“He was smoking a cigar with apparently the utmost enjoyment. He was charged with the murder of 26 persons, but in reality, it is believed that he killed from 40 to 50 people. I cannot say positively, but it was reported in Hanover that he made the flesh of his victims into sausage which he sold in his butcher shop.”
The speaker was a Goldsboro man, Franz William Zobel, a native of Germany, who arrived here several weeks ago, to make his home with his aunt, Mrs. William H. Langston. The murderer to whom he referred was Fritz Haarman, the “wholesale murderer” of Hanover, Germany, who yesterday was sentenced to die for his crimes.
Mr. Zobel, while en route to America, stopped over in Hanover for about two weeks. His efforts to secure the necessary papers for his passage to America took him to the combined court house and prison of the city of Hanover. There it was he saw the modern Bluebeard.
“They told me,” concluded the Goldsboro man, “that Haarman ground the flesh of his victims into sausage. I cannot vouchsafe for this fact, but you will notice the Associated Press dispatch makes reference to this belief.”
Butcher by Trade
Fritz Haarman, a Hanover butcher, was shown at his trial to be a criminal degenerate who lured men and boys to his lodgings, and there killed them by tearing their throats with his teeth and sucking their blood. The crimes were committed in his room in the top story of a decrepit tenement house facing the Leine river, and the bodies were disposed of by throwing them into the stream. Many human bones were found when the bed of the river was dragged after his arrest, early last summer.
Testimony at the trial, which aroused intense horror throughout Germany, was revolting, much of it to the extent that witnesses were heard behind closed doors. Among the allegations was that the murderer had offered his customers human flesh for consumption.
Confessed Killing 15
Haarman confessed to the slaying of 15 youths between the ages of 15 and 22, but declared he could not remember the exact number, or the names of his victims. The crimes were spread over a period of several years.
For a time after his arrest ?? seemed to revel in the notoriety which the case brought him, and that he would go down in history as the greatest murderer of all time, but as the tale of his deeds was unfolded, he began to fear vengeance at the hands of his victims’ relatives and pleased for a quick ending to the case.
Crowds at Trial
The great crowds which sought admission to the court room enhanced his fear of personal violence and at times he became panic stricken. Towards the end he refused even to sleep alone in his cell at night and demanded that a guard be placed with him.
An attempt to mitigate the punishment by establishing insanity fell through, alienists declaring him sane in the eyes of the law and thus accountable for his acts.
His accomplice Graus, who was also sentenced to death, was charged with encouraging Haarmann in in his crimes, and of buying the clothing of his victims.
Goes to Death Joyfully
“I go to the decapitating block joyfully and happily,” Haarmann declared to the court just before the sentence was pronounced. Then he pleaded: “Don’t send me to the insane asylum. I would rather not live.”
From the front page of The Goldsboro News, Saturday morning, December 20, 1924. "Haarman" or "Haarmann"?
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn93064755/1924-12-20/ed-1/seq-1/ -=-
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