The Vampire: Peter Kurten, the Blood Sucking German Serial Killer // MONSTERS SERIES
In 1929, bodies were turning up all over Dusseldorf, Germany with one horrifying thing in common. It looked like someone had bitten their necks, and in some cases, tried to drain them of blood.
Immediately word of a vampire spread throughout the city, but that did little to stop the attacks, which would eventually point back to one of the most depraved human beings that we’ve covered on this show…
TW: Reference to child harm, sexual assault, incest, and animal cruelty.
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SOURCES
Monsters of Weimar: The Stories of Fritz Haarmann and Peter Kurten by Theodor Lessing , Karl Berg , Colin Wilson (Introduction)
https://www.duesseldorf.de/fileadmin/Amt13/touristik/Fischerdorf_GB.pdf
https://oars.uos.ac.uk/3927/1/Peter%20Kurten.pdf
https://aquazoo-duesseldorf.de/en/ueber-uns-1/history#:~:text=In%201987%2C%20the%20Aquazoo%20L%C3%B6bbecke%20Museum%20opened,the%20institute%2C%20however%2C%20stretches%20far%20back%20into
https://www.bionity.com/de/lexikon/Karl_Berg_%28Forensiker%29.html
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/shadow-boxing/201405/profile-sadist-murder-and-blood
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/136318510
https://www.newspapers.com/image/604210403/?match=1&terms=peter%20kurten%20vampire
https://www.newspapers.com/image/763988545/?match=1&terms=dusseldorf%20vampire
https://www.ripleys.com/stories/peter-kurten
TRANSCRIPT
In 1929, bodies were turning up all over Dusseldorf germany with one horrifying thing in common. It looked like someone had bitten their necks, and in some cases, tried to drain them of blood.
Immediately word of a vampire spread throughout the city, but that did little to stop the attacks, which would eventually point back to one of the most depraved human beings that we’ve covered on this show…
If you're interested in true crime that reads like gothic horror, real monsters that mirror mythological ones, and cases that will genuinely keep you up at night, you're in the right place. You're just like me. We upload once a week, so make sure to subscribe
**This episode includes material that may be upsetting to listeners. For more information on our content warnings, you can check out the episode description.
November 9th, 1929. Düsseldorf, Germany.
The morning fog was just lifting when a group of police officers arrived at a factory building in the city's industrial district. They didn’t know exactly what they were looking for but they had received a disturbing message from the local paper just a few hours earlier.
That’s when A junior reporter was sitting at his desk, going through his mail, and saw one letter that really stuck out to him. It was a hand drawn map that looked like it had been quickly scribbled down. Someone had roughly sketched out an area in the industrial district, they had even labeled parts of the map with Forest, Meadow, Field. But at the bottom written near a circle that was drawn around the factory, was one word that caused the reporter to phone the police. Murder.
So the officers were on the scene and they moved carefully through the area, eyes scanning the ground, expecting the worst.
When all of a sudden an officer screamed at the top of his lungs. He’d found something.
There, face down in the weeds by an outer wall of the factory was the small body of Five-year-old Gertrud Albermann.
But it was when they turned her over that all of the officers got a chill down their spines, and one of them even had to look away. See, Her neck had the telltale marks that they had been finding on bodies in the area all year. Gertrude had Bite marks. Deep and deliberate ones on her throat.
This isn't the first body they've found like this. In fact, it's the pattern that's been haunting them. Women, children, men—all discovered with their throats bearing these same wounds. As if something, or someone, had been drinking from them.
One of the officers turned to the group, and said the thing that’s on all of their minds. “The vampire of Dusseldorf has struck again.”
And somewhere in the distance, barely audible over the industrial hum of the city, one officer swore they could hear laughter echoing from the trees.
Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. I'm your host, Kaelyn Moore.
This October, we're doing something special. We're exploring real-life monsters—killers whose crimes were so horrific, so beyond comprehension, that they resemble the stuff of legend. Men and women who don’t just inspire our nightmares, but who seem to step right out of them.
