On November 7, 1854, Pauline returned to her sister’s Berlin lodgings to find neither her brother-in-law nor the children. One child had just been put to bed; a laundry basket had vanished. At first, their absence might have passed for an ordinary errand, until the family, seized by unease, began to search. According to the judicial chronicle later published in the Pitaval, Karl Wilhelm Albert Biermann presented himself at his parents’ home without the little ones; to his mother, who demanded where they were, he answered that he had killed them. To his wife, who put to him the very same question, he promised that he would go fetch them. Thereupon, he walked of his own accord to the police station.
This chronicle opens upon a numerical enigma. It first evokes four young children, only to designate the child laid to bed as the fifth. Yet the remainder of the chapter and the judicial proceedings concern four children led away and drowned; a contemporary dispatch from 1855 likewise numbers them at four. In the absence of original court minutes or a direct collation with the printed facsimile at this specific word, this discordance in the OCR transcription must remain visible, without assuming that the original type necessarily bore this reading. While this detail does not alter the essential question put to the jurors, it forbids the reduction of a textual hesitation into an unwarranted certainty.
At the guardhouse, Biermann recounted that he had led the four children beyond the Silesian Gate, toward the canal known as the Flutgraben. There, he said, he placed them within a basket—the two eldest beneath, the two youngest above—before binding it with a cord and casting it into the waters. He stated that after the basket fell, he heard but a single cry. The chronicle treats this initial declaration as his most complete confession; yet before the examining magistrate, and later at the bar, Biermann neither frankly reaffirmed it nor wholly cast it aside. He claimed he no longer knew what had transpired.
The prosecution’s narrative, however, rested upon tangible corroboration. Two bodies were recovered almost immediately, a third the following day, and the last shortly thereafter. The medical examiners, the Pitaval records, found no marks upon the corpses capable of establishing any other cause of death; their post-mortem findings were consistent with the submersion described by Biermann. A tablecloth, which the accused claimed to have taken to cover the children, was discovered on November 8 near the indicated spot. It belonged to the household. The cord and the basket were formally identified; Biermann had also pointed out to the investigators the lock footbridge from which, by his own admission, he had hurled the children.
Other actions were interpreted as the deliberate preparations of a design. On the afternoon of November 7, Biermann had borrowed a small handcart; he maintained he had intended to haul fuel, and no witness saw the children depart within it. Ultimately, he led them away on foot. The youngest, already asleep, was reportedly lifted from bed; a basket was slung over his back, while the other two children were led by the hand. A week prior, according to his own admissions, he had already taken three of the elder children as far as the Silesian Gate. He explained that he had wished to treat them to an omnibus ride on their return; the chronicle notes the coldness of that evening, yet refrains from presenting that earlier excursion as independent proof of premeditation.
The domestic situation furnished the prosecution with its principal theory of motive. The wife earned an income by sewing and ironing; the husband had long been employed in the laundry of his mother, who was herself in the service of a prince. Following their marriage in 1848, he continued to work alongside his parents. The grandmother sent daily meals for the children, even when the financial reckonings between herself and her daughter-in-law had been settled. In time, this material dependence degenerated into a bitter struggle for authority. According to depositions recorded in the Pitaval, Biermann oversaw the laundry accounts, withheld receipts, and occasionally refused to surrender money to his mother, all the while lamenting that she treated him with cruelty.
The feud escalated amid accusations of diverted linen and falsified ledgers connected to the laundry business. Several witnesses asserted that parcels of linen had been secreted in the attic, and that Biermann had admitted during the preliminary inquiry to having altered the account books. At the trial, he sought to diminish the gravity of these admissions. His parents ultimately barred him from their threshold and obtained a police injunction forbidding his return. He had quit the house in September, following a violent confrontation, and was not to reappear there until the very night his children vanished.
This expulsion, and the rancor it was said to have nurtured, became the cornerstone of the prosecution’s theory. Biermann’s own father reportedly declared that his son sought to punish the grandparents by robbing them of the grandchildren they held dear. The prosecutor and one of the examining physicians elaborated upon this interpretation: a once-pampered son, turned domestic tyrant, had resolved to avenge himself while posing as a martyr of poverty or rejection. Other testimonies appeared to bolster this view: Biermann had once remarked that if his mother made his life unbearable, he would kill his children; he had also threatened to abandon his wife and flee with them to America. Yet such utterances were recalled only after the tragedy, and could not, in themselves, unveil the exact state of his mind on the night of the drownings.
