the Café Kröpcke in the Georgstrasse, one of the first boulevards of New Hanover; whilst others met their friends at the andrygonous balls in the Kalenberger Vorstadt, or in the old Assembly Rooms; and lowest of all there was a tiny dancing-place, “Zur schwülen Guste,” “Hot-Stuff Gussie’s” where poor boys found their clientele. It was here, for example, that Grans picked up young Ernst Spiecker whose tawdry shirt cost him his life.
With regard to his demeanour at the trial the contemporary newspapers[89] write: “Throughout the long ordeal Haarmann was utterly impassive and complacent… The details of the atrocious crimes for which Haarmann will shortly pay with his life were extremely revolting. All his victims were between 12 and 18 years of age,[90] and it was proved that accused actually sold the flesh for human consumption. He once made sausages in his kitchen, and, together with the purchaser, cooked and ate them…. Some alienists hold that even then the twenty-four murders cannot possibly exhaust the full toll of Haarmann’s atrocious crimes, and estimate the total as high as fifty. With the exception of a few counts, the prisoner made minutely detailed confessions and for days the court listened to his grim narrative of how he cut up the bodies of his victims and disposed of the fragments in various ways. He consistently repudiated the imputation of insanity, but at the same time maintained unhesitatingly that all the murders were committed when he was in a state of trance, and unaware of what he was doing. This contention was specifically brushed aside by the Bench, which in its judgement pointed out that according to his own account of what happened, it was necessary for him to hold down his victims by hand in a peculiar way before it was possible for him to inflict a fatal bite on their throats. Such action necessarily involved some degree of deliberation and conscious purpose.” Another account[91] says with regard to Haarmann: “The killing of altogether twenty-seven young men is laid at his door, the horror of the deeds being magnified by the allegation that he sold to customers for consumption the flesh of those he did not himself eat… With Haarmann in the dock appeared a younger man, his friend Hans Grans, first accused of assisting in the actual murders but now charged with inciting to commit them and with receiving stolen
