Jürgen Bartsch
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Jürgen Bartsch (born November 6, 1946 in Essen; died April 28, 1976 in Eickelborn; original name "Karl-Heinz Sadrozinski") was a German serial killer who murdered four children and attempted to kill another.
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[edit] Childhood
Karl-Heinz Sadrozinski was born in 1946 as an illegitimate child in Essen. His birth mother died of tuberculosis soon afterward, and he spent the first months of his life being cared for by nurses, until at eleven months he was adopted by a professional animal slaughterer and his wife in Langenberg (today Velbert-Langenberg). From then on he was called Jürgen Bartsch.
Bartsch's adoptive mother, who suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, was fixated on cleanliness. He was not permitted to play with other children, lest he became dirty. This continued into adulthood -- his mother personally bathed him until he was 19.
At the age of 10, Bartsch entered school. Since it was not in his parent's opinion sufficiently strict, he was soon moved to a Catholic boarding school, where, when he was bed-ridden with fever, he was molested by the choir leader, Pater Pütz.
Bartsch began killing as a teenager. He persuaded all of his victims to accompany him into an abandoned air-raid shelter, where he forced them to undress and then sexually abused them. He dismembered his first four victims. His intended fifth victim, 11-year-old Peter Freese, escaped, however, by burning through his bindings with a candle Bartsch had left burning after leaving the shelter.
Bartsch was arrested in 1966.
[edit] Trial and Conviction
Upon arrest, Bartsch confessed openly to his crimes. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on December 15, 1967, by the Wuppertal regional court. Initially, the sentence was upheld on appeal. However, in 1971, the Federal Court of Justice of Germany, on appeal from the Dusseldorf court, reduced the sentence to 10 years juvenile detention and to be placed under psychiatric care in Eickelborn. There, he married Gisela Deike of Hanover in 1974.
The forensic psychiatrists considered various therapy concepts: psychotherapy, castration and even psychosurgery. Bartsch initially refused any surgery but finally agreed to voluntary castration in 1976 in order to avoid lifetime incarceration in a hospital ten or about ten years after incarceration, two years after his marriage, and after his depressive condition did not improve. The doctors of the state hospital Eickelborn chose a castration methodology that accidentally resulted in Bartsch's death. An official autopsy and investigation realized that Bartsch had been intoxicated with a Halothane overdose (factor ten) by an insufficiently trained male nurse. A rumour circulates in Germany to this day that the doctors overseeing the surgery intentionally caused his death.
[edit] Film and literature
The 2002 film Ein Leben lang kurze Hosen tragen (released in the U.S. in 2004, as The Child I Never Was) depicts Bartsch's life and crimes.
Bethlehem's bassist and main songwriter uses the name Jürgen Bartsch. Whether this is simply a ghastly pseudonym (more likely) or his real name remains unknown.
[edit] References
- review of a movie based on Bartsch's case
- books in german libraries on Bartsch's case
- Alice Miller, Am Anfang war Erziehung (translation: In the Beginning there was Reeducation), Suhrkamp, 1983, ISBN 3518374516
- Paul Moor, Jürgen Bartsch: Opfer und Täter, Rowohlt, 1991, ISBN 3-498-04288-2
