The murderer was waiting for his next victim hidden in the shadows and wielding a knife. “They were capricious…” he said to himself. He was referring to women, towards whom he harbored an absolute feeling of hatred and resentment. Minutes later, Hilde found death in a nearby park.
The attacker assaulted her at knifepoint, violently raped her and, when he was done, slit her throat. Hilde had no chance to defend herself and died almost instantly. The monster of the Black Forest had just started a wave of crimes that would put the authorities in check and spread terror in this German area in the middle of the post-war period. Her name was Pommerencke, one of the greatest sexual predators in history.
Heinrich Pommerencke was born on July 6, 1937 in Bentwisch (Germany) and, from his childhood, two tragic events would mark him forever. On the one hand, the death of his father in the middle of World War II and, on the other, the abandonment of his mother at the age of twelve. The woman decided to leave her children in the care of her maternal grandparents to move to Switzerland.
Both circumstances generated in him feelings of orphanhood and helplessness, as a result of which he developed a solitary and introverted personality. “When I was a child I never had a friend in the world,” he once stated. In addition, the little boy also germinated an exacerbated obsession with sexuality and at the age of ten he had his first sexual encounter.
However, his compulsive sexual behavior led to such frustration that, when he turned fifteen, he began to frequent dance halls to look for young girls with whom to make his fantasies come true. If they opposed, and this was the case in most cases, Heinrich followed them and attacked when they reached a more secluded area. Once alone, he did not hesitate to beat and rape them.
In this way, the teenager accumulated dozens of robberies, rapes and assaults in the Mecklenburg region. Although the police only arrested him for an attempted sexual assault on a ten-year-old girl when he was seventeen. It was then that Heinrich left the country and moved to Switzerland with his mother for a while.
His change of country did not diminish his perverse sexual drives. The young man wandered around Switzerland, Germany, and even Austria to commit his misdeeds and for which he had to answer to the authorities. His entries and exits from prison were a constant during the 1950s.
At the beginning of 1959, Heinrich returned to Germany and settled in Hornberg, in the middle of the Black Forest, an area that suffered its most perverse atrocities and whose inhabitants - mainly female - lived in complete terror.
If until now Heinrich was content with robbing, attacking, beating and raping his victims, from now on, the escalation of violence went one step further. The one about crime. According to him he would confess some time later and once arrested, the trigger was watching a movie, The Ten Commandments.
“I saw women dancing around the Golden Calf and I thought they were capricious. I knew I would have to kill,” she told police. After leaving the cinema, Heinrich went to a store, bought a knife and unleashed the monster inside him. Here began a chronology of murders where dark alleys, trains, stations and embankments were his favorite places.
His first victim was Hilde Konter, 49, whom he assaulted at knifepoint and dragged to a nearby park to rape and murder her by cutting her throat. Her body was found on February 26, 1959 at a highway intersection.
A month later, 18-year-old Karin Wälde was raped in a wooden cabin and beaten to death with a stone. Her body was found near a railroad embankment after being thrown off the Gutach River embankment.
On May 30, 1959, Heinrich sneaked into a teenage girl's bedroom, but the victim was able to get away from the killer and call for help. Heinrich fled while the police were unaware that he was looking for a serial killer. A few hours later, as he had not achieved his goal, the young man acted again. This time he chose Heidelberg central station and a 21-year-old girl. Dagmar was stabbed in the chest and thrown from the moving train.
Two kilometers later, Heinrich activated the emergency brake for a macabre reason: he wanted to return to the body to practice necrophilia and stab it again, this time in the back. The body was found on June 5, and investigators did not link this murder to previous crimes or to the emergency braking.
From this date until June 19, Heinrich once again acted with total impunity, disrupting the lives of several more women and attacking a dozen of them who were able to survive. In fact, in one of these assaults, the young man left his mark, something unprecedented, since, in all this time, he had not left a single piece of evidence that incriminated him.
Luck changed the day he had a custom-made suit made at a tailor in Hornberg. By then, investigators had discovered the connection between an armed robbery and the murders: a witness had provided a description of the gun and this led them to the aforementioned footprint.
When the murderer left the store he did not notice an oversight that would cost him his freedom, that of a suitcase containing a sawed-off shotgun with which he had carried out numerous robberies. The tailor raised the alarm and the authorities waited for the young man to return to arrest him. However, there was something about him that raised suspicions.
During the interrogation, Heinrich only confessed to the robberies, but the investigators had a trap prepared for him: to make him believe that they had found his blood in other crimes. Heinrich then broke down and admitted to a total of 65 charges, including four murders, six attempted murders, two completed rapes, 25 attempted sexual assaults and dozens of robberies and thefts.
The police had before them the one baptized by the media of the time as The Monster of the Black Forest, the abomination or the beast in human form.
“There is no man sitting before you but the devil,” Heinrich Pommerencke said of himself during his trial before the Freiburg Regional Court in early October 1960. Twenty days later, he was found guilty of four of the murders. , as well as twelve attempted murders and twenty-one rapes.
The court sentenced him to a minimum of six life sentences and 140 years in prison. “Human language is inadequate to describe the horror and misery that Heinrich Pommerencke had caused so many people,” the prosecutor went on to say after the verdict. Even the Schaffhauser Nachrichten newspaper described the sentence as follows:
“Behind the worker Heinrich Pommerenke the nine doors of the Bruchsal prison are closed forever. The biggest sex offender of the post-war period will spend the rest of his blood-stained life behind bars, never able to hope to be released again (...) No one will ever be able to understand exactly what was happening behind those ice-cold eyes, the high forehead, the angular but not extraordinary features of this sexual offender as he threw himself on one of his victims, strangled or stabbed her in cold blood and then proceeded to savagely destroy the corpse.”
The beast from the Black Forest never had a chance to apply for parole. This was ruled by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1995, stating that it was incompatible with “human dignity.” There was not even any expert to confirm that Heinrich no longer posed any danger to the public.
During the five decades that the beast remained behind bars, he only found peace when he embraced faith. According to the officials who dealt with him, Heinrich was a pious man and religion had changed him. Despite his lawyers' attempts to get him out of prison, Heinrich finally died after suffering a long illness. He was 71 years old on December 27, 2008.
