Meet Armin Meiwes, the world known cannibal who devoured his gay lover.
He is also known as the Rotenburg Cannibal or The Master Butcher and he worked as a computer technician until he met Bernd Jurgen Amando Brandes, a reputed engineer from Berlin, on the internet. What followed next cannot be described in simple words. The details are gruesome and there’s one thing that stands out: the victim was an accomplice. As weird as this may sound, Bernd had met Armin knowing what was going to happen. His intention was to be eaten by Armin.
Everything happened on 9th of March 2001, when the two met at Armin Meiwes’s home in Rotenburg, a small town in Germany and they had videotaped everything that happened next. First thing they did was to cut Brandes’s penis and try and eat it raw. Since it proved to be too hard to chew, they decided to cook it in Brandes’s own fat, but they exaggerated and the meal was eventually too burnt to be consumed. Since the victim was bleeding too much, Meiwes gave him alcohol and pain killers in order to ease the pain. Eventually, with Brandes’s permission, he killed him by repeating stabs in the neck, hung it in a meat hook in a room especially designed for this purpose and consumed around 44 lbs of his flesh over the course of 10 months.
Meiwes was eventually caught in December 2002, after he posted new advertisements online, seeking for a new victim and offering details about Brandes’s killing. Two years later, in 2004, he was convicted to 8 years for manslaughter. Another trial took place in 2006 and found Meiwes to be mentally unstable, after he stated that he “had fantasies about devouring the flesh of young people”. This time he had received a life sentence.
Since then, Meiwes’s story served as an inspiration for a lot of people. Marilyn Manson named his album Eat me, Drink me as a tribute to Meiwes, Rammstein released Mein Teil, a song based on the story and he was even mentioned in one of Hannibal episodes.
15 years later and his words are still as haunting as they have ever been: “I’d spent over 40 years longing for it, dreaming about it,” he said, referring to eating a human being. “And now I was getting the feeling that I was actually achieving this perfect inner connection through his flesh. The flesh tastes like pork, but stronger.”
But it’s ok, after 15 years in prison, Meiwes stated that he had become vegetarian. He also claimed that he believes that there are more than 800 cannibals in Germany alone.
