Some cases carry danger not only in the criminal himself. The danger also lies in what society decides to do with him afterwards. The case of Peter Kürten is one of the darkest files in the history of interwar Germany. Between 1929 and 1930, Düsseldorf lived under a series of attacks that plunged the city into fear. The press gave him a nickname designed to sell: "the Düsseldorf vampire." We will not use it as a title. We will mention it because it is part of the history. But we will not make it a hook. Peter Kürten does not need more legend. He needs context, distance and rigour.
This is the last case in the collection. We have kept it for the end precisely because it is the darkest in editorial terms. But properly handled it contributes something fundamental: how a city, a press and a criminology build the public monster. And why we must resist that process even as we describe it.
Case File
Before entering the case it is worth stating what this article will not do. It will not recreate the attacks. It will not turn Kürten into a fascinating figure. It will not use his media nickname as a hook. It will not go into clinical details about his crimes. It will not build a morbid list of victims. And it will not "enter his mind" as if that were serious historical writing. The press already did all of that in 1930 and 1931. The result was a myth that has functioned for decades in favour of the killer and to the detriment of the victims and of honest historical analysis.
What this article will do: explain Düsseldorf under pressure, the investigation, the relationship between crime and the Weimar press, the criminology of the period, the trial and the subsequent memory. The Kürten case does not matter because it is fascinating. It matters because it shows mechanisms we recognise.
Düsseldorf in the late 1920s was a modern, industrial, urban city, traversed by social tensions, the movement of people, working-class districts, nightlife and the uncertainty characteristic of Weimar Germany. No gothic setting was required. Reality was already sufficiently loaded. Between February 1929 and mid-1930, the city lived under the pressure of successive attacks that did not follow a pattern simple enough for the police to break quickly. WDR summarises that from February 1929 to mid-1930 a killer kept Düsseldorf on edge, until 24 May 1930, when Peter Kürten was arrested — a man who appeared, on the surface, ordinary, in his late forties. That element matters: apparently ordinary. Kürten's figure was disturbing precisely because he did not fit the comfortable idea of the visible monster. He was someone capable of moving through the city without anyone knowing what lay behind him. Urban fear often starts there. Not from the absolutely unknown. But from the suspicion that the unknown is walking alongside you.
One of the risks in writing about Peter Kürten is that the criminal takes up all the space. That cannot happen. The victims were specific people: women, girls, men, people attacked at different moments, survivors who testified, shattered families and a wounded city. Reducing them to numbers would repeat part of the erasure that criminal celebrity produces. Historical sources indicate that in 1929 and 1930 Kürten committed eight of the nine murders judicially attributed to him in Düsseldorf, along with several further attempts. That is enough to understand the scale of the case. There is no need to enter into each attack. The aim is to explain how a series of attacks altered the life of a city and how the case was processed by police, press, justice and criminology. Respect for the victims begins by not turning their suffering into narrative decoration.
The case forced the police to mobilise resources, examine leads, take testimony and face an increasingly anxious public. The search became a public matter. Düsseldorf was not only suffering a series of attacks: it began to live in constant awareness of them. The investigation was followed by the press day by day, and that continuous coverage transformed the relationship between the crime and the public. The case has been studied as an example of how the Weimar Republic transformed the relationship between crime, investigation and the citizenry. In that period, two processes converged: a crisis of confidence in certain methods of criminal identification and the idea that criminality could be anywhere, which led authorities to involve the population in surveillance. Kürten was not only a criminal pursued by detectives. He was a case of a mobilised city.
The press gave him a nickname: "the Düsseldorf vampire." The city of Düsseldorf explains that the press gave him that sobriquet because of episodes associated with the case that fed a macabre image. That nickname is part of the problem, not part of the solution. It fixes memory, but also simplifies. It turns a person into a brand. And when a criminal becomes a brand, the door to fascination opens. The press called him "the Düsseldorf vampire." This article treats him as Peter Kürten, a real criminal in a real city, not as a creature of legend. That difference is small in appearance. In editorial terms, it changes everything.
The Kürten case belongs to the Weimar Republic, and that matters. Weimar was a period of cultural modernity, political instability, economic crisis, street violence, artistic experimentation, social fear and urban transformation. In that context, celebrated crimes were read with particular intensity. They were not merely events: they seemed like symptoms of a society under strain. Kürten was framed within a broader category of Weimar criminals. But some studies warn that the label can obscure more than it reveals if used mechanically, turning distinct lives and files into a too-comfortable cultural explanation. The correct line is intermediate: his case developed within a society marked by crisis, modernity, mass press, urban fear and new forms of criminology. That context does not justify him. It situates him.
Peter Kürten was arrested on 24 May 1930. His capture was not the result of a spectacular detective breakthrough. He was reported to the police by his wife, Auguste Scharf. That detail matters and must not be lost in the narrative. In many accounts of the case, the arrest appears as a police achievement without mentioning that the person who brought that period of fear to an end was the woman who lived with him. The police investigation did its work. But what ended the search was an act of personal courage in the closest circle of the accused.
