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.

1 Childhood
2 Trial and conviction
3 Film and literature
4 References

[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 11 months he was adopted by a butcher 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. Because, in his parents' opinion, it was not sufficiently strict, he was 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, however, escaped by burning through his bindings with a candle that Bartsch had left burning after leaving the shelter.

Bartsch was arrested in 1966.

[edit] Trial and conviction

Upon arrest, Bartsch openly confessed to his crimes. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on December 15, 1967, by the Wuppertal regional court (Landgericht Wuppertal). Initially, the sentence was upheld on appeal. However, in 1971, the Federal Court of Justice of Germany, returned the case to the Landgericht Düsseldorf, which reduced the sentence to 10 years of juvenile detention and had Bartsch 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. This was about ten years after incarceration, two years after his marriage, and after his depressive condition did not improve. The doctors of Eickelborn State Hospital chose a castration methodology that accidentally resulted in Bartsch's death. An official autopsy and investigation determined that Bartsch had been intoxicated with a Halothane overdose (factor 10) by an insufficiently trained nurse.^[1]