Poverty, at any rate, was no simple defense to maintain. The prosecution demonstrated that Biermann still possessed more than one hundred thalers, that his wife earned sufficient wages to sustain the household, and that the children were well nourished. Before the police, however, he had alleged an inability to feed them. Before the judges, he contested the import of his confessions, claiming he had intended merely to seek assistance, not to drown them. He remembered setting out with them, pausing at the water’s edge, and placing them in the basket; he maintained he could no longer recall how he had come to return alone.
It fell to the jury to decide both his guilt and his capacity to answer for his deeds. The trial took place before the Berlin Assize Court on July 2 and 3, 1855. Biermann admitted having led the children away, but denied any intention of taking their lives. The chronicle notes that he answered questions with composure, at times with clarity, before retreating behind professed lapses of memory. When asked whether he was guilty, he insisted he did not feel guilty; he admitted remembering that he had let the children fall into the water, yet could not explain how he had arrived at such an extremity.
The defense seized upon this incoherence as possible evidence of mental incapacity. Counsel portrayed an enervated, volatile man, given to extravagant schemes and steeped in idleness. He recalled the family strife and the stifling dependence upon the parents. The Pitaval, which remains a retrospective chronicle rather than a verbatim transcript, attributes to the advocate the argument that a clouded intellect might act without grasping the full measure of its deed. He implored the jurors not to confound the horror of the outcome with proof of a criminal resolve.
Two medical men divided over the weight to be accorded these signs. The district physician, Dr. Bressler, deemed Biermann entirely sane. His answers following his arrest, his deportment during the investigation, and the premeditation implied by conveying the children seemed to demonstrate that he knew precisely what he was doing. In his view, malice toward the parents offered a far more plausible explanation than madness. Dr. Casper, an eminent medical counselor, urged that the accused’s incoherent schemes and the doubts stirring public opinion be scrupulously weighed. Yet after balancing these reservations, he arrived at the same conclusion as Bressler: Biermann was of sound mind and criminally responsible. The two practitioners diverged in their reasoning and in the weight they granted to uncertainty, but the report shows them converging upon the selfsame conclusion regarding his accountability.
The prosecutor contended that the material clues, the initial confessions, and the medical examinations established a premeditated murder committed with full consciousness of the act. The defense moved for a verdict of irresponsibility. The jury pronounced Biermann guilty of the four murders and affirmed, by a substantial majority, that he was sane. An ambiguity in their initial response compelled the presiding judge to send them back for further deliberation: they were required to state explicitly that the accused possessed the capacity to answer for his acts at the moment of the crime. They returned with that clarification. The court sentenced him to death and decreed the forfeiture of his civic rights.
The chapter adds that the appeal in cassation lodged by his counsel was dismissed and that Biermann was executed. It omits the precise day of the execution. A modern study on Berlin’s Zellengefängnis dates it to May 22, 1856; a brief contemporary dispatch records the capital sentence and editorially attributes the deed to a desire to vex his parents, though such an assertion constitutes no independent proof of motive. This distinction is paramount: guilt and punishment are judicial determinations recorded by the chronicle, the intent to wreak vengeance upon the parents is a thesis advanced by the prosecution, and the execution on that date is documented by external records.
The Pitaval subsequently converts the affair into a moral portrait of the “wayward son,” indulging in contemptuous generalities regarding men without a trade. Nothing compels the historian to adopt this social moralizing when reviewing the judicial exhibits. The children were drowned; Biermann was condemned; the jury resolved the question of his responsibility after hearing the medical debate. The ultimate why remains far more elusive than the verdict. In that courtroom, the basket, the linen, and the confessions marshaled the facts; the motives, however, remained matters of interpretation. The chapter bequeaths to us not the secret truths of an inner conscience, but the competing narratives brought before the jury, and the sentence that brought their conflict to an end.