This month we’re even going to re-release our original horror audio drama The Timekeeper starring Judah Lewis, Chandler Kinney and Arjun Athalye, featuring a terrifying monster. That’ll be every friday and I’m going to include the trailer at the end of this episode, so stick around.
But This spooky season, our programming will be looking at real life Werewolves, Sirens, and Boogeymen
And today, to kick off our series, we’re going to follow the story of a real life Vampire……
Before we dive in though I have one more special thing I wanted to do for you guys. if you’ve been looking for an excuse to try out a subscription, we have a limited time extended free trial this month only on Apple Podcasts. You’ll get a full month free to check out our entire back catalog of monthly bonus episodes, archived episodes and more. Again that is a full month free trial on Apple Podcasts if you sign up this October. Check out the link in the description.
And before we jump in, a reminder we are reading The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova in our Rogue Detecting Society book club. Visit heartstartspounding.com/bookclub to learn more. Now, let’s start with a very brief history of vampires.
For centuries, cultures around the world have warned each other of the undead who feed on the living. The ancient Mesopotamians feared the Edimmu (ed-EE-moo), the vengeful ghosts of those who weren’t buried properly. The Greeks spoke of the Vrykolakas (fry-call-uh-kiss) who would feed upon the livers of the living. In China, the Jiangshi hopped through the night, arms outstretched, seeking life force to steal.
And in the 18th century, a vampire panic swept through Eastern Europe. In Serbia, it was believed someone became a vampire after they died. Blood would still course through their veins as they laid in their grave as long as they stole the life force of 9 unsuspecting townspeople at night.
People would awake in a sweat to see their deceased loved one standing in the corner of their room in the dead of night, waiting to feed. Then, their motionless bodies would be found in the morning, a victim of the vampire. The only way to stop it, was to dig up the body of the monster, take out his still bloody heart, and burn it.
By the early 1800’s, the vampire became more than a life force stealer, he became a blood sucker. Books featuring these pale, aristocratic, blood thirsty monsters starting becoming popular.
When Polidori (paul-idori) wrote "The Vampyre" in 1819, he created Lord Ruthven (Ruhthven)—charming, dangerous, and irresistible to women. Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897 cemented the archetype: the foreign nobleman who invades proper society, seduces innocent women, and transforms them through the exchange of blood.
But in eastern europe in the 1920s, it had been 200 years since Vampire panic had caused graves to be dug up, caused people to steal the hearts out of the corpses of suspected vampires. and it had been 100 years since those books were popular. Everyone in the area thought that Vampires were just historical creatures of myth, folklore, and FICTION.
Especially in Germany in the 1920’s, when Nosferatu had just been released in 1922. So when the citizens of Dusseldorf opened their newspapers in 1929 and saw the word VAMPIRE plastered on the front page, they thought it was promo for a new movie.
But it wasn’t. So today, I want to tell you the story of the vampire of Dusseldorf
To understand how a vampire could hunt in broad daylight in one of Germany's most modern cities, we need to understand what Düsseldorf was like in 1929.
The city sat on the Rhine (Rine) River, and Since 1850, it had transformed from a modest river town into a bustling metropolis. By 1925 the population had swelled to 430,000 people. The central train station brought in thousands of workers, travelers, and—importantly for our story—young women looking for work in the city's factories and households.
But Düsseldorf was a city of contrasts. Yes, there were the modern factories, the electric streetlights, the bustling beer gardens. But surrounding the city were those ancient German forests that had inspired the Brothers Grimm. The Grafenberg Forest, with its dense canopy of trees. The winding paths along the Rhine where lovers strolled at dusk. These dark spaces existed just minutes from the city center, places where screams couldn't be heard over the industrial noise.
And it was by these woods that our story begins. On a lonely road on the outskirts of the city,. Around 9pm on February 3rd, 1929, before the body of Gertrude was found by the factory. A young woman named Frau Kühn was walking home. We don’t know much about Frau Kuhn other than she was young, and she was probably heading home late at night after a long day of work.
All of a sudden she heard footsteps coming up behind her. Slow at first, and then faster.
