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1929: Willi Kraus tackles the case of the Kinderfresser, the vicious Child-Eater of Berlin.
1929: Willi Kraus tackles the case of the Kinderfresser, the vicious Child-Eater of Berlin.
Turning the clock back two years from The Sleepwalkers, the story starts out in the fall of 1929, the last days of prosperity. Berlin is deep in the throes of a giddy rush to forget its troubled past. But the same day the stock market crashes in New York, the dark underside of the German capital flushes to the surface in the form of a burlap sack spewed by floodwaters from the city sewer system. When Willi is called to investigate and discovers the sack is full of children’s bones with teeth marks on them – and a bible with a single phrase circled in red: children of wrath – he fears he’s run into “something darker than he’s ever known.”
Young male children are disappearing at an alarming rate in the city of Berlin. This is not war, but something far worse and much darker. A sack containing bones has been found…some bearing teeth marks…
What’s happening above ground is bad enough but below in the underbelly and sewers of the city, the blood of the slaughter houses is running freely.
This is a Berlin in the deepest darkest recesses of the human mind. The rise of the Nazi party, the decadence of 1930s Berlin, Jews being persecuted and the strange cults and societies which were creeping up across the city.
They were tearing up the Alex – big time. After two centuries of hodgepodge growth, order was being imposed on the jumble of streets that comprised the old commercial hub just east of the city centre Alexander Platz with all its hotels and grand department stores, famous restaurants and nightmarish traffic was going to become an architecturally coherent Square.
It’s menancing facade and sullen cupolas loomed over the whole southeast site of the Alex like a dead whale.” This is the HQ of the police where Willi Kraus works.
Destination: Berlin Author/Guide: Paul Grossman Departure Time: 1929
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