The Rotenburg Cannibal, Armin Meiwes

“The Rotenburg Cannibal” is the nickname given to Armin Meiwes, a German murderer who earned it by killing and eating another man.

Armin Meiwes, the Rotenburg Cannibal

Meiwes was born in Essen, Germany, on 1 December 1961 and led an apparently normal life: after serving in the German army he worked as an IT specialist at the data centre of a bank in Kassel. His classmates remember him as a normal, somewhat solitary child.

Even as a child Meiwes had cannibal fantasies: he remembers wanting to eat the classmates he liked best.

He says that seeing a pig being slaughtered during puberty intensified his fantasies. He lived with his mother, his father and his two older half-brothers, but when Armin was 8 his father took the car and left, never to return. In an interview Armin explained that he ran after the car, but his father never came back.

When his brothers also left, in 1980, he moved with his mother to Wüstefeld, a hamlet of just 30 inhabitants in Rotenburg an der Fulda, into a huge 44-room family house. His mother was a domineering woman who controlled her son heavily: she even went with him on dates and business trips. Armin always felt very lonely and thought that, to have someone with him forever, he had to eat them.

In 1996 his mother had a car accident from which she never recovered. She used crutches and Armin had to help her with everything. Being a domineering person, she made Armin’s life impossible, calling him every 5 minutes and constantly complaining. In 1999 she died, and Armin was finally free of this burden, but also alone in the world.

Alone in that huge house, and no longer under his mother’s control, he began surfing the internet to indulge his sexual fantasies on cannibal fetish sites and forums.

The search for someone willing to be eaten

Armin wanted to eat a person, but he wanted them to consent. After his mother’s death he began looking for his victim online. The internet is full of people with a cannibalism fetish, both as executioner and as victim, and Armin began to frequent sites such as “Cannibal Café”, where many people shared their cannibal fantasies.

There was also an ads section where many people offered themselves to be eaten, and Armin met some of them. For them, however, it was only a fantasy: they did not really want to be killed and eaten, just to play role-playing games in which they were the victims and Armin their executioner.

So he decided to post an ad:

Looking for a well-built young man between 18 and 30 to be slaughtered and eaten

signing himself “The Master Butcher”. Many people answered his ad, but they all ended up backing out. He decided to wait, then answered an ad that read:

I offer you the chance to eat me alive

It was the ad of Bernd Brandes, a 43-year-old engineer from Berlin, who on 5 February 2001 replied to one of his messages.

Bernd Brandes, Armin’s victim

Bernd too felt alone in the world: his mother had died by suicide when he was only 5, and his father did not give him the affection he needed. When he told his father he was gay, their relationship broke down for good.

Bernd sought relationships with other men, but his fantasy was pain: he wanted someone to hurt him. So he posted an ad on Cannibal Café, which Armin Meiwes answered. Armin and Bernd decided to meet and to act out their fantasy: to eat a human being, and to be eaten, respectively.

Preparing for cannibalism

On 9 March 2001 the two met at Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe station and Bernd went to Armin’s house. As soon as he came in he undressed completely so that Armin could admire his dinner. Then they went into the “slaughter room” and had sex.

Bernd, however, was not satisfied: Armin could not bring himself to tear off his flesh and eat him alive, so he decided to go home. Armin drove him to the station but then had second thoughts. He told Bernd he had changed his mind, and the two went back home, determined to go all the way.

Bernd was sedated, then Armin, with his consent, cut off his penis.

A video camera was on, recording everything, because Bernd wanted to watch the scene of his amputation. He told Armin to cook his freshly severed penis. Armin fried it, but the meat was so fresh it was ruined. The dish was inedible and Bernd was very disappointed. Armin remembers that Bernd was happy to see the blood pouring from the wound, and disappointed when the pain of the amputation faded after “only” 30 seconds.

Then he ran a hot bath for Bernd, who was cold, and while he was bleeding to death in the bathtub, Meiwes sat down to read a Star Wars book. Then he went back to his victim, who tried to get out of the bath but collapsed.

The butchering

Bernd lost consciousness several times during the night, until at a certain point he did not wake up again. Armin did not know what to do: he picked up the knife but then put it down. He sat next to Bernd, kissed him and prayed. He picked up the knife, put it down again, kissed Bernd again and prayed, asking God to forgive him. Then he cut his throat.

He hung the body from a butcher’s hook and began to cut it up, carving the flesh and storing it in the freezer to eat later.

Armin felt bad about having killed a man, but also fulfilled at having finally acted out his fantasy, and he decided to look for more victims. He started posting ads again on cannibalism sites and told a young man who contacted him that he had tasted human flesh. The young man decided to call the police.

The arrest

In December 2002 the police turned up at Meiwes’s house with a search warrant. They seized the meat they found in the freezer, his computer, his video camera, three knives, an axe and a butcher’s apron. Meiwes called a lawyer and asked him to take his case, calmly explaining that he had killed and eaten a person.

It immediately became a media sensation, and the people of Rotenburg were shocked by the news, especially Meiwes’s neighbours. One neighbour said he often babysat her children and that she thought Meiwes was a good person, so much so that she would trust him with her children again.

German law does not contain a crime of cannibalism, and the video clearly showed that Bernd had consented.

So, in January 2004, Armin was sentenced to 8 and a half years for manslaughter. But in May 2006, in a retrial, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Of the 4 hours of footage Armin had shot, only 19 minutes were shown to the jury. After watching them, the jurors felt ill and some needed therapy. Today Armin is serving his life sentence in prison.

Does the Rotenburg Cannibal remind you of anyone? Perhaps it’s Issei Sagawa, the Japanese cannibal, who died in 2022. I’m sure they would have got along.

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Sources

• Armin Meiwes – Wikipedia