She started to turn to see who was behind her, when she felt the pressure of someone pulling on the lapels of her coat and a voice whispered in her ear, “Don’t Scream”. She couldn’t see the assailants face, but she felt the blades of the scissors as they punctured her, first her arms, then her head.
She screamed anyway, but wasn’t anyone around to hear. She started bellowing, crying out like a wounded animal in hopes that someone else was wandering along the lonely road. And that was enough to scare the attacker, who took off into the darkness ahead of her. As Frau laid on the ground, 24 puncture wounds around her body, She could see the assailant enough to tell that he was well dressed, and his hair was neatly combed, but nothing else. At least, that’s what she was able to tell the police when she somehow managed to pull herself up off of the ground and make her way to a police station.
Now, the police were certainly concerned over what happened to Frau, but they didn’t make much of an effort to catch the guy. After all, what was a young girl like herself doing alone on the outskirts of town so late at night?
This was a time when crime was rampant in Dusseldorf and if the victim didn’t die, there wasn’t necessarily a rush to solve the case. But a few days later, something far worse occurred….
On February 9th, less than a week later, a few employees of a local factory were heading into work around 9am when one of them stopped in his tracks near the entrance.
He had been absentmindedly looking out into the field next to the factory, when he saw what looked like a small foot sticking out of a hedge.
He almost just walked past it, but something inside him told him he should go look. And afterwards, part of him wished he never did.
Laying on her back in the hedge, was the body of an 8 year old girl named Rose Ohliger. Her body was wrapped in a cloak, and when the man peeled it away, he could see that her clothes underneath were burned and her body smelled like petroleum. She was covered in tiny stab wounds, mostly around her chest, but there was no blood surrounding her body. How did someone remove all of the blood from the scene, the worker wondered.
No one knew it at the time, but the night before, a kind stranger- a well dressed man with neatly combed hair had approached young Rose while she walked along a secluded path and asked her where she was going. Home she replied. And the man offered to help her get there, but instead, lead her further along the secluded path, all the way to the side of this factory.
Investigators had really nothing to go on. There had been no witnesses, no murder weapon, not a single clue as to who could have done this. They just had to hope that he wouldn’t strike again. The wooded paths on the outskirts of town were dangerous, it seemed like someone was lurking there. And just four days later, it seemed like they struck again…
On February 13th, just as the sun had come up, the body of a 45 year old man, Rudolf Scheer, was found in a ditch. A long trail of blood ran from the nearby road to his corpse, like he’d been dragged there by his attacker. His body was covered in multiple small stab wounds like those of Frau. But it was the neck wounds that made investigators pause. Whoever had done this had spent most of their energy attacking Rudolfs neck. Mostly with the scissors, tiny little sharp stab wounds, similar to what Rose Oliger had been covered in but there were two wounds that didn’t match the others, They looked almost like bite marks.
And as a group of officers and detectives were gathered around the body, trying to piece together what may have happened, one of them was approached by a man.
He was well dressed, with neatly cropped hair and he seemed unusually calm, but also curious about the crime scene.
He started asking the detective specific questions about the murder. How was the body positioned? How much blood was there? The detective, suspicious, asked how the man knew about the crime. I heard about it by telephone, the man said. But how could that be, the only people who knew about this crime were the officers standing over the body.
The detective went back to the group to notify them about the curious man, but by the time he turned back around, he was gone.
A dark cloud descended on Dusseldorf as winter melted into spring and turned into summer. Several other women came forward saying they were out on paths on the outskirts of town when a man approached them from behind and tried to strangle them. He only fled when they started screaming or fighting back. But because these women had lived to tell the tale and didn’t really get a good look at the guy, the police didn’t do much to look into their cases.
But later that summer, the attacks started increasing and becoming more barbaric in nature.
On August 8th a 17 year old girl named Maria Hahn, 17, vanished. Witnesses had last seen her with a man at a beer garden, laughing and drinking, but no one noticed as the man convinced her to leave the garden and walk with him down a secluded path by the river.
Maria calmly strolled ahead talking to the man who was just a few steps behind her, and they walked further and further into the darkness, away from the bustling Beer Garden.
