Jürgen Bartsch

The 2002 film Ein Leben lang kurze Hosen tragen (released in the U.S. in 2004, as The Child I Never Was) depicts Bartsch's life and crimes.

The forensic psychiatrists considered various therapy concepts: psychotherapy, castration and even psychosurgery. Bartsch initially refused any surgery but finally agreed to voluntary castration on April 28, 1976 in order to avoid lifetime incarceration in a mental hospital. This was about ten years after incarceration, two years after his marriage, and after his depressive condition did not improve. The doctors of Eickelborn State Hospital chose a castration methodology that accidentally resulted in Bartsch's death. An official autopsy and investigation determined that Bartsch had been intoxicated with a halothane overdose (factor 10) due to a mistake during surgery.

Upon arrest, Bartsch openly confessed to his crimes. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on December 15, 1967, by the Wuppertal regional court (Landgericht Wuppertal). Initially, the sentence was upheld on appeal. However, in 1971, the Federal Court of Justice of Germany, returned the case to the Landgericht Düsseldorf, which reduced the sentence to 10 years of juvenile detention and had Bartsch placed under psychiatric care in Eickelborn. There, he married Gisela Deike of Hanover on January 2, 1974.

Bartsch began killing at the age of fifteen. His first victim was Klaus Jung who was murdered in 1962. His next victim was Peter Fuchs who was killed three years later in 1965. He persuaded all of his victims to accompany him into an abandoned air-raid shelter, where he forced them to undress and then sexually abused them. He dismembered his first four victims. His intended fifth victim, 15-year-old Peter Frese, however, escaped by burning through his bindings with a candle that Bartsch had left burning after leaving the shelter that he has been keeping his victims in. Bartsch was arrested in 1966.

Jürgen Bartsch (born Karl-Heinz Sadrozinski; November 6, 1946 – April 28, 1976) was a West German serial killer who murdered four boys aged between 8 and 13 and attempted to kill a fifteen year old boy. The case of this sexual offender was the first in German jurisdiction history to include psycho-social factors of the defendant, who came from a violent early surrounding, to set down the degree of penalty.