Fritz Honka—Gertraud Bräuer

Fritz Honka—Gertraud Bräuer concerns the killing of Gertraud Bräuer by Fritz Honka, an act that the court later placed within a series of four killings committed in his apartment. The judgment dates her death to late 1970 and identifies strangulation as the method, making her case the earliest of the four killings listed in the cited ruling.

The Killing and Its Setting

At the time of the killings, Honka was a 40-year-old security guard. The court found that he had killed four women in his third-floor apartment at Zeißstraße 74 in Hamburg 50. It identified Bräuer as a hairdresser and stated that Honka had strangled her in late 1970. The judgment described the sexual motive for the killings as probable, not certain; the available account does not provide further circumstances of Bräuer’s death or describe her relationship with Honka before it.

Court Finding and Sentence

The court’s ruling of December 20, 1976, included Bräuer’s killing among the four deaths for which Honka was convicted. It sentenced him to a total of 15 years’ imprisonment for murder in one case and manslaughter in three, each committed with diminished criminal responsibility, and ordered his placement in a psychiatric hospital. The cited ruling does not identify which of the four killings received the murder classification, so Bräuer’s case cannot be assigned a specific classification from this evidence alone.

Place in the Case

Bräuer’s killing stands at the beginning of the chronology set out in the judgment: it occurred in late 1970, years before the three other deaths listed, which took place between October 1974 and January 1975. The court’s account groups the four women under the shared fact of their deaths in Honka’s apartment while preserving the distinct dates and methods of each killing. In this relation, the documented connection is stark and limited: Honka was Bräuer’s killer, and her death became one part of the wider case that ended in his conviction and psychiatric confinement.