Abstract
In the chapter on Germany, some background information on the German society is given, followed by a description of the legal definition of homicide in German criminal law and summary of existing research on homicide in the Federal Republic. Next, the two main sources of homicide data, the police crime statistics and the causes of death statistics, are discussed. In the main section, trends in homicide are described using time series starting in 1953 (Western Germany) resp. 1993 (including the former GDR); for some variables, data are available only for more recent years. The presentation of trends is followed by sections on the regional distribution of homicides (homicide rates for the Länder and large cities; homicide rates by class of the size of the municipality), characteristics of homicides (offender–victim relationship; use of guns; perpetration under the influence of alcohol; relation between municipality of residence of the perpetrator and location of the crime), victims (sex and age), and perpetrators (sex, age, citizenship status, dependency on hard drugs). There will be also a section in which the knowledge on patterns with respect to modus operandus is summarized; it will contain a special subsection on sexually motivated killings of children. The final section is devoted to a discussion of explanations specific to Germany (or to be more precise, the question if there is something special about German homicide trends, or if they fit well into a global trend across industrial countries – extant interpretations for such a trend are discussed as well) and policies (like recent legislation regarding domestic violence), which might have played some (indirect) role in the recent decrease of homicides.
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Notes
- 1.
Own computations based on the ‘middle scenario’ in (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2009b: 39, 40, 43, 44) and population tables provided by the Statistisches Bundesamt.
- 2.
For a comparison of legal definitions of homicide across Europe, see Smit and Bijleveld (2012).
- 3.
In addition, analogous crimes of stalking, arson and smuggling of human beings resulting in death are defined in §§238, 306c of the German Penal Code and in §97 of the law on residence in Germany (Aufenthaltsgesetz). Similar cases of killings in the course of a robbery, sexual abuse of children or rape are covered by §§176b, 178, and 251 of the Strafgesetzbuch. Unfortunately, separate data for rape resulting in death and sexual abuse resulting in death are only available since 1999 (before that year, such cases were registered together with non-lethal rapes etc.), and in the case of robbery, it is not possible to separate lethal from non-lethal cases for the whole period under study. Similar problems apply to stalking resulting in death, arson resulting in death and smuggling of human beings resulting in death. Thus, these offences will be excluded from our analyses, but this seems to be acceptable in view of the low number of cases involved.
- 4.
The resulting combined rate of completed homicides is dominated by murder and manslaughter: In 1993–1998, 71% of the cases were murder/manslaughter, 1% infanticides and 28% assaults resulting in death. In 2005–2009, the corresponding proportions were 84% (murder/manslaughter) and 16% (assault resulting in death); infanticide was no longer recorded separately.
- 5.
It is difficult and only partially possible to identify these cases; therefore, they are generally included in the figures reported in this paper, unless indicated otherwise.
- 6.
It has to be noted that in Germany one case is counted even if there is more than one victim. In the period from 2005 to 2009, there were on average 1.08 victims per completed homicide. We start with the year 1963, because it is the first one in which assaults resulting in death occurring as part of a traffic offence were not recorded in the Police Crime Statistics, as it was done until 1962. Thus, pre-1963 figures are not comparable with those from 1963 onwards.
- 7.
In contrast to the cases at the Berlin Wall, which were excluded in the computation of the homicide rates for West Germany and the whole of Germany.
- 8.
For sexual murder (a subcategory of murder), the picture is very similar: A continuous decline of the incidence, especially in the West (from 0.048 per 100,000 population in 1987–1992 to 0.015 in 2005–2009), where it was until recently also higher than in the East (0.016 in 1993–1998, 0.015 since then).
- 9.
Because of limitations of space, we do not tabulate the data here. The numbers of cases in the Police Crime Statistics for Berlin are generally to some extent inflated by a change in recording procedures for 2009; it is unknown to what degree homicide figures are affected by this. Any possible influence is mitigated by the computation of the multi-year-averages reported here.
- 10.
One federal state reported in 2009 generally too many cases for municipalities of less than 20,000 inhabitants and too few cases for cities between 20,000 and less than 100,000 inhabitants. It is not clear to what degree homicide data are subject to this problem. In any case, it should have affected the average figures for 2005–2009 only marginally.
- 11.
In Table 3.1, we present separate figures for murder/manslaughter and assault resulting in death, because there are differences in the distributions of attributes between these types of homicide. Because of its minor quantitative importance, infanticide is not included here.
- 12.