So no one saw as the man raised his hand behind Maria’s back and grabbed her neck, no one saw as he wrestled her to the ground while she fought him all the way. And no one saw as this mysterious figure clamped his mouth down on her neck, bit until he broke the skin, and then drank enough blood to cause him to be sick on the side of the path.
After the attack, the figure fled, and Maria wouldn’t be found until, once again, a cryptic letter was sent to the local paper with a hand drawn map, months later. It led police to Maria’s body, but by that point, she had been moved off the path, which means her killer had returned at some point to cover his tracks.
Her body also revealed she’d been stabbed all over, and had blood drank from her neck. There were stab wounds in her temple, her chest, all over her neck. Some of these were classified as “for pleasure”, meaning they weren’t for killing Maria, but they were for the enjoyment of the killer.
The letter that was sent to the paper was signed D.M.M, which the police believed stood for Düsseldorfs Menschen (mention) Mörde, or Dusseldorfs Man Murderer. Though, the public was already calling him something else.
Word that a vampire was actively hunting in Dusseldorf spread like a virus. Multiple victims in the same year, all found with mysterious bite marks on their necks, their bodies almost completely drained of blood or blood from them missing from the scene
News started spreading around all of Germany, and then the world. Parents stop letting their children out of their sight, people start locking their doors and not going out at night, and every now and then, someone passing a graveyard would gaze into it, just to see if the earth near a headstone is overturned, as if they’d find a clue that someone had stepped straight out of their grave and into the streets of Dusseldorf.
But one woman was having a different experience. One local woman named Auguste Kurten read the headlines and couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Not because of the horror of the situation, but because it triggered a memory.
See, on the night of August 8th–the very night Maria Hahn vanished from the beer garden with a man, Auguste was waiting by the door for her husband. It was getting increasingly late and she wondered where he could be. When all of a sudden, in the early morning hours. She heard the lock turn.
Where have you been? She asked him, but he didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.
Even in the darkness, Auguste could tell that his clothes were filthy. His shoes tracked mud into the house, and there was something dark all over his clothing. In the dim light, it could be more dirt, but something told her it wasn’t.
Her husband walked to the back of the house and grabbed a shovel. I’m working the night shift, he said. And then, he disappeared outside into the dark.
When he returned hours later, from what he said was his groundskeeping job, Auguste was still awake, and she noticed his shirt had changed. And the old one, when she found it stuffed in the back of a closet, had stains that wouldn’t come out. Stains that look suspiciously like blood.
Over the next few months, Auguste watched as her community became more terrified. As more stories started spreading. Auguste heard about Ida Reuter, the young servant girl who was found murdered on the paths near the Rhine. Someone had hit her over the head with a hammer multiple times
There was also the young servant girl, Dorrier, who was killed on another path in a similar way. Both crime scenes were exceptionally bloody and had sexual components that happened after the crime had took place, like someone was excited by the blood.
and she watched as her husband became increasingly paranoid, watching over his shoulder constantly, locking their front door and then continually checking it to make sure it was secure. Was he afraid of becoming a victim? Auguste wondered. Or was there something else?
Months passed with no answers and no movement in the police investigation. Eventually, the winter turned back into spring and people started feeling more comfortable leaving their homes.
And that’s when a woman named Maria Butlies took a train from Cologne to Dusseldorf.
It was May 14th. She was a young woman looking for work, and she was unfamiliar with the city, which was probably why two men immediately approached her when she got off the train. They asked where a pretty girl like her was headed, and if she wanted to come with them. Maria, who was very uncomfortable, tried to get away from the men but they kept pestering her.
And that’s when she heard another voice. “Can I be of assistance Miss?” A well dressed man nudged the two men to the side. Maybe he had a trustworthy face, or maybe Maria was just desperate to get away, so she happily took this new man’s offer to help.
He told her that where she needed to go was actually in a different direction than what her map showed, and that she should follow him there, down a secluded alleyway that fed into the neighborhood she was looking for.
So maria followed him, but as they headed down the alley, she became more wary of the situation. Where was this man taking her?
