I'm sure a lot of you have heard about this, I only heard about it today in a Philosophy class. We were talking about how to solve the mind body problem. Apparently eating the mind of another can make you somehow absorb his essence... Right. Why is this one of my majors? Your guess is as good as mine.
Here's the full article. If you feel that you need to know the graphic details, click on "MORE." Amazing what humanity can come up with. Sigh. Following this Reuters article is a London Times article. Blech.
German cannibal confesses all
Wednesday December 3, 08:04 PM
By David Crossland
KASSEL, Germany (Reuters) - A German has confessed to killing and eating a willing victim in a case that could make legal history, telling a shocked courtroom the experience was "like taking communion" in a religious service.
At the start of his murder trial in Kassel, central Germany on Wednesday, Armin Meiwes, 42, offered a full account of the killing that has gained him worldwide notoriety as "The Cannibal of Rotenburg" after the town where he lived.
Meiwes said there were "hundreds, thousands" of people seeking to fulfil their desires to eat humans or be eaten via Internet advertisements in forums called "Cannibal Cafe", "Guy Cannibals" and "Torturenet".
In testimony so frank it drew gasps from the public gallery, Meiwes said he had kept his victim's skull and plastic bags of flesh in his freezer. He ate about 20 kg (44 lb) of the flesh, defrosting it bit by bit.
"With every piece of flesh I ate I remembered him," Meiwes, a self-assured and well-spoken computer repair man, told the judge. "It was like taking communion."
The killing took place in March 2001. Meiwes was arrested in December 2002 after police received a tip-off from someone who had seen one of his Internet adverts seeking a slaughter victim.
The trial is expected to last until the end of January and some 40 witnesses will be called, including some of Meiwes's Internet contacts.
The gaunt, bespectacled defendant said that during his upbringing alone with a dominant mother he had longed for a little brother he could make "part of me".
He told how he made contact online with a 43-year-old Berlin computer specialist identified only as Bernd-Juergen B.
He invited him to his elegant half-timbered home near Kassel and killed him with a kitchen knife in a "slaughtering room" he had built containing meat hooks, a cage and a butcher's table.
"He told me he had had the desire since he was a child to be slaughtered and eaten," Meiwes said. "He was very intelligent and I didn't see any sign that he was disturbed." Meiwes filmed the killing and the video tape may be shown to the court.
Defence lawyers have said the film shows Meiwes cutting off the victim's penis at the latter's request.
"It was important to him that his member be cut off and that he witness it," Meiwes said.
"He screamed terribly and jumped around the table but after a while he said he was surprised it didn't hurt and was very pleased that the wound bled so strongly," he added.
"It gave him pleasure."
MURDER OR EUTHANASIA?
Eventually the victim lost consciousness and Meiwes killed him with a knife. He hung up the corpse and cut it up, filming the process.
Prosecutors, who charged Meiwes with murder after a psychiatrist declared him fit to stand trial, are seeking a life sentence.
They concede the victim wanted to be killed but argue he was incapable of rational thought.
Meiwes's lawyer has pleaded for him to be convicted of "killing on request", a form of illegal euthanasia which carries a maximum five years sentence.
Legal experts say the charge of full murder may not stick given that the video film shows the victim to be willing. The case could reach the Federal Constitutional Court, Arthur Kreuzer of Giessen University's Institute for Criminology said this week.
Meiwes said he became obsessed with wanting a younger brother -- "someone to be part of me".
Using the pseudonym "Franky", he posted Internet ads saying: "If you are 18-25 you are my boy" or "Come to me I'll eat your delicious flesh".
Some 430 people responded to his e-mails within a year.
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that has horrified a nation and revived memories of the darkest days of war
The Times (England), Dec. 13, 2002
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/
By Roger Boyes
Germany was transfixed in horror yesterday by a case of cannibalism in which an apparently respectable software specialist mutilated and ate a microchip engineer.
The cannibal says his victim volunteered to be slaughtered. The man confessed after police thwarted his attempt to find a new victim over the internet: at least five men had already declared their willingness to be eaten.
