Peter Kürten, the “Vampire of Düsseldorf”

A City Under Siege, 1929

In 1929 the industrial city of Düsseldorf on the Rhine became the setting for one of the most notorious criminal cases of the Weimar Republic. Over a period of months, a string of murders and attempted murders, most of them against women and children, spread fear across the city and the wider Rhineland.

Kürten was eventually tried on nine counts of murder and seven of attempted murder. Accounts of the wider total differ: the dpa news agency, reporting on newly found files in 2023, spoke of at least ten further attempted murders, while a legal history article in Legal Tribune Online counts more than twenty attempts between February 1929 and May 1930.

The Man Behind the Attacks

Peter Kürten was born in Mülheim, now part of Cologne. Encyclopaedia Britannica gives his birth date as 26 May 1883, although at least one German legal history account gives 1882. He grew up in a large, poor family (sources give between eleven and thirteen children) dominated by a violent, alcoholic father who was imprisoned for abusing one of Kürten's sisters. As a young man he was convicted again and again, for theft and desertion among other offences, and by his final arrest he had been sentenced to prison close to thirty times. After his release in 1921 he married, and outwardly he led an unremarkable life in Düsseldorf.

Behind that appearance lay a long history of violence. His first proven killing dated back to 1913 in Mülheim, when the young daughter of an innkeeper was murdered; sources give her age as nine or ten. Kürten also claimed to have killed two boys on the Rhine bank as a child, but the Düsseldorf court left that confession out of its verdict, partly for lack of evidence and partly because he would have been below the age of criminal responsibility.

A Manhunt Without Answers

The attacks put enormous pressure on the Düsseldorf police, who for months had no suspect. The case drew in Berlin's leading homicide investigator, Ernst Gennat.

The breakthrough came almost by accident. In May 1930 a young woman named Maria Budlick was attacked by a man who had offered her a place to stay. She described the encounter in a letter to a friend, but the letter was misdelivered and the person who opened it alerted the police. Detectives traced her, and she led them to the man's lodgings; Kürten saw them coming and fled. Realising he would be caught, he told his wife Auguste what he had done and urged her to turn him in so she could claim a reward. On 24 May 1930, at a meeting arranged with her near the Rochuskirche in Düsseldorf, police took him into custody without a struggle.

Trial and Execution

Kürten at first confessed in detail, later withdrew his confession, then admitted the crimes again. He was examined at length by the forensic physician Karl Berg, who, like the other experts, found him legally responsible for his actions. His trial in Düsseldorf opened on 13 April 1931 and became a national event that drew academic observers and curious onlookers; he was held in a specially built cage in the courtroom. He was convicted and received nine death sentences.

Not everyone accepted the outcome. In an article in Die Weltbühne dated 5 May 1931, the journalist Carl von Ossietzky argued that the trial had glossed over police failures, that Kürten's wife had never been questioned, and that Kürten had confessed to three murders committed while he was demonstrably in prison. An execution, he warned, would close the case for good. Clemency was not granted, and Kürten was beheaded by guillotine at Klingelpütz prison in Cologne on 2 July 1931.

Archives and Afterlife

The case has never quite left public view. Fritz Lang's 1931 film M, about a city hunting a child murderer, was loosely based on it, and Berg's study of Kürten, published in English as The Sadist, became a classic of criminology. In April 2023 a previously unknown file kept by the investigating judge, Carl Hertel, surfaced among the papers of the former federal chief prosecutor Max Güde. The Düsseldorf city archive passed it to the North Rhine-Westphalia state archive, which already held 223 court files on the case. It contains original letters written by Kürten, including letters to his wife after his arrest, and records of his interrogations. A search for 2024 to 2026 found no new official findings.

What the Case Changed in Germany

The Düsseldorf investigation is closely tied to the vocabulary and methods of modern German policing. Ernst Gennat is credited with coining the German term Serienmörder, serial murderer, in connection with these crimes, and the word has since become standard. Berg's lengthy interviews with Kürten, and the study he published from them, went on to influence later research into serial murder. The case also fed Weimar-era arguments over capital punishment, with critics such as Ossietzky warning that executions could bury unresolved questions about who had committed which crimes.