Eventually, they ended up at an apartment, and even though she was unfamiliar with the area, she knew this was not where she was supposed to be. And that’s when she started getting a really bad feeling, so she asked him gently if he could please just take her to the neighborhood she was originally looking for. The man looked, disappointed, but he obliged, and they were back off, still walking through secluded alleyways
Before she knew it, once no one else was around, he overtook her. But it’s what he did next that really terrified Maria. He grabbed her by the throat and pulled at the back of her head, tugging her head back until it hurt and exposing her neck. And he longingly gazed at her neck to the point where she wondered if he was salivating.
This clearly excited the man, and he started violating Maria, but she screamed and was able to run away.
And not really knowing what else to do, that night she sat down and wrote a letter to her friend, explaining the strange situation. Her friend had been reading the news in a way that Maria had not, and immediately when she got the letter she was reminded of the Vampire of Dusseldorf, and she told Maria to contact the police right away.
And the next day, as Auguste Kurtain was coming home, she saw young Maria Butlies with officers standing outside of her apartment door. The two looked at each other for just a moment, and Auguste knew why they were there.
Auguste Scharf Kürten was not a woman easily frightened. She couldn't afford to be.
Born in 1880, she'd already lived through more than most people could bear. She'd shot her former fiancé when he'd jilted her after eight years together, serving five years in prison for it. She knew what it was like to have blood on her hands. Maybe that's why, when she met Peter Kürten in 1921, his intensity didn't scare her off like it did other women.
Their courtship, if you could call it that, was intense and it was dark, but there was something about it that excited Auguste. He told her the first time they ever met, "If you don't have sex with me, "I'll push something between your ribs." Most women would have run. Auguste saw something in him—maybe recognized a fellow darkness—and stayed.
The couple married in 1923, and for a while, things seemed almost normal. Peter worked construction. They moved to Düsseldorf in 1925. He was, as Auguste would later tell investigators, "home-loving and took part in club life."
But there were signs early on that something was not right with Peter. He would fly into rages over nothing. He demanded sex constantly, and sometimes violently. And then there were the absences. Nights when he simply didn't come home. Days when he'd disappear with no explanation.
She was able to brush these moments off for a while. But The first real crack in Auguste's denial came in 1927. She'd known Peter was seeing other women on the side. But when she ran into him on the street with a young woman named Tiede (teedah), something snapped. The girl didn't even know Peter was married. Neither did Mech, another servant girl Peter had been pursuing.
Now, Both of these women would later accuse Peter of rape. And Of cutting them. Tiede told police that when she protested his violence, Peter would grab her throat, gazing at it with a sadistic lust, and say, "That's what love means."
Peter served eight months in prison for the affairs. When he got out, he promised Auguste things would be different. And for a while, they were. Until that night in August 1929, when he came home needing a shovel.
Auguste knew that she should have interrogated him harder , that something was wrong, her wifely intuition was right. And now, the police were at her door.
That night, Auguste and Peter sat in the apartment in silence. The police had opted to not speak to either of them that day, they just made notes of the location, spoke to Maria a bit more, and then left.
But then, Out of the silence Peter cleared his throat and said that there was something he wanted to talk to Auguste about. She got really flushed, was he about to confess something to her?
He said that the young woman who stopped by the apartment today was probably going to accuse him of something, but to not worry about it, he’d figure it out. He was just worried because he had already gone to jail for the assault of the two women he was having an affair with that he’d go to jail again if she accused him.
“Peter, you must have done something really awful” Auguste said to him. She was staring at him now, all of the headlines, all of the bodies being found around Dusseldorf, all of this talk about blood and a vampire, all of it in the back of her mind.
And something inside of him just snapped. Maybe he knew that his wife had caught on, maybe he was ready to finally tell someone, or maybe he was saying it as a threat. But he just looked her in the eyes and said.
“I have done everything that has happened here in Düsseldorf.” and Auguste asked him “Everything - the murders, attacks, and those innocent children, too?”
And he just said :“Yes I don't know myself, it just came over me.”
