Tour · Monaco di Baviera · Building
The Call from Hinterkaifeck - Polizeipräsidium
Behind the stone lions of Theodor Fischer's 1913 police headquarters, Munich's Kripo took a telephone call at a quarter past six on 4 April 1922 that opened Germany's most famous unsolved case: six people beaten to death with a mattock on the lonely farm of Hinterkaifeck, and a killer who stayed to feed the cattle.
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The Polizeipräsidium at Ettstraße 2 is the lion's den of Munich policing: a sprawling complex built from 1911 to 1913 by Theodor Fischer on the site of a razed Augustinian monastery, guarded by Bernhard Bleeker's stone lions and decorated at its Löwengrube stair corner with Bruno Goldschmitt's frescoes of the deadly sins. From this building the Munich criminal police ran the investigation into the Hinterkaifeck murders. At 18:15 on 4 April 1922 the Polizeidirektion was told that neighbours had found all six inhabitants of a remote farm near Schrobenhausen dead, killed with a mattock on the night of 31 March to 1 April: the farmer Andreas Gruber, his wife Cäzilia, their daughter Viktoria Gabriel, Viktoria's children Cäzilia and Josef, and the maid Maria Baumgartner, who had arrived only hours earlier. Kriminaloberinspektor Georg Reingruber and six officers drove out that night and reached the farm at dawn. The killer had lived on in the house for days, feeding the animals, while in the weeks before the family had heard footsteps in the attic and found tracks in the snow that led in but never out. Despite a 100,000 Mark reward, about a hundred suspects and seances in which mediums were shown the victims' skulls, nobody was ever charged. The skulls and most of the files burned in a 1944 air raid on Augsburg, the case was closed in 1955, and the crime scene itself was demolished in 1923. The building you are looking at is the one place where the file was never truly put away.
Fatti principali
- 6 victims — Six people, three generations of the Gruber and Gabriel family plus their new maid Maria Baumgartner, were killed with a mattock on the Hinterkaifeck farm on the night of 31 March to 1 April 1922; the Munich Polizeidirektion was notified at 18:15 on 4 April and sent Kriminaloberinspektor Georg Reingruber with six officers that same night.
- 100000 Mark reward — On 8 April 1922 the Bavarian Interior Ministry offered 100,000 Mark for the capture of the killers; about a hundred suspects were questioned over the following decades, but no one was ever charged, and the file was formally closed in 1955.
- 1913 year — The police headquarters at Ettstraße 2, nicknamed the Löwengrube or lion's den, was completed in 1913 after two years of construction to plans by Theodor Fischer, on the site of a demolished Augustinian monastery whose church was absorbed into the complex.
📍 Ettstraße 2, 80333, München