Trivia

The documentary only alludes to the need of Jürgen Bartsch to confess to someone after the first murder. He did confess to a local priest, who decided to adhere to the seal of confession and not to report the crime to the police at the time. This led to a public discussion about the merit of the seal of confession and the fact that the deaths of the three other victims could have been prevented.

Jürgen Bartsch died of circulatory collapse due to a tenfold Halothane overdose during a surgical castration in 1976. There was no trained anesthesiologist present during the procedure and the operating team used an unsuitable vaporizer to distribute the gas. The same surgeon was responsible for a similar accident during a previous operation and was later convicted of negligent homicide. He received a suspended sentence.

The case of Jürgen Bartsch shares striking similarities with the case of Erwin Hagedorn, who killed three young boys in the East German city of Eberswalde only a few years later between 1969 and 1971. The Ministry for State Security of the former German Democratic Republic even went so far as to obtain documents through their agents about the case of Jürgen Bartsch in an attempt to further the search for the then unknown perpetrator. Both Hagedorn and Bartsch were quite young when they committed their crimes and both attested to a sexually-motivated compulsion to torture and kill their victims. Erwin Hagedorn even agreed to appear in an educational film that reconstructed the crimes, which was never shown to the public. He was eventually sentenced to death by shooting in 1972 and became the last regular criminal to be executed in the German Democratic Republic before the official abolishment of the death penalty in 1987.

Karl-Heinz Sadrozinski, renamed Jürgen Bartsch, was born Nov. 6th, 1946, in Essen, Germany, left in the hospital by his tubaculous mother, Anna Sadrozinski. Some months later Gerhard and Gertrud Bartsch, who runs a butcher's shop, look after and adopt the young boy, which they rename Jürgen. The new parents hold the boy extremely austere and avoid every contact to other children, because Jürgen shouldn't hear that he is an adopted child. Especially Gertrud Barsch is hard on the boy and hits him very often. At the age of ten Jürgen is sent to the children's home in Rheinbach, and at the age of twelve he is brought to the Marienhausen Catholic school. This school advocates severe discipline and physical chastisements are on the agenda. There he is seduced and abused homosexually by older boys and his teacher. The choir leader Father Pütlitz rapes Jürgen several times.