That is how Auguste Kurtain came to know that she was living with a monster.
But do Monsters appear out of nowhere, or are they created? In modern vampire lore a vampire is created when one bites a living person and the infection takes over them. And for Peter Kurtain, some psychologists have suggested there may have been things that happened in his childhood that contributed to what he became.
To understand Peter Kürten, we need to go back to May 26, 1883, in Cologne-Mülheim, where he was born the third of thirteen children into a hell that would forge a monster.
Peter’s entire family lived in one room, led by a father who was not just a maniac, but a predator. Now, his father would have probably blamed this on the alcohol. It wasn’t REALLY him, it was the ale that changed him, similar to how the full moon transforms the werewolf. But the children knew that the darkness inside of their father was always there, waiting for an excuse to come out.
From a young age, Peter watched as his father brutalized his family with his words, with his fists, and with worse. The only break the children got from his cruelty was when he served 18 months for incest after abusing Peter’s sister.
But that darkness that lived inside of Peter’s father, lived inside of him as well.. He committed his first murders at just nine years old when He pushed a schoolmate off a raft into the Rhine river, knowing the boy couldn't swim. another child in the area watched this happen and tried to help, he dove into the water to save the boy, and Peter held down his head until he stopped moving. Both boys drowned. The deaths were ruled accidental.
That same year, Peter began torturing and killing animals. It wasn’t so much the pain he was inflicting or the actual killing that excited him. No, it was the sight of blood. It excited him in a way that nothing before ever had, and he decided that he’d do whatever it took to experience that feeling.
By 1899, when he was 16, he tried to strangle an 18 year old girl. He’d go on to commit other crimes that would land him small stints in jail, like deserting the army in 1904.
And it really seems like His prison experiences only made him worse. The German prison system of the early 1900s was brutal, as you can maybe imagine. Peter experienced what he called "disciplinary punishment of the severest kinds." Solitary confinement. Beatings. Psychological torture that drove him to attempt suicide multiple times.
Each stint in prison made him angrier. Each release saw him commit worse crimes. It was as if the system designed to punish him was just feeding his bloodlust and insatiability.
In 1913, when Peter was 30, he committed what he considered his first "perfect" crime. He had been breaking into a home to rob it, when he found a 10-year-old girl named Christine Klein asleep in her parents' bed. He strangled her, assaulted her, then cut her throat with a pocket knife.
The sight and sound of the blood was almost, erotic to him, he'd recount.
That crime went unsolved for decades, but Peter found other ways to wind up in jail. He served eight years for petty crimes. And it seems like he had a lot of time in those 8 years to think about his life, and to consider what wasn’t working. He realized that it’s easier to act out your wildest fantasies while blending in to society, when no one suspects that you’re capable of committing atrocities.
When Peter was released in 1921, everyone thought he had gotten his act together. He got a job, he married Auguste, he was a productive and respectable member of society.
But while a vampire may don nice clothes and seem charming; just like Jerry Dandrige in fright night, the bloodlusting monster still lives inside.
And in 1929, it was hungrier than ever.
Over the next few months, any time Auguste tried to bring up Peter’s crimes, or ask him more questions about them, he would fly into a violent rage. She was afraid to live in her own home, and every time he’d leave the house for the night, she wondered where he was going, if there was another young girl he’d attack.
Finally, she came to a breaking point. And on May 24th, 1930, she walked down to the police station, checking over her shoulder the whole way, afraid that somehow Peter would find out what she was about to do. And she just told them EVERYTHING. The night he came home after Maria’s murder, grabbing the shovel, his confession to her. Everything
She then led them to a church where Peter was attending mass and pointed him out to the officers. And all of the people in their pews watched as the man who sang the hymns behind them was arrested because he was the true Vampire of Dusseldorf.
Within days, the story had hit the headlines. “Vampire Characterized as most ruthless criminal of the century, a monster in Human form” and “Man Confesses to Killing Eleven at Dusseldorf”.
