Adolf Seefeldt, Germany's Forgotten Serial Killer

Adolf Seefeldt, Germany's Forgotten Serial KillerIn the pine forests of Mecklenburg in the early 1930s, children were found lying peacefully against tree roots, their sailor suits neat, their hands folded, apparently sleeping. They were not sleeping. They were dead, killed by a grey-haired itinerant watchmaker named Adolf Seefeldt, whom the children of his clients knew affectionately as Uncle Tick Tock.Adolf Seefeldt: reconstructs the full arc of one of the most chilling and least understood cases in European criminal history. Born in Potsdam in 1870, Seefeldt was shaped by maternal abandonment, childhood sexual abuse, and a craft formation that instilled in him the patience and precision he would eventually turn toward murder. His professional identity as a traveling clockmaker gave him unparalleled access to the families of northern Germany, and to their children, across four decades of largely undetected predation. Investigators at the time believed the true victim count approached one hundred.Drawing on forensic pathology, criminological theory, and the social history of Imperial and Nazi Germany, this book examines not only how Seefeldt killed but how a society failed to see him, and how the state that finally caught him executed him not in the name of justice, but in the name of a racial ideology that would soon be responsible for atrocities beyond imagination.