The Lichtenmoor Strangler (Würger vom Lichtenmoor)

The British zone of occupation, in what is now Lower Saxony. German hunters had been disarmed in 1945. Wolves had been wiped out in Germany around 1850. Meat was rationed to 100 g per person per month, and every slaughter needed approval.

Winter 1947/48. Around the Lichtenmoor, a thinly populated moor north-east of Nienburg/Weser, many wild animals were found dead. People spoke of a large grey dog. By February 1948 there was talk of poaching dogs in the south-west of Kreis Fallingbostel. No livestock had been lost yet, and few paid attention.

Then came May. From 8 May, Hermann Gaatz later wrote, the grazing animals fell "almost every night, with hardly a break". On several cattle the right hind leg was torn open, and the animal bled to death. Some sheep had their fleeces cut off in the pasture. In the end, dozens of cattle and about 100 sheep were blamed on the unseen killer.

Villagers said they had seen "a grