The Hinterkaifeck Murders

An isolated farm near Schrobenhausen

Hinterkaifeck was a small farmstead standing apart from the hamlet of Gröbern, near the market town of Schrobenhausen in Bavaria, southern Germany. In the spring of 1922 it was home to the retired farming couple Andreas and Cäzilia Gruber; their widowed daughter, Viktoria Gabriel, who ran the farm; and Viktoria's two children, seven-year-old Cäzilia and Josef, who was two and a half. A new maid, Maria Baumgartner, arrived on 31 March 1922, the very day the household was killed.

Viktoria's husband, Karl Gabriel, had been reported killed in France in 1914, early in the First World War. The family's private life was already known to the authorities: in 1915 Viktoria and her father were convicted of incest, and both received prison sentences, according to files described by the Bavarian state archives.

Unsettling signs beforehand

Accounts gathered by investigators describe a household on edge in the days before the crime. The family reportedly felt they were being watched from the nearby woods. On 30 March Andreas Gruber found tracks in the snow leading towards the farm buildings but none leading back out, footsteps were said to have been heard in the attic at night, and a Munich periodical that nobody had ordered turned up at the farm. Gruber nonetheless turned down offers of help from the authorities. These details come from witness statements taken after the killings, so they cannot be independently checked.

The crime and its discovery

Investigators later placed the time of death on the evening of 31 March 1922, probably between about 7 and 10 p.m. All six people died of head injuries. Four of them, including the older child, were found in the barn; the maid and little Josef were found inside the house.

Nobody raised the alarm for several days. Visitors who called at the farm on 1 April got no answer, and on 4 April three men from the neighbourhood, among them the nearest neighbour, Lorenz Schlittenbauer, went to check and found the bodies. Investigators later concluded that someone had remained at the farm after the killings: the animals appeared to have been fed and milked, and coins were still in the house, which made a simple robbery seem less likely. The victims were buried in Waidhofen on 8 April in front of a large crowd.

A troubled investigation

Officers from the Munich police took charge, led by Georg Reingruber, but by the time they arrived curious onlookers had already walked through the scene and destroyed evidence. Fingerprints were not used. The likely weapon, a farm mattock known in German as a Reuthaue, only came to light in 1923, hidden under a floor when the buildings were torn down. It was later destroyed in a wartime air raid on Augsburg in 1944. The victims' skulls were removed during the post-mortem examinations; police even showed them to a clairvoyant in 1922, and they are now considered lost.

A reward of 100,000 marks was offered, and the Munich police opened more than 100 lines of inquiry up to 1930 without result. Suspicion fell over the years on Schlittenbauer, who was reputed to be Josef's father; on Karl Gabriel, amid rumours that he had survived the war; and on a man named Josef Bärtl who had escaped from an asylum. None of these suspicions was ever proven, and no one was charged or convicted.

A modern training exercise

Decades later the case files were revisited by trainees at the Bavarian police college in Fürstenfeldbruck as a cold-case exercise. Sources differ on the date: the case is often linked to a 2007 review, while t-online dates the class to 2005. The trainees criticised the original handling of the scene, rejected robbery as the main motive and said they believed they knew who was responsible, but they declined to name anyone because they lacked conclusive proof.

Why the case still matters

Hinterkaifeck is one of the most notorious unsolved murder cases in German history. It also illustrates how policing worked in the Weimar-era Bavaria of the early 1920s, when scene protection was weak and forensic science limited. The surviving Munich police files are held today by the Staatsarchiv München. In spring 2026 the Bavarian Main State Archives in Munich staged a free exhibition, "Der sechsfache Mord in Hinterkaifeck", from 17 March to 10 April, using these files and objects from the Bavarian Army Museum in Ingolstadt to show how the investigation unfolded. More than a century on, the killings remain officially unsolved.