u/celestino120

Spent a few days in the capital and was completely surprised how many cool cars there were.

I went down a rabbit hole on Fritz Haarmann this week. If you have ever heard of his story you know it is quite a disturbing one. But what made this interesting in my eyes is how he wasn't stopped earlier.

Because police searched the his flat in 1918 over a missing boy. The boy's head was in the room with them the whole time, in a suitcase. They found nothing, and left.

The boy was 17-year-old Friedel Rothe, whose family had gone to the police and named the exact man their son had been spending time with. A man who told people he had police authority. Couple years later, while in interrogation, Haarmann said Friedel's head had been put away in that flat while the officers walked through the rooms.

It's weird to think that this led nowhere but there was a reason why it was able to happen. Haarmann worked for the Hannover police as an informant. He fed them information from the city's underworld, and in exchange they trusted him. He approached boys at the central railway station, telling them he was a detective. To a tired teenager who'd just arrived in Hannover, a man with police authority offering food and a bed didn't read as danger. He killed at least 24 over six years and put the remains in the River Leine.

The police never caught him. It ended in 1924 because children playing on the riverbank found a skull, then more, until the count ran into hundreds of bone fragments.

The easy version of this would be "incompetent cops missed a killer." But they didn't really miss him. They knew his record, knew his history with boys, even had stood inside his flat over a missing child. They'd given him a job. When the journalist Theodor Lessing wrote about the informant relationship during the trial, the court expelled him. Haarmann got to run his own defence and interrupt proceedings as he pleased.

The parents wanted one word on their sons' memorial: 'murdered'. But the city refused. The grave that finally went up in 1928 says only that these were sons who "died," between 1918 and 1924.

This shows that a killer is sometimes safer inside a system than outside it. As long as Haarmann was useful, every suspicion against him had a reason to be quietly set aside.

Does anyone know other cases where an informant relationship shielded someone for years? That's the pattern that gets to me.