After the arrest, the case entered another phase: confessions, interrogations, reconstructions and medical reports. One of the fundamental sources was the report by physician Karl Berg, published later under the title Der Sadist. Much of what is known about Kürten comes from the psychiatric and forensic medical assessment prepared for the trial. This connects the case to the criminology of its time. Kürten was observed, interrogated, classified and turned into an object of study. The question was no longer only what he had done, but what kind of person he was and how that extreme level of violence was to be understood. Science was looking for words. The press was looking for monsters. Justice was looking for a verdict. And the victims, as so often, remained behind. A criminal can confess. He can also exaggerate, distort, select or perform. Not everything a killer says about himself should automatically become psychological truth.
Some biographical sources on Kürten emphasise a childhood marked by poverty, domestic violence and abuse in the home. Deutschlandfunk notes that his father was alcoholic and that violence was part of the domestic environment in which he grew up. This must be handled carefully. A violent childhood can help explain a trajectory. It does not justify murders. Nor does it make the adult crimes an inevitable consequence. Millions of people suffer terrible childhoods and commit no such acts. Turning trauma into a total explanation would be unjust to the victims and false to those who survive trauma without harming others. Kürten's violent childhood is part of his biography. It does not explain his crimes on its own, nor does it justify them.
One of the most disturbing elements of the case was the distance between Kürten's outward life and his crimes. After his arrest, many were struck by the image of a not especially striking man, married, employed in certain periods, capable of moving through the city without always arousing suspicion. WDR describes him at the time of his arrest as an outwardly ordinary, unassuming man in his late forties. That contrast fed fear because it unsettled a comfortable boundary: if the criminal resembles any other citizen too closely, the line between safety and threat becomes invisible. Modern cities produce anonymity. Anonymity protects freedoms. It can also conceal dangers.
The trial opened on 13 April 1931 in Düsseldorf. Kürten was tried on charges including nine murders and seven attempted murders. The proceedings were followed with enormous attention. Academic work on the trial analyses it precisely as a media spectacle in Weimar Germany, focused on press coverage of the proceedings against the so-called "Düsseldorf vampire." The problem with turning a trial into spectacle is that spectacle always demands more: more detail, more confession, more horror, more face of the criminal, and less respectful silence for the victims. The question of criminal responsibility was central. Medical reports attempted to assess his mental state. The court ultimately found him criminally responsible, and that finding was recorded in the sentence. His behaviour before the execution was observed closely by those seeking to confirm that assessment. There is no need to reproduce what he said. It is enough to note that the court considered there to be full awareness of the acts.
Peter Kürten was executed on 2 July 1931 by guillotine in Cologne, not in Düsseldorf. The execution closed the criminal proceedings. It did not close the myth. In many respects it fixed it. The press had already built a figure, the trial had amplified it and the death turned it into part of European criminal memory. Books, studies, films, cultural references and an uncomfortable place in the history of criminology followed. Justice ended. The legend began to recycle itself. The State cuts the knot. Culture ties it again.
The Kürten case is often linked to Fritz Lang's film M, released in 1931. The connection must be stated precisely. It is not a direct adaptation of the Kürten case. It is more accurate to say that the climate of urban fear, the search for a killer and several criminal cases of the era — including those of Haarmann and Kürten — influenced the imaginative world of the film. IASLonline notes that Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou drew on specific stimuli from famous criminal cases of Weimar history. This fits the line of this collection. Real crime feeds culture. Culture transforms crime. And many people then remember the fiction more clearly than the file. M is not Peter Kürten. But without the urban fear of Weimar Germany, and without cases like his, the film would not have the same historical ground beneath it.
Kürten's nickname was not innocent. Criminal nicknames rarely are. They fix memory but also simplify. They turn a person into a brand. And when a criminal becomes a brand, the door to fascination opens. The Kürten case is a clear example of how the press can build a near-mythical figure from a real file. The result is dangerous: the more monstrous the criminal appears, the more the system that pursues him, the victims he left behind and the context that surrounds him are erased. The task is not to ignore that mechanism. It is to deactivate it. There is a difference.
In cases of urban panic, the population is not only an audience. It becomes part of the apparatus. People report suspicions, watch neighbours, recall conversations, point out anomalies, contribute leads. They also make mistakes, fantasise, accuse without foundation and feed rumours. Studies on crime in Weimar highlight precisely that transformation of collective surveillance: public participation becomes part of the search for criminals in a society that perceives the threat as everywhere. Düsseldorf lived that: an entire city turned into a nervous system. Each report increased sensitivity. Each attack fed suspicion. Each suspicion extended fear. And meanwhile the truth kept failing to appear.
Peter Kürten must not be treated as a legendary figure, but as the centre of a file that reveals urban fear, sensationalist press and the criminology of Weimar Germany. That is the heart of this article and the reason the collection ends here.
After twenty-five cases that have covered domestic crimes, judicial errors, state forgeries, the construction of serial killers, victims without names, unresolved cases and proceedings contaminated by prejudice, this last one poses the most uncomfortable question of all: what does a society do with extreme evil? Does it understand it? Classify it? Turn it into spectacle? Execute it and forget it?
Weimar Germany's answer was a little of everything. And ours, almost a century later, is not so different. The press still manufactures nicknames. Documentaries still explore minds. Podcasts still promise to reveal what the archives do not say. And the victims still end up in the second paragraph.
Evil does not need legend.
It is enough that it happened.
And when a historical archive writes about it, the obligation is not to make it more attractive.
The obligation is to make it comprehensible without making it desirable.
That is the limit.
And that is where this case ends.
And this collection.