1980: Winfried Baumann

East German frigate captain Winfried Baumann was shot on this date in 1980 as a spy.

He and a collaborator, Dr. Christa-Karin Schumann,* were caught by the prolific DDR mail surveillance program dropping messages for the West German Federal Intelligence Service. (This Bundesnachrichtendienst, originally founded in 1956, remains unified Germany’s intelligence agency today.) East Germany’s last executioner Hermann Lorenz carried out the sentence by shooting at Leipzig Prison.

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1970: Hilmar “Henry Stutzbach” Swinka

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.

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