So far as could be traced the first boy he so charitably took to his rooms was a lad of seventeen named Friedel Rothe, who had run away from home. On 29th September, 1918, his mother received a postcard, and it so happened the very same day his father returned from the war. The parents were not going to let their son disappear without a search, and they soon began to hunt for him in real earnest. One of Friedel’s pals told them that the missing boy had met a detective who offered him shelter. Other clues were traced and with extraordinary trouble, for the authorities had more pressing matters in hand than tracking truant schoolboys, the family obliged the police to search Cellarstrasse 27, where Haarmann lived. When a sudden entry was made Haarmann was found with another boy in such an unequivocal situation that his friends, the police, were obliged to arrest him there and then, and he received nine months imprisonment for gross indecency under Section 175 of the German Code. Four years later when Haarmann was awaiting trial for twenty-four murders he remarked: “At the time when the policeman arrested me the head of the boy Friedel Rothe was hidden under a newspaper behind the oven. Later on, I threw it into the canal.”
In September, 1919, Haarmann first met Hans Grans, the handsome lad, who was to stand beside him in the dock. Grans, the type of abnormal and dangerous decadent which is only too common to-day, was one of the foulest parasites of society, pilferer and thief, bully, informer, spy, agent provocateur, murderer, renter, prostitute, and what is lower and fouler than all, blackmailer. The influence of this Ganymede over Haarmann was complete. It was he who instigated many of the murders—Adolf Hannappel a lad of seventeen was killed in November, 1923, because Grans wanted his pair of new trousers; Ernst Spiecker, likewise aged seventeen was killed on 5th January, 1924, because Grans coveted his “toff shirt”—it was he who arranged the details, who very often trapped the prey.
It may be said that in 1918, Hanover, a town of 450,000 inhabitants was well-known as being markedly homosexual. These were inscribed on the police lists no less than 500 “Männliche Prostituierten,” of whom the comeliest and best-dressed, the mannered and well-behaved elegants frequented
