Georg Grossmann

Georg Grossmann | The Berlin Butcher

Born: 1863

The Berlin Butcher

German Serial Killer

Crime Spree: 1913 – 1921

Death: 1921

Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Großmann, a.k.a. Georg Grossman or just ‘Carl’ – later nicknamed “The Berlin Butcher” – was a German pedophile, serial killer and cannibal who sold human meat to the unwitting community where he lived.

Georg Grossmann, born December 13. 1863, was an ugly man with a surly disposition, was a sexual degenerate and sadist who included bestiality among his various perversions. Twenty-five arrests throughout his criminal career included three convictions for molesting children, one of whom died shortly after the attack and only he and God knows how many young women perished by his hand.

Once employed as a butcher, Georg Grossmann preferred to live by begging in the streets, invariably spending his money on sleazy prostitutes who nightly shared his bed.

Protected by his rap sheet from the military draft in World War I, Georg soon devised a way to turn a profit on his appetites.

Before the outbreak of hostilities, Grossmann rented a squalid upstairs flat in the slums of Berlin, near the terminus of the Silesian railway.

Sour and secretive, he was loathed by his neighbors but paid his rent on time and the landlord left him alone.

Georg Grossmann

Grossmann’s flat had been constructed with a separate entrance. The other tenants seldom thought of him before the early morning hours, when he stumbled home from all-night drinking bouts with giggling prostitutes in tow.

He could afford the booze and women now, because he had devised another source of income. While the war and subsequent depression nearly ruined Germany, with famine a result of failure on the battlefield, Georg Grossmann peddled fresh meat in the streets. His neighbors might be starving, but the man upstairs was never phased by rationing or shortages.

A Different Kind of Income

In August 1921, the landlord was disturbed by the sounds of a violent struggle, emanating from the butcher’s flat. Police were summoned and they found a freshly murdered woman in the kitchen, trussed up like a hog for slaughter.

Evidence recovered from the flat suggested Georg Grossmann had done the same by at least three women in as many weeks. His diary, and his statements to police, revealed that he had used the women sexually, murdered them, then sold their flesh to others as beef or pork. He also operated a ‘hot dog’ stand at the train station near his flat.

After his arrest he admitted to disposing the “useless” remnants of his kills in a nearby river.

Georg Gossmann

How many victims Georg Großmann actually claimed is not known. Only the body of his final victim was found, along with bloodstains in the apartment that indicated at least three others had been butchered in the recent weeks.

Some have suggested as many as 50 to 100 young women entered Großmann’s apartment over time and many ended up being murdered, dismembered and eaten by unwitting customers of Großmann’s ‘meat’ business.

Convicted of murder, Georg Großmann was sentenced to death.

Before his sentence could be carried out however, he hanged himself in his cell on July 5, 1922. He left behind no full confession, leaving the extent of his crimes unknown and his motives for murder and cannibalism to only speculation and humor.