Herr Groepler, a stolid individual whose profession forces him to lead a rather unsocial existence, left his cosy home in Magdeburg last week with a bag of tools and a coil of new rope. He took the train to the Prussian State Prison at Klingelpuetz, near Cologne. In the prison yard he disappeared into a dusty, dilapidated shed. Prisoners tense in their cells heard him hammering, hammering, filing metal all day long.
In the evening three Lutheran pastors in white ties and black frock coats arrived. They were taken to the cell of Germany's most dangerous criminal, mild-mannered, flutter-fingered Peter Kuerten, "the Diisseldorf Fiend" (TIME, May 4).
In May Killer Kuerten was sentenced to death nine times for a fiendish series of bloodlust killings. Dusseldorf children, who had been going to school in vans guarded by armed policemen, played in the streets again. Peter Kuerten confessed all his crimes, muttered that when his head throbbed he just had to kill.
His last day last week he spent writing letters of apology to the parents of his victims. That night he prayed with the three pastors. At dawn the doors of the shed in the prison yard were opened. Executioner Groepler wheeled out what he had been hammering and filing on all day, a dusty French guillotine, 130 years old, which, with the Code Napoleon was a present from the Emperor to the Rhine states. At 6 a.m. Killer Kuerten walked unmoved to the machine, stretched out his naked neck. Down crashed the knife.