“If you don’t get home on time, the beast will get you!” At the end of the 1950s, some parents in the district of Baden said to their children if they did not go home on time. If the children and young women were allowed to go outside at all. And this concern was justified, because in 1959 the serial killer and violent criminal Heinrich Paul Max Pommerenke scared people here for four months.
Pommerenke was born in 1937 in a village near Rostock, grew up there and was not a blank slate when it came to criminal offenses even as a schoolboy. He became a rapist as a schoolboy – and after his apprenticeship as a painter he became a repeat offender. Before he could be held accountable for his actions, he fled East Germany to West Germany. From West Berlin he was sent to Switzerland to live with his mother.
A film performance was the trigger
On February 27, Pommerenke is said to have watched a film screening of “The 10 Commandments” in the Karlsruhe cinema, which did not go unemotionally past him. Angry at what he felt was women who were far too scantily clad, his unspeakable hatred of the female sex became untameable. The then 21-year-old began his series of murders on the same day: he took the life of his first victim. He ambushed 49-year-old Hilde Conther, cut her throat and then abused her. In March, Pommerenke raped 18-year-old Karin Wälde and killed her with a stone. This was followed by the murder of 21-year-old Dagmar Klimek, whom he stabbed with a knife on an express train. He threw her off the train going to Basel, pulled the emergency brake and went back to her lifeless body. He dragged him to a forest path and attacked the corpse. In June 1959 he raped 16-year-old Rita Walterspacher and then strangled her – it was supposed to be his last act.
48 years in prison
On June 19, 1959, Heinrich Pommerenke went to a store to pick up a suit. There he forgot a bag with a gun. The police were informed by the shop staff – and the feverish search for the murder suspect began. Finally he was recognized in Hornberg on a station forecourt and arrested by the police. The people of the region could finally breathe a sigh of relief, because “the beast in human form” or the “Monster from the Black Forest”, as the press called him at the time, had finally been caught.
Pommerenke was sentenced to life imprisonment on October 22, 1960 by the Freiburg jury for four counts of murder, twelve counts of attempted murder, indecency with a child, rape, theft, aggravated robbery and extortion. The serial killer spent over 48 years in prison until his death on December 27, 2008.