The Confessions of Felix Trallsenberger

The Confessions of Felix Trallsenberger

Translated and with an introduction by Thomas Fogel

Felix Trallsenberger 1937

What became of The Confessions of Felix Trallsenberger?


Felix Trallsenberger - also known as Felix Trauffenbern - was said by psychologist Edmund Heller to be ‘the most viciously corrupt character in the history of senseless crime’. His confessions were written while he awaited execution for the murders of the Staffen family of Munich in 1937. He had killed, dismembered and consumed parts of three generations of the family, including an 87-year-old grandmother and a baby of five months. During the trial his laughter so infuriated the court that he was forced to wear a gag.


Before his execution, Trallsenberger said he bore no animosity towards his victims, nor jealousy, but only pity. He was at pains to point out that his actions were not for profit. His crimes, he claimed, were pure, that is, unmotivated by any personal prejudice and untainted by any selfish considerations. He was reported to have awaited his execution patiently, quietly composing his confessions which he thought might be of interest to psychiatrists, psychologists, theologians and philosophers.


The first plan to publish Trallsenberger’s Confessions was in late 1938 but that was not the time to be publishing the memoirs of a German degenerate. Trallsenberger’s trail had already been conducted behind closed doors and kept out of the German press because the Nazis did not want details of his barbarous killing spree to become known to the world. Nazi Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, took a pre-publication copy of the book to the Führer, and had no trouble persuading his to suppress publication and have all existing copies destroyed. Trallsenberger’s confessions did not sit well with the Nazi party’s presentation of the racially superior, noble, Germanic-Aryan national identity. Not only was Trallsenberger of pure Aryan stock, but he bore more than a passing resemblance to Himmler’s right-hand man in the SS, Reinhard Heydrich. In fact, Trallsenberger was more of an Aryan than Heydrich, who, despite being the main architect of the Holocaust and called by Hitler ‘the man with the iron heart’, was of Jewish ancestry, a fact which Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence, was said to have known and supressed. But there is a dissenting view of the nature of this suppression.  

Reinhard Heydrich 1941

In 1977, Erich Friberg went so far as to make the incredible claim in the Tubingen daily newspaper, Schwabisches Tagblatt, that Reinhard Heydrich was replaced by Felix Trallsenberger in the SS in 1938 by direct order from Himmler. The replacement was said to have gone virtually unnoticed due to the uncanny resemblance between Heydrich and Trallsenberger. Himmler's growing dissatisfaction with Heydrich, states Friberg, had been evident since 1932 when rumours of Heydrich's Jewish ancestry became widespread and made the SS's claim of being an organisation of Aryan purity look laughable. According to Friberg, Trallsenberger's execution was faked, Heydrich disposed of, and Trallsenberger then took over as Himmler's right-hand man in the SS. Friberg believes it was not Heydrich's Jewish ancestry which Wihelm Canaris surpressed but knowledge of Heydrich's replacement. And it was this knowledge which saved Canaris from an early execution despite evidence linking him with underground opposition to the Nazi leadership. Canaris had made it clear, according to Friberg, that if he were to be killed details of Heydrich's replacement would be made public. By 1944, when Heydrich had already been dead for two years, there was no longer any need to fear revelations by Canaris and he was executed at Flossenburg concentration camp. David Irving, who in 1977 had just published the first part of his two-part biography of Hitler, Hitler's War, dismissed Friberg's claims as being 'utterly preposterous' and said that the claims might perhaps have been motivated by the fact that a Jewish writer, as Friberg was, found it completely unacceptable that a man of Jewish ancestry, however distant, had played a part in the extermination of the Jews. How much truth there was to Frieberg's claim will never be known as he was killed in a car crash on the Munich autobahn shortly after his article was published and the evidence he claimed to have gathered was never found.

For ten years, Trallsenbergr's confessions, which had been passed between psychiatric professionals, were considered unbelievable and nothing more than the outrageous ravings of a psychotic megalomaniac and, as such, they lay unpublished and forgotten. It was only with the proposed printing of them by a small independent press in Hamburg in 1948 that they gained a brief notoriety, providing as they did, the police of several German provinces with the solution to many unsolved murders of the 1920s and 30s which had taken place in their districts, not to mention leading the police to the location of the sites of 35 bodies of persons previously listed as missing. Many more bodies are believed to lie undiscovered.


