East Germany executed sociopath Hilmar Swinka* on this date in 1970 for three murders in Berlin.
Swinka’s trial and execution were conducted in great secrecy — the Communist bloc being oft lothe to acknowledge such bourgeois monsters as serial sex-killers. Hans Girod describes him in his German-language study of DDR criminals, Blutspuren (Bloodstains), using the pseudonym Henry Stutzbach.
Swinka/Stutzbach wasn’t the type where you say nobody could have seen it coming.
A disaffected loner abandoned by his violent father, he dropped out of his apprenticeship and rotated unskilled jobs through his twenties while passing his time with pugilism of both the sweet science and the barroom brawl varieties.
His last job, as an assistant at a pathology institute, creepily set up his crimes — where he made a nauseating mockery of dissection by strangling and then carving open two ex-lovers on February 13, 1969. The next day, Swinka honored St. Valentine by doing the same thing to his lawfully wedded wife.
Swinka was shot at a secret execution facility in Leipzig, by Hermann Lorenz — East Germany’s last executioner.
There’s a truncated version of this documentary about the Leipzig death chambers here.
* The surname means pig in Slavic languages.
On this day..
- 1953: Erna Dorn, June 17 rising patsy
- 1912: Sargent Philp
- 1499: Paolo Vitelli, duplicitous commander
- 1818: James Ouley
- 1822: Augustin Joseph Caron, entrapped
- 1881: Charlie Pierce lynched in Bloomington, Illinois
- 1567: Pietro Carnesecchi, Florentine humanist and heretic
- 1926: Tony Vettere, who put up a fierce fight
- 1903: Willis, Frederick, and Burton van Wormer
- 1950: The Leningrad Affair "culprits"
- 1788: William "Deacon" Brodie, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde inspiration
- 1957: Jacques Fesch: playboy, cop killer, saint?