Hinterkaifeck Farm Victims

Case background and investigation

Hinterkaifeck was a solitary farmstead between the hamlets of Gröbern and Laag, near Waidhofen in Upper Bavaria, roughly 70 kilometres north of Munich. In March 1922 it was home to the retired farmer Andreas Gruber and his wife Cäzilia, their widowed daughter Viktoria Gabriel, 35, who owned the farm, and her children Cäzilia, 7, and Josef, 2. Viktoria's husband had been killed in France in 1914 while serving as a soldier. A new maid, Maria Baumgartner, arrived on the afternoon of Friday, March 31, 1922.

According to Wikipedia's account of the investigation files, Andreas Gruber had told neighbours in the preceding weeks about unexplained events: a newspaper nobody nearby subscribed to, tracks in the snow leading to the farm, a missing house key, a forced padlock and footsteps in the attic. He did not ask neighbours or police for help.

All six residents were killed that night or in the early hours of April 1. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung summarises it, the couple, their daughter and granddaughter died in the barn area, and the maid and the two-year-old boy were killed inside the house. The weapon was a mattock belonging to the farm. It is not known why the first four victims went to the barn. The post-mortem examination found that the seven-year-old had survived for some time after the attack.

Over the following days a coffee salesman, the postman and a mechanic each called at the farm and found nobody. On April 4, 1922, neighbour Lorenz Schlittenbauer entered the buildings with Michael Pöll and Jakob Sigl and found the bodies, most of them covered. Investigators noted that the cattle had been fed and milked, and that bread and meat had been consumed, indicating that someone had stayed at or returned to the farm after the killings.

The court physician Johann Baptist Aumüller carried out the autopsies at the farm. The victims' skulls were removed for examination and were later destroyed in Augsburg during a Second World War air raid. The victims were buried at Waidhofen cemetery on April 8, 1922, where a memorial stone stands. The farm was demolished in 1923.

Police looked at about a hundred suspects, and several people were arrested over the years, but nothing was proven against anyone. Schlittenbauer, who had had a relationship with Viktoria Gabriel, was widely suspected locally; the Süddeutsche Zeitung reports that police could never prove anything against him and that he denied involvement until his death in 1941. The files were closed in 1955, although final interviews took place as late as 1986. In 2007 a group of students at the police college in Fürstenfeldbruck re-examined the files. The Augsburger Allgemeine quoted the project leader as saying that guilt could no longer be proven because no crime-scene evidence survives. The students did not publish the name of the person they considered most likely responsible.