Viviane Janouin-Benanti

The Ogre of Hanover Station

Fritz Haarmann

In Hannover, Germany in the early 1920s, there was a rumor that the River Leine was filled with the bodies of dead children. When the river was finally dredged, over 1,500 human bones were found in the foul-smelling sludge. All the flesh had been carefully removed from the bones. What had been done with it? Who had committed these horrific murders? And why hadn’t he been caught sooner?

Readers beware, this story is not for the faint of heart.

“270 missing children, do you realize that there have been 270 disappearances in one year!” barked Police Chief Retz, beside himself, addressing a room full of bewildered police officers.

And the numbers kept growing and growing… A serial killer nicknamed the Ogre of Hannover was able to operate in the city, unchecked, for years.

Local businessman Fritz Haarmann, always so polite and well dressed, greeted everyone in his neighborhood with a smile. He was even on friendly terms with the chief of police. Such a nice man was above all suspicion. How could anyone imagine that he was the one abducting children, let alone that he was killing and dismembering them and dumping their bones in the river at night…? With an average of one murder per week over the span of years, his arrest couldn’t come too soon.

This chilling story has been impeccably researched and tactfully dramatized by Viviane Janouin-Benanti, the author of over twenty captivating historical true crime novels. In telling this story, Janouin-Benanti does not glorify the sordid details of this serial killer’s crimes. She tells us the facts and names his victims, sharing their tragic stories as well.

You can read sample of The Ogre of Hanover Station: Fritz Haarmann on: Amazon

Some photos from the book

Friedrich Haarmann — Friedrich, called Fritz, Haarmann

Magasin de Fritz Haarmann — Fritz Haarmann's clothing store

Appartement d'Haarmann — Haarmann's pantry
where he stored human meat
before selling it

Hans Grans,
Haarmann's lover and accomplice

Gare d'Hanovre — Hannover railway station

Fritz Haarmann
happy to pose for posterity

Articles published on The ogre of Hanover station

In Hanover of the post-war period of 14-18, the police were disorganized and the crisis was raging. The circumstances was propitious to a serial killer. Not just any one, this one, a pedophile, attacks boys and teenagers. Between 1918 and 1924, reports of worrying disappearances rise dramatically. Commissioner Retz admits his powerlessness.

Friedrich Haarmann was mainly active from 1918 to 1924, without the number of his victims being really known. There will be no bodies, only a mountain of anonymous bones in the Leine River. At the very least, Haarmann will be forced to confess to 27 murders during his trial.

Viviane Janouin-Benanti has accustomed us to handle her criminal cases with sensitivity and restraint. She never enters into the sordid, seeking rather to dissect the personality of the protagonists. However, it must be admitted that for this sadistic killer who sold human flesh on the black market, you have to have a strong heart to follow his sordid path. In this sense, it is one of the darkest novels we have ever read.

Fortunately, despite the horror of the facts, the author's clear and alert style leads us in confidence and security to the conclusion of the investigation and the atonement of the monster.

CDL 44, february 2019.

Viviane Janouin-Benanti opens not with a gruesome tableau but with a boy at a table, embroidering alongside his mother; from the start she frames Fritz Haarmann within a household where devotion and dysfunction coil together. The portrait is unsettling: a son cherished to the point of complicity, a father he’s taught to despise, and a childhood already bending toward predation as the cellar of the apartment building becomes his private hunting ground. The scenes are lean and sober, designed to unsettle because they feel ordinary—thin walls, neighbors passing in the stairwell, a mother who looks the other way.

Will you want to read it?
That depends on your threshold. The author promises not to dwell on the sordid, and she keeps that promise, but she does not euphemize the crimes or their aftermath. Readers sensitive to depictions of violence against minors should know that while scenes are written with restraint, they are still harrowing. The payoff is understanding: you come away seeing how a predator’s ordinary mask can be made, how institutions can be softened by gifts and small favors, and how a city can learn to hear the station’s hum as background noise until the river itself starts talking.

The Ogre of Hannover Station is both gripping and careful, an unusually humane entry in a genre that often confuses cruelty with candor. Viviane Janouin-Benanti’s gift is perspective: she sees the killer clearly, but she refuses to let him eclipse the parents who search, the boys who make one small wrong choice in a dark week, and the officials who find a hundred reasons not to act.
You close the book not with prurient satisfaction, but with a sharper sense of how such a story becomes possible, and what it takes to stop it. Highly recommended, with the caveat that its restraint is moral, not anesthetic: the pain is real, and the author honors it.