Armin Meiwes (; born 1 December 1961) is a German former computer repair technician who received international attention for murdering and cannibalising Bernd Brandes, whom he had found via the Internet as a voluntary victim, in March 2001.
After Meiwes and the victim jointly attempted to eat the victim's severed penis, Meiwes murdered his victim and proceeded to eat a large amount of his flesh. He was arrested in December 2002. In January 2004, Meiwes was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to eight years and six months in prison. In a retrial in May 2006, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Because of his acts, Meiwes is also known as the Rotenburg Cannibal or (The Master Butcher), from the signature he used in his e-mails.
Early life Armin Meiwes was born in Essen as the third child of Waltraud Vetter (1922–1999) and her then-boyfriend Dieter Meiwes (born 1941); the pair married the year following the birth. Waltraud was a housewife and Dieter worked as a police officer. Through his mother, Meiwes had two older half-brothers by different fathers, who were raised with him in Holsterhausen district. Dieter separated from Waltraud in 1969 and filed for divorce when Meiwes was twelve. Meiwes dropped out of Hauptschule and attended commercial training without completion.
In 1980, after his elder brothers moved out, Meiwes and his mother moved to , a hamlet part of Rotenburg an der Fulda, where the family had, since 1966, owned an estate, composed of a 44-room Gründerzeit-era house and pony stables. The town had a population of 30 in 2001.
Waltraud Meiwes Psychologists described Waltraud Meiwes as domineering and controlling over her son's life. She held misandrist views due to her failed romantic relationships and sought to make her youngest son fully dependent on her. Former girlfriends and colleagues of Meiwes recalled that she would always accompany him to dates and work trips, with Meiwes stating that he was raised to believe this was normal. Since Meiwes's childhood she had manipulated him into performing most household chores and would humiliate him in front of friends by telling them his embarrassing secrets and calling him by the pet name "Minchen". Essen police recorded that Waltraud Meiwes had filed a false murder accusation against a female acquaintance of her then-husband in 1965. During the encounter with officers and the accused woman, Waltraud pretended to faint to avoid having to explain herself. A number of journals written by Waltraud contained comprehensive 19th-century genealogies and an autobiography, which notably skipped any mention of her marriages or upbringing of her children. Until Meiwes was nearly 20 years old, she kept the door to his room adorned with the words "children's bedroom".
Both of her ex-husbands cited mental cruelty as the reason for their divorce; the father of her second child, whom she met after his return from a Russian prisoner-of-war camp, died in a mental hospital after attempting to kill Waltraud in a failed murder-suicide gas explosion. Her third husband Dieter stated that Waltraud did not want a third child, but that she did so anyway to "bind [her husband] more tightly to her". Meiwes described himself as being closer to his father growing up, finding his mother "eccentric", but that after their separation, she was his closest contact for almost all his life.
Adulthood
Military service and career Between 1981 and 1993, Meiwes served as a contractual soldier in the German Army, largely spent stationed at the outside of Rotenburg, and became a non-commissioned officer of the 52nd Panzergrenadier Brigade. Due to the close proximity to his home, Meiwes drove back and forth to continue to live with his mother. Soldiers and civilian employees described him as professional and obliging, always allowing leaves and offering to help in the private lives of his subordinates. Between 1984 and 1985, he was engaged to a woman, but Meiwes ended the relationship because he found her too similar in character and appearance to his mother. Meiwes claimed to have met his ex-fiancée, as well as other women, through a matchmaker and that after the break-up, he focused more on his career, finishing administrative training in Sonthofen and Unna in 1986. On 16 December 1986, Meiwes totalled his car after crashing into a telephone pole while driving home drunk from a Christmas party, resulting in a 1,500 mark fine and a nine-month driver's licence suspension. Shortly after regaining his driving privileges, Meiwes had another traffic collision, this time causing another vehicle to overturn, injuring the two occupants. The case led to Meiwes hiring attorney Harald Ermel, who remained his legal counsel for the later homicide trials. Meiwes was ultimately sentenced to a 1,280 mark fine. According to Meiwes, the drunk driving convictions led to his military superiors excluding him from promotions. In 1988, Meiwes had a brief romantic relationship with a fellow male soldier while stationed in Canada on CFB Shilo.
Meiwes had originally planned to run a computer teaching school with his brothers, but following his discharge with the rank of Oberfeldwebel, Meiwes instead found work as an IT specialist for the data centre of a bank in Kassel. Neighbours described Meiwes as polite and well-kempt in appearance, regularly attending and helping to organise events in the small community. Meiwes was known to be entrusted with children, babysitting the children of his neighbours and annually acting as Santa Claus for Christmas. He gave driving courses for teenagers and often voiced his wish to settle down and have children of his own. Two relationships with local women failed after Meiwes disclosed his preferences for both sexes.
