In 1772, the child murderer Susanna Margaretha Brandt was the talk of the town in Frankfurt am Main, the birthplace of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the man with whom I share a birthday. At the time, he was working as a lawyer in Frankfurt...
Over 400 years ago, social tensions arose in Frankfurt am Main between the citizens and the city’s rulers, an event that went down in history as the Fettmilch Uprising. The name derives from one of the leaders of the rebels, Vinzenz Fettmilch. Vinzenz Fettmilch,...
On March 9, 1931, at around 6:15 a.m., laborer Eduard Fuchs made a gruesome discovery at Krummgasse 2 in Vienna’s 3rd district, Landstraße. He found two legs wrapped in packing paper. He immediately alerted the police, who found fragments of a letter beneath the...
In the 16th and 17th centuries, people were accused not only of witchcraft and sorcery, but also of being werewolves. One person who was actually convicted of being a werewolf was Martin Blome in 1605. He was born in 1562 as the son of...
The first murder case in Germany to be solved using dactyloscopy was the murder of Anna Marie Lehmann, the widow of a Dresden civil servant. Dactyloscopy is a forensic method of identifying individuals based on the papillary ridges of fingers, palms, and soles of...
Countess Henkel von Kramschütz was a true femme fatale who instantly set every man’s heart aflutter. The attractive countess had many admirers who financed her extremely lavish lifestyle. In December 1790, the eloquent countess had moved into the house on Kaigasse in Salzburg, which...