A psychiatrist named Dr. Karl Berg sat down with Peter once he was behind bars and did a full psychological exam, which he catalogued in the book “The Sadist”. This book would go on to be banned by the Nazi’s for breaking their moral code, so of course, my associate producer and I read the whole thing.
Peter confessed everything to Dr. Karl Berg, and it’s all written down in this book. He talks about how he was walking with 17 year old Maria Hahn after the beer garden when an insatiable blood lust took over him. He wasn’t planning on killing her, but something took over.
He confirmed that she wasn’t dead after he had attempted to drink her blood, making himself sick. But when he returned to the crime scene the next day to move her body, she was.
He talked about how he had stalked the 5 year old Gertrud Albermann for weeks before her murder and how he’d sent the letter to the officers. He even talked about how he went back to the crime scene and watched from the woods as police discovered her body. And it made him laugh so hard he was sure the officers had heard him.
Rudolf Scheer had clung to his legs as he delivered the blow to his head that killed him. He admitted that he had returned to talk to the police because he wanted to see them discover the body. To watch the blood drain from their faces as they saw the wounds on his neck.
But Peter would ultimately confess to over 50 crimes, a number so high, police had trouble believing it. When she heard that number, Auguste suffered a mental break and was actually committed to an asylum.
This number is most likely false, and was probably made up by Peter as a way of self aggrandizing. Eventually, he confessed to just 9 murders. The ones the police are most certain he committed are the ones we discussed in this episode.
And on July 2nd, 1931. In Klingelpütz (Klingel-Poots) Prison, Cologne.
Peter Kürten walked to the guillotine with the same meticulous attention to appearance he'd maintained his entire life. His suit was pressed, his shoes polished, his hair carefully combed. He just finished his last meal—Wiener Schnitzel, fried potatoes, and white wine. He enjoyed it so much he asked for seconds. Apparently his looming death was not enough to stop his appetite.
The crowd outside the prison that day was enormous. Some people called for blood. Others came simply to witness the end of Germany's most notorious killer. Inside, only a select few were present: the executioner, the priest, the prison officials, and Dr. Karl Berg, the psychiatrist who spent the last year trying to understand the mind of this monster.
As Kürten approached the scaffold, he turned to Berg with a question that would haunt the doctor for the rest of his life.
"Tell me," Peter asked, almost conversationally, "after my head has been chopped off, will I still be able to hear, at least for a moment, the sound of my own blood gushing from the stump of my neck?"
Berg didn’t answer. So Peter continued: "That would be the pleasure to end all pleasures."
Even facing death, Peter Kürten's final thought was of blood.
The execution was swift. The blade fell at 6:00 AM precisely. Peter Kürten, the Vampire of Düsseldorf, was finally dead at 48.
Today, if you visit Ripley's Believe It or Not in Wisconsin Dells, you can see Peter Kürten's mummified head, bisected and preserved. Scientists tried to study his brain after he died but didn’t learn much, other than the fact that he had an enlarged thymus gland. They wanted something they could point at to say, look! This is where the monster came from, but today we know that it was a combination of things. A terrible childhood, and a darkness that came from somewhere you can’t see on an MRI.
But Peter’s violence shaped Dusseldorf forever. Because vampires, at least, are fiction. They're bound by rules—sunlight, crosses, holy water. The vampires from eastern european legend could be understood, categorized, defeated.
But Peter Kürten was human. He walked in daylight. He had a job, a wife, a normal life that he wore like a mask. He could have been anyone's neighbor, anyone's husband, but if he found you alone on a secluded path on the outskirts of town, it was over for you.
In the end, maybe that's why we need our monsters to be supernatural. Because the truth—that ordinary humans can become something so evil—is more terrifying than any legend.
Peter Kürten proved that vampires are real. They just don't need fangs.
Our exploration of real-life monsters has just begun. Next week, we’re going to listen to the siren song of one woman who lured men from all over the country to her farm, only for them to vanish.
See, Sirens are not just out on the rocks in the sea, and we’re going to explore that in next weeks episode, you’re not going to want to miss it. For now, enjoy this special trailer for The Timekeeper. The first episode drops right here on Friday.
Until then, stay curious.