Cannibal fetishism During sessions with police experts, Meiwes had explained that his desire for cannibalism had developed during his adolescent years. Having spent summer vacations in rural Wüstefeld, he was introduced to home slaughtering of cattle, poultry, hogs, and deer by neighbours at an early age and taught how to gut small animals such as rabbits around the age of six. He named the fairy tale "Hansel and Gretel" and a film adaptation of the novel Robinson Crusoe as early influences, with the latter standing out to him for featuring a scene where the character Friday voiced interest in "showing his reverence" for a fellow tribesman by consuming his remains.
Meiwes had also described himself feeling "very lonesome" after "the family had fallen apart", referring primarily to the abandonment by his father, but also the poor relationship to his older brothers, as well as the deaths of his grandmother and first pet cat by the time he was eight years old. Combined with his lack of friends, Meiwes created an imaginary little brother named "Franky", after a classmate named Frank. In Meiwes's imagination, "Franky" resembled the character Sandy Ricks (portrayed by Luke Halpin) from the American TV show Flipper. Shortly after beginning puberty, his mother forbade him from making girlfriends, after which Meiwes began experiencing sexual fantasies about "Franky". Specifically, he desired to "become one" with "Franky" by consuming his body, with the fantasy branching out into evisceration and slaughterhouse imagery. Meiwes only attempted to live this fantasy out once before, having wanted to ask a male classmate who bore a close resemblance to "Franky" to "cut off a piece of him", but decided against it for fear of being refused and subsequently ostracised. Meiwes stated that as he grew older, his fantasies would "fade into the background" whenever he was in a relationship, but the death of his mother on 2 September 1999 caused him to focus more intensely on it. Meiwes is bisexual, but stated that his cannibal fetish was exclusively directed at men. He did not disclose the fetish to his ex-fiancée or his boyfriend during his military service.
As an adult, Meiwes kept recordings of TV documentaries about the Vietnam War and read literature about cannibalistic serial killers such as Fritz Haarmann and Jeffrey Dahmer. Meiwes also filmed amateur fetish videos for personal usage, wherein he would cover himself in ketchup while pretending to cut himself, hang himself up by his feet via block and tackle to resemble a slaughtered animal carcass, or eat marzipan and minced meat he had formed into human or phallic shapes. He kept collages of cut-out body parts from pornographic magazines on a grill and copies of the videos locked in a safe, after he stopped producing additional footage when his mother questioned an uncleaned kitchen Meiwes left behind after one nightly filming. With the advent of the internet in the 1990s, Meiwes began frequenting online forums centred around cannibal fetishism since at least 1998, using the alias "Franky" with the username "Antrophagus" and styling himself as a butcher. Meiwes voiced interest primarily in killing, dismembering and cannibalising another person, but also fantasised about being cooked and eaten by someone else.
In early 2000, Meiwes posted more than 60 online advertisements on the forum Nullo, which was dedicated to "fantasies of emasculation" and similar male genital mutilation. The adverts, written in English, stated that he was "looking for a well-built 18- to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed". Several people responded to the advertisement but backed out; Meiwes specifically requested volunteers and did not attempt to force them to do anything against their will. The ads also appeared on another site, the Cannibal Café, which, contrary to some media reports, was not where Meiwes met Brandes, as it was primarily centred around the (fantasy) cannibalisation of women.
At the same time, Meiwes scoured adverts by people who claimed they were willing to be killed and eaten, chatting at length with two users, though neither ultimately followed up on their offer. "Luke", self-identified as a 20-year-old Austrian man, stated that his family was going to undertake the slaughtering instead of Meiwes, set for 7 January 2001 during Orthodox Christmas. "Matteo", a middle-aged Italian man, originally agreed to be "whipped to death" and "grilled" with either a flamethrower or two portable electric heaters while nailed to a St Andrew's Cross, but reconsidered due to the cannibal aspect.
At Matteo's request, Meiwes had converted a part of his attic, which formerly held a smoke chamber, into a "slaughter room". He furnished the room with a metal bed frame, a foldable table, and two nightstands, one holding a comic and the other containing air fresheners. In addition to the two heaters and cross, Meiwes decorated the room with two rubber mannequins, a hatchet, a cat o' nine tails, a self-crafted whip, and a cage made from leftover packaging, also soundproofing the walls with mattresses and particle boards. While Meiwes ultimately only sent pictures of the room to "Matteo", he ended up using the attic for future sexual encounters.
In June 2000, Meiwes met Jörg Buse, a 31-year-old hotel cook from Füssen, going by the username "Meatboy". Buse had similar fantasies about butchering and cooking another human being, becoming a frequent chat partner on a cannibal chat group on Yahoo Messenger. They agreed to meet in real life in the following autumn and after two regular meet-ups in Kassel during October, Meiwes convinced Buse to two "slaughter" sessions. The first time on 12 November, at a hotel in Kassel, Meiwes engaged in foreplay by slathering Buse with olive oil and drawing circles on Buse's naked body, telling him that he would cut meat from these sections. They also talked about the "edibility" of two acquaintances of Buse, who offered to bring them to Meiwes to be knocked unconscious, dismembered, and eaten by the pair. During the second meeting on 19 November at Meiwes' house, Buse left early after seeing the "slaughter room" in person.