The tabloid daily Bild expressed concern that cannibals could be roaming German streets. “They are invisible behind their glasses, their hairstyles, their families, their work, their seemingly unblemished innocence,” wrote Franz Josef Wagner, a columnist for the paper. “These sick people are hiding among us, they are in our very midst.”
Cannibalism not only breaches moral and social taboos, it hits a nerve for a whole generation of Germans who remember the desperate eating of human organs during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
Bodies of fallen soldiers frozen in the snow sometimes had to provide meat for the half-starved Wehrmacht in retreat.
The three months of hand-to-hand fighting in the icy ruins of Stalingrad during the winter of 1942-3 saw — as German veterans now admit — a frenzied resort to human flesh. After the war, when the soldiers started to trickle back from Soviet captivity, some of the horrific stories were passed on to families.
For German literature however wartime cannibalism remained a forbidden subject. This latest case of cannibalism plainly stems from sexual perversion. But the ghost of wartime hunger and the buried secrets of a generation hung over the public debate yesterday.
The victim of the ritualistic killing was a 42-year-old leading microchip designer at the electronics giant Siemens, one of the best according to his colleagues. Bernd Jürgen B (his surname has been withheld) was a slim, athletic chainsmoker who lived in a luxurious penthouse suite decked out with £30,000-worth of cutting-edge computer equipment. He disappeared in the spring of 2000 after having first sold his Mitsubishi car and some other valuables.
Police now know that he responded to an internet advertisement announcing: “Wanted: young, well-built 18-30-year-old for slaughter.”
The man who placed the advertisement — and who started to advertise again this year — was Armin M (surname withheld) from the charming half-timbered town of Rotenburg in the western state of Hesse.
The 41-year-old computer technician was entirely serious: investigators this week found a slaughtering room, complete with meat hooks, in his apartment. Herr M, a former sergeant major in the German army who later worked for the council in Mainz, video-recorded his butchery.
Police have confiscated 50 videos which are said to be worth thousands on the very specialised market for cannibal acts. Details from the confessions of Armin M were published in all German newspapers yesterday.
He says that he and the victim fried and ate part of the victim’s body before leaving the kitchen for the slaughtering room, where Herr M switched on the camera and then stabbed Herr B to death. He hung the body upside down on a meat hook to allow the blood to drain and later sliced it into small chunks, which he wrapped and stored in the deep-freeze.
Herr M has been eating Herr B ever since; some pieces were found in the freezer this week. He buried inedible body parts and bones in a garden. These too have been recovered by the police.
Germany is struggling to understand the act. The head of the Criminological Institute in Wiesbaden, Dr Rudolf Egg, said that modern cannibals use deep-freezing to extend and ration out their pleasure. Primitive cannibals used to eat their victims all at one go soon after killing.
“If he really derived pleasure from eating a man,” he said, “then he could not possibly eat everything in a single day. And he obviously did not want to eat rotten meat. So he froze the body parts; the act of eating then took on the aspect of a ritual and could be drawn into his sexual fantasies.”
Franz Josef Wagner blamed the case on the film The Silence of the Lambs and its prequel, Red Dragon, released this year. “The cult star of the film world in 2002 was Hannibal Lecter, who ate a human brain to the music of Vivaldi.”
Since the information about the case comes solely from the confessing killer, police are unsure whether Herr B really did co-operate in his own consumption. The cannibal has been charged with murder.
In recent months Herr M has placed 80 advertisements calling for new victims. The five men who replied appear to have been genuine volunteers but police were unwilling to disclose details yesterday.
As far as the investigators can work out, Herr M has so far committed only one act of cannibalism but inquiries are being extended to other places where he lived and worked.
“This is going to take a while,” said the state prosecutor of Cassel, Hans-Manfred Jung.
The savages
March 1998: 30-year-old man in Italy eats two-year-old daughter
February 1999: Venezuelan confesses to eating ten men and says: “I never eat women because they have not done anything wrong”
March 1999: three Finnish men and a woman eat fellow member of Satanist cult
October 2001: two Kazakhstanis sentenced to death for killing seven prostitutes and making kebabs out of them. The meat was shared with neighbours
October 2001: Six Belarusians arrested for eating a man’s raw liver
Posted by mbare at December 05, 2003 01:18 AM