When the publication of Trallsenberger’s confessions was again planned in '48, it was decided by the post-war government that the more recent and greater crimes of the Nazi regime were already too much for the German public to digest without adding Trallsenberger’s psychotic misadventures to the tally. Professor Edmund Heller, who read the confessions before their suppression and who was very familiar with Trallsenberger’s homicidal career, said the details of his crimes make those of a Carl Panzram appear almost merciful. The confessions, Heller reported in his 1979 memoir, Fünfzig Jahre unter kriminellen Köpfen: Erinnerungen eines Polizeipsychologen (Hamburg University Press), revelled in the wanton and grotesque suffering he inflicted on his victims.

As Heller points out in his memoir, to psychiatrists and criminal psychologists of the 1920s and 1930s, the most puzzling and frustrating aspects of Trallsenberger’s crimes was that he betrayed none of the usual indications of a psychotic. He had been the child of a loving Munich family; a post mortem examination after his execution revealed no brain malformations nor degeneration; and in all blind psychological tests, that is, tests which did not reveal the crimes of the person to be tested, he was pronounced sane and stable. He was said to be charming and intelligent and capable of acts of kindness and courtesy out-with his criminal career. The only indication of the perverse criminality of his nature was said to be in his crimes themselves. Professor Heller, speaking in 1981, said: ‘To the present day, judged by all psychological tests and modern profiling methods, no agency, however sophisticated might have predicted his criminality, or considered him a suspect in any crime, without his own corroborative evidence.’


All that is left of Trallsenberger’s confessions is the following tantalising, and infuriatingly, brief exert which Professor Heller found among his own personal papers.

***

The Confessions of Felix Trallsenberger. 1928

Fragment translated by Thomas Fogel

I killed not for the love of killing, nor for any animosity towards my victims, nor out of jealousy that they enjoyed more of the finer things of life than I, nor out of disgust that they led lives of a type which I abhorred. No. I did not even delight in the cruelty I inflicted, nor did I take perverse pleasure in their pleas for mercy, cries of pain, or protestations of innocence. I killed, maimed, mutilated and tortured in an attempt to understand. When I laughed during my trial, I laughed not out of contempt but out of the misunderstanding of the court who could not, would not, understand my reasons. You might say I was indulging in a scientific experiment, although I experienced no scientific objectivity – if such a thing is possible. I often cried with the victims, physically and mentally winced as I empathised with their pains and fears. What I was attempting to understand was what God or gods must experience in their random destruction, when, assuming their power, they might easily have acted otherwise.

My victims were picked at random. I took some pages from a local directory of persons collected by the police in each town and village. I tore out pages at random, again tore those pages at random and tossed them into the air. Whichever names first came to my hands would decide their fate. I would take down the name and address of the individual, watch their movements and locate their close family or friends. And then my work would begin. In many cases I found they were a very likable group or individual which made my work all the more painful, in fact, a burden, to me. But a vocation is a vocation…

And there, the fragment ends.


Numerous attempts have been made by myself and others to secure a complete copy of Trallsenberger’s confessions but not one copy, or larger fragment of a copy, has been discovered. It is almost as if Germany has erased the memory of Trallsenberg and his crimes, mention of which only crops up, briefly, in other volumes such as Prof. Heller’s memoirs. Attempts to discover more details of Trallsenberger in newspapers of the era have revealed disappointingly little due to his trial being conducted behind closed doors. Potential family members who have been approached over the years have been, understandably, reluctant to provide any information regarding him or disclaimed all knowledge of him entirely. Police records reveal very little except the details of the Staffen family murders, for which Trallsenberger was charged, convicted and, supposedly, executed.

Curiously enough, a record of Trallsenberger’s last words on the gallows have been recorded. They were; ‘Hat jemand einen Zahnstocher, den ich benutzen könnte?’ ‘Does anyone have a toothpick I might use?’


If anyone has any further information regarding Trallsenberger or, ideally, more fragments of his confessions, please get in touch.