Both men understood the horrifying fate they were pursuing.
Bern Brandes and Wojciech Stempniewicz never crossed paths, and they died more than 10 years apart. Yet their stories were connected by the same deadly fixation—one that would eventually cost them their lives.
Both men fantasised about being killed and eaten. Through disturbing online forums, each deliberately found someone willing to turn those fantasies into reality.
The events that followed became the centre of two of Germany’s most shocking criminal investigations, involving elaborate and deeply disturbing rituals.
One man requested the mutilation of his own genitals so he could supposedly share them with his future killer. The other travelled to an isolated mountain retreat, where he was hanged and dismembered.
Brandes encountered his killer, Armin Meiwes, in 2001 through The Cannibal Cafe, a now-defunct website that attracted users with a fetish involving cannibalism.
Meiwes, who worked as a computer repair technician, had placed an online advert seeking a “well-built” man prepared to be killed and eaten. Brandes, a Berlin-based telecommunications engineer, responded to the post.
On the morning of March 9, 2001, Brandes travelled to Kassel, Germany, where Meiwes met him at the railway station.
Berlin telecommunications engineer Bernd Brandes agreed to be killed after meeting his future murderer on a cannibalism fetish website
Armin Meiwes, pictured, was later convicted of Brandes’s killing
The outside of the house where Meiwes killed and consumed Brandes
Brandes had requested that he be “slaughtered” that day. The pair therefore drove to Meiwes’s home, where they arranged video equipment to record what was about to happen.
He also wanted his penis removed and asked that the two men attempt to eat it together while he was still alive.
Meiwes had prepared extensively. He bought six knives, a hatchet and a meat grinder, and downloaded a detailed guide to butchering a human body, which he then translated.
Before the ritual began, Brandes took 20 sleeping tablets and drank half a bottle of cough medicine in an effort to dull the pain.
When Meiwes was unable to bite through his penis, he used a knife to remove it instead.
The men then tried to eat the severed tissue together, but Brandes could not swallow it.
Meiwes cooked it in a pan with salt, pepper, wine and garlic, although it became so badly burned that neither man could eat it.
He later prepared a bath for Brandes, who lay bleeding in the water as he slipped repeatedly in and out of consciousness.
The bath where Brandes spent the final moments of his life
Police search Meiwes’ property in 2002
Once Brandes was dead, Meiwes tied him to a table and cut off parts of his body, keeping them in the freezer and gradually eating them over the next few months.
After putting out an advertisement for a second victim, he was finally caught by police when an Austrian student reported him in 2002.
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By the time police arrived at his home to arrest him, there was less than 40lb of Brandes remaining.
Meiwes was convicted of manslaughter in 2004, but federal judges later quashed that verdict, and he was found guilty of murder at a retrial in 2006.
At his retrial, a psychologist stated that Meiwes could re-offend and still ‘had fantasies about devouring the flesh of young people’.
The case shocked Germany and shone the spotlight on the dark underbelly of cannibalism sites.
Years later, the killing and dismembering of Stempniewicz would bring up memories of the gruesome cannibal-murder case.
Polish businessman Stempniewicz – who went under the name of LongpigHeszla on perverted websites devoted to torture and bondage – was killed and partially eaten by police forensic specialist Detlev Guenzel at his lonely home in the mountains near Dresden.
Stempniewicz, 59, nurtured lurid fantasies of being killed and eaten and trawled the internet for an entire year before he found a willing predator.
In one message to a user calling himself Butcher755 in November 2012, he asked about a contraption in his house designed to winch up his body after he had been killed.
‘Can you describe a little more about the room and your equipment? Did you check the load-bearing capacity of the rods? Will it withstand my weight?’ he asked on a cyberspace forum.
In November 2013, Stempniewicz, who ran a trucking logistics business in Hanover, met up with Guenzel on the internet – his killer, who went by the name of Caligula.
Detlev Guenzel pictured standing next to a skeleton and holding an axe wearing nothing but socks and sandals
Police are pictured at Guenzel’s property as they searched for his victim’s remains
Pictured: The property where Stempniewicz was butchered
Guenzel in court in Dresden in 2014
Guenzel collected Stempniewicz from Dresden’s bus station on November 4 that year and drove him to the B&B he ran in the Erzgebirge Mountains.
Once inside, he took him to the cellar, where he said he strangled Stempniewicz before cutting him into small pieces while listening to pop music.
A video played in court showed Guenzel in his underwear slicing the naked body of his willing victim into pieces with a knife and saw while it hung from a hook.
The fiancee of Stempniewicz, a Russian woman identified only as Svetlana, called police when he did not return home again.
Caligula was traced via the computer messages and telephone calls he had with his victim, and he was arrested at the police station where he worked as a handwriting specialist early in 2014.
When cops arrived at the property, they found Stempniewicz’s remains hidden among flowerbeds in the garden.
Stempniewicz’s penis and one testicle were never found.
Police also found a disturbing picture of Detlev, which shows him standing next to a skeleton and holding an axe, wearing nothing but socks and sandals.
Guenzel admitted slicing the corpse up but claimed Stempniewicz hanged himself. He was found guilty of murder in April 2015.