The Beast of the Black Forest

In 1959, a serial killer terrorized the Black Forest region for four months. It all began with the murder of 49-year-old Hilde Konter. On February 27, 1959, a waiter found her body on his way to work on Durlacher Allee in Karlsruhe. After finishing work at the Gablonzer jewelry workshops, Hilde Konter had bought milk, pastries, sugar, whipped cream, and an apple. She then wanted to go to her apartment, but she never arrived there. On her way there, a man had ambushed her, grabbed her from behind, and rolled her down an embankment. He then slit her throat with a razor and sexually assaulted her corpse. He then drank the milk that Hilde Konter had bought at the supermarket before disappearing into the darkness. On March 25, another woman’s body was found on the banks of the Gutach River. Eighteen-year-old Karin Wälde had been raped and killed with a stone. On May 31, 1959, 21-year-old Dagmar Klimek was traveling on a special holiday train, the D 969, when a man stabbed her in the chest with a knife. The perpetrator then threw the dead woman out of the train bound for Basel, pulled the emergency brake, and ran to the body. He dragged it to a forest path, where he sexually assaulted it. The fourth murder took place on June 9, 1959, near Baden-Baden, where 16-year-old Rita Walterspacher was raped and strangled. The police were completely in the dark as to who the brutal murderer and rapist of women was until a coincidence came to their aid. In the small town of Hornberg, a young man wanted to pick up a suit he had ordered from a tailor and forgot his bag there. The tailor glanced into the bag and discovered a sawn-off small-caliber rifle. This had been stolen on June 10, 1959, during a break-in at a gun shop in Baden-Baden, and used on June 18, 1959, to rob a ticket clerk at the Karlsruhe-Durlach train station, where the perpetrator stole 540 DM. The tailor alerted the police and gave the investigators the man’s personal details. On the same day, the young man was arrested by the police on the station forecourt. During the subsequent interrogation, he confessed to 65 crimes, including the four murders of women. But who was this young man? He was Heinrich Paul Max Pommerenke, a 21-year-old unskilled laborer from Bentwisch who was shy around people. This baby-faced boy was born in Bentwisch on July 6, 1937. His father was a dock worker in Rostock. After his father was killed in World War II, his mother moved to Switzerland without her children. From then on, Pommerenke and his siblings grew up with their grandparents. He became a rapist while still at school and, after completing an apprenticeship as a painter, raped again. He fled from the GDR to the FRG so that he could not be held accountable for his heinous crimes. From West Berlin, he was sent to his mother, who was living in Switzerland, where he found work at a fair in Schaffhausen. But he committed another rape, which is why he was banned from entering Switzerland for ten years. Pommerenke then committed several robberies and sexual offenses in southern Germany and in Bregenz, Austria. But what was the trigger for him to not only rape the women, but now also murder them? Pommerenke stated that watching the film “The Ten Commandments” on February 27, 1959, in a Karlsruhe cinema, in which scantily clad women danced around a golden calf, made him realize that women were the root of all evil. He projected all his hatred onto the female sex. He committed his first murder on the same day. Thus, the beast of the Black Forest was born, killing in the evenings in foggy, misty weather. That is why such weather later became known in southern Germany as “Pommerenke weather.” Pommerenke, who described himself during questioning as “not a human being, but the devil” and stated that he had deliberately forgotten his bag in order to be caught, was sentenced on October 22, 1960, by the Freiburg Assize Court to six life sentences and a further 15 years in prison for four counts of murder, 12 counts of attempted murder, sexual abuse of a child, rape, theft, aggravated robbery, and extortion. Pommerenke spent over 48 years in prison until his death on December 27, 2008. This made him the longest-serving prisoner in the Federal Republic of Germany until his death.