossman

was strongly suspected of more than twenty killings in as many years, some linked to the unidentified bodies found in the reservoir and canal.

14:15

Yeah, I mean, if he only killed four people, weren't the neighbours complaining about the sounds going on in his apartment for ages. It definitely, although if you're going to jail forever, often the serial killers, they're like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. I killed like 100 people" and they can't prove it or anything, but they're just like "Screw it! time in prison forever anyway".

14:32

But without even a name for many of these victims, the police didn’t have much to build any additional charges on. The ones he had confessed to would just have to do and so, in July 1922, almost one year after his arrest

Grossman

was brought to trial.

14:46

Trial and Death.

14:50

During the trial the prosecution brought forward a parade of witnesses who testified to

Grossman’s

propensity for violence. These included several of the women who he had brought back to his apartment in the past. One woman named Erika reported being creeped out by the guy and his strange-smelling bedsit, deciding to back out of the arrangement at the last minute.

15:07

Other survivors had less fortunate stories to tell about how they had to endure

Grossman’s

sexual assaults and beatings after taking him up on offers out of desperation. In his defence

Grossman

just explained that he had killed the three women in a rage they had tried to steal money from him.

15:21

Crimes Of Passion

were generally viewed with more leniency than cold-blooded killings but

Grossman

must have sensed that his story wasn’t going to fly. On the 5th of July, just three days into the proceedings, he was found

Hanging

dead in his jail cell. And I think we can all say here, "Oh no"!

15:37

Whether dished out by the state or himself, death by

Hanging

was an inevitability for the

Berlin

Butcher, so he had essentially just expedited the process. With him died the knowledge of just how many victims he claimed throughout his criminal career and whether or not those train station hot dogs were really fit for human consumption.

15:54

It’s a pretty grim tale from start to finish, yeah, but I guess if we’re looking to take something away from it, it’d be this: if you ever find yourself in the same position as

Grossman’s

neighbours, do you really want to hold off on calling the police until it turns into some horrible story like this one?

16:08

No you don't! If you're hearing people being tortured in your neighbour's house, call the police, unless you are my neighbours because I scream in videos. I do a channel called Business Blaze were often I'll get a bit of a shouting on. So far the police have not been called on me.

16:21

That and the golden rule: never buy indiscriminate meat from shady guys down the pub, but I reckon you already knew that. Yeah, just buy your meat from a butchers or a supermarket or online. Don't buy from a weird shady dude.

16:33

This has been another episode of The Casual Criminalist. This was one of our shorter episodes. We have one of these per week. We also have a full length episode which runs about an hour every week. If you are enjoying this please do subscribe to this show, whether you are watching it on YouTube or listening to it as a podcast. It's available in both formats.

16:51

Hooray and, yeah, leave me a review, leave a comment, smash that. Like button and all that good stuff and I'll see you in the next one.

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