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History’s Top Executioners of All Time

Khalid Elhassan June 5, 2020 34 min

9. You Did Not Want to Accept a Dinner Invitation From This Man

Karl Denke was born in 1860 into a wealthy farming family near Munsterberg, Silesia, Kingdom of Prussia – today’s Ziebice, Poland. Little is known of his early life, other than that he ran away from home at age twelve, and apprenticed himself to a gardener. As he grew up, he pursued a variety of professions, including farming after his father’s death, when he used his share of the inheritance to buy a plot of land.

Denke was not a good farmer, however, and it did not take long before working the fields reminded him why had why he had run away from home as a child. So he sold his land, and bounced around a variety of occupations for a few years. He eventually bought a small house in Munsterberg, and became an organ player in his local church. Few would have predicted he would go down in history as one of Germany’s scariest serial killers and cannibals.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.