Jürgen Bartsch

Born out of wedlock in post-war Germany, Juergen Bartsch lost his mother at the tender age of five months. He was adopted after spending eleven months in a foundling home, but the selection of a new family was unfortunate. Enrolled in a parochial school, Bartsch was seduced by a homosexual priest who also delighted in filling his mind with sadistic stories from medieval times. Back in his adopted home, the boy was alternately treated with contempt and extravagant attention. His „mother“ insisted on bathing Juergen through adolescence and beyond, a practice she continued to the date of his arrest on murder charges. By 1967, Bartsch — now 17 — was working as a butcher’s apprentice, still living with his adoptive parents in Bonn, West Germany. He was also a sadistic pedophile, responsible for the torture-slayings of four young boys he had lured to an abandoned mine shaft, killing each in turn after they were brutalized and sexually abused. On arrest and conviction, he was sentenced to a term of life imprisonment, the German death penalty having been outlawed after World War II. On April 10, 1971, the Supreme Court of Germany overturned Juergen’s conviction, on grounds that the lower court improperly ignored psychiatric evidence and Bartsch was a minor when the crimes took place. Psychiatrists informed the high court that Bartsch’s actions were a product of sexual compulsion, beyond his conscious control. His sentence was reduced from life to ten years, with credit for time already served. In April 1976, seeking to curry favor for early parole, Bartsch submitted to voluntary castration as part of his overall rehabilitation program. He died on April 28, following surgery, with doctors attributing his death to heart failure.