It has to be mentioned that in 2000, Brandenburg did not collect data on intoxicated suspects. This does affect data for the whole country only marginally, and the influence on the multi-year-average for the period 1999–2004 is negligible.
- 13.
In 2000, Brandenburg did also not report data on users of hard drugs.
- 14.
The fact that a person had been suspected of a crime before does not necessarily imply that there is a prior conviction. The proportion of offenders with prior appearance as a suspect is an underestimate, because checks for a prior appearance are only conducted for a limited period and with respect to the federal state in which the homicide occurred (Bundeskriminalamt, 2009: 69).
- 15.
If we talk of ‘offenders’ or ‘perpetrators’ here, we always refer to suspects, strictly speaking, because the person identified as suspect by the police is not necessarily (although most probably) the actual offender. This question can only be resolved at later stages of the prosecution process, to which the Police Crime Statistics do not refer. The data on suspects allow no differentiation between perpetrators of attempted and completed crimes. Furthermore, offending rates are computed using only data on suspects who are German citizens (relating them to the number of inhabitants who are German citizens), because a part of the non-German suspects has its permanent residence outside Germany (e.g. tourists) and, therefore, does not show up in German population statistics. Another reason is that the statistics on non-German residents are known to be chronically unreliable. Thus, there is no appropriate denominator available for the computation of offending rates including non-German suspects.
- 16.
Because of technical problems, Thüringen underreported data on gun use in 2009. The reported average proportion for the years 2005–2009 should not be significantly affected by this.
- 17.
Not all federal states reported data for 2008; therefore, this year was excluded from the computation. Note that the proportions sum up to more than 100, because during any given year, some suspects commit several crimes at different places (their municipality, in another federal state etc.) and are counted, therefore, under several categories, but only once for the total number of suspects (which is the denominator for the computation), due to the counting rules (‘echte Tatverdächtigenzählung’ – ‘counting of real suspects’).
- 18.
‘Fellow countryman’ is recorded only if ‘spouse/other family member’ or ‘acquaintance’ does not also apply.
- 19.
These figures do not include cases of rape resulting in death and sexual child abuse resulting in death, the latter being particularly rare. Were these cases included, the number of cases of sexually associated murders listed in the German Criminal Police Statistics in the time span 1999–2008 would amount to n = 444. Such offences are in rapid decline and, in over 70% of the cases, were committed by relatives or acquaintances. Such cases are in practice hardly discernable from sexual murders and should, therefore, in principle be considered in this context. This was indeed done in the so-called Geography Study (Dern, Frönd, Straub, Vick, & Witt, 2004) and the study of previous criminal records of sex-offenders (Straub & Witt, 2002) carried out by the Bundeskriminalamt.
- 20.
The following locations were selected as anchor points for the purposes of this study: The offender’s place of residence, the offender’s prior places of residence, the offender’s place of work, and the place of residence of the offender’s primary family (parents, siblings or children). Thus, the anchor point concept was being used in a strict manner, which should prevent the over-estimating of regional effects. In the vast majority of cases, the offender’s anchor point was his place of residence.
- 21.
A case was classified ‘regional’, when the distance between the initial contact site and the anchor point of the offender did not exceed 20 km.
- 22.
See also Eisner (2008).
- 23.
Besides that, the estimation of the effect of law enforcement variables like the conviction rate on crime rates is fraught with methodological difficulties (e.g. Panel on Research on Deterrent and Incapacitative Effects, 1978).
- 24.
In 2009, per-capita-GDP ranged from 21,264 EUR (Brandenburg) to 22,228 EUR (Saxony) in the former GDR, while it amounted to between 25,511 (Rhineland-Palatinate) to 35,731 (Hesse) among the western Flächenstaaten (among the city states, Hamburg is the wealthiest with 48,229 Euro) (Statistisches Landesamt Baden-Württemberg, 2010).
- 25.
The exact title of the law is ‘Law on the improvement of the civil law protection against violence and stalking, as well as on the facilitation of the cession of the conjugal home in the case of separation of 11 December 2001’ (Gesetz zur Verbesserung des zivilrechtlichen Schutzes gegen Gewalt und Nachstellungen sowie zur Erleichterung der Abtretung der Ehewohnung bei Trennung vom 11. Dezember 2001).
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Birkel, C., Dern, H. (2012). Homicide in Germany. In: Liem, M., Pridemore, W. (eds) Handbook of European Homicide Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0466-8_20
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