The brutal murder

Since December 11, 1946, 40-year-old Käthe Stiehler and her 7-year-old son Heinz had been missing in the Elbe metropolis of Dresden. They were last seen leaving their apartment at Großenhainer Straße 106 at around 4 p.m. After that, there was no trace of them. What had happened and where were the two? The People’s Police soon began investigating these questions. Käthe Stiehler was a war widow who worked as a winder at the Dresden light bulb factory. She was considered extremely reliable and popular. She had a particularly close friendship with 34-year-old Frieda Lehmann, who had no children and whose husband had been missing since 1944. No one suspected that Frieda Lehmann had murdered her friend and her son in cold blood and in a brutal manner. Although the Dresden daily newspaper published a missing person report for Käthe Stiehler and her son on December 28, 1946, it did not lead to any results. In the meantime, on December 17, 1946, a wood collector found two of a woman’s lower legs wrapped in newspaper in the rubble of the old drill hall on Alaunplatz in Dresden-Neustadt. After that, more decayed body parts wrapped in newspaper in a sack were found. But who was the murder victim? The only clue was the newspaper, which had green ink stains on it. This green ink led to the Dresden light bulb factory, where Käthe Stiehler, who had been missing since December 11, 1946, had been employed since that date. This was the first hot lead, and police investigations confirmed that the body parts belonged to Käthe Stiehler. Her friend Frieda Lehmann quickly came under the investigators’ scrutiny when green ink was found in her apartment at Talstraße 9. In addition, further body parts were discovered near her apartment. Frieda Lehmann, who vehemently denied murdering her friend for a long time, finally confessed due to the increasingly overwhelming evidence. She had lured her friend to her apartment on December 11, 1946, under the pretext of wanting to give Heinz a Christmas present. There, Frieda Lehmann offered her a seat in the kitchen while Heinz played in the living room. Frieda Lehmann, who had worked as a maid for master butcher Hirschfeld in Leubnik-Neuostra for five years and had learned a little about the butcher’s trade from the journeymen, first murdered Käthe Stiehler and then her son Heinz with a knife she had stolen from master butcher Hirschfeld. She did this in an extremely brutal manner. She grabbed Käthe Stiehler’s head from behind as she sat on the kitchen chair, bent it back, and cut from her throat to her cervical vertebrae with her knife. Käthe Stiehler jumped up, but then collapsed. Frieda Lehmann then called Heinz and cut his throat with the knife as well. She dismembered the bodies, wrapped them in newspaper, and took them out of the apartment. The most macabre thing about this was that she gave large pieces of meat from the corpses to acquaintances as supposed horse meat, which, due to the winter of hunger, ended up in their cooking pots. But why did her friend Käthe Stiehler and her son Heinz have to die? What was the motive? It was quite banal: Frieda Lehmann killed out of greed. After more than five years of war, Käthe Stiehler’s fine bed linen, clothing, and silverware were real treasures for Frieda Lehmann, which she could exchange on the black market or in the countryside for food, which was in short supply. That is why Frieda Lehmann went to Käthe Stiehler’s apartment after the murder and stole the valuable items without being noticed by the neighbors. She deposited the stolen goods with acquaintances. Whether she had committed the crime alone remained unclear until the end. Frieda Lehmann, who was sentenced to death by guillotine for double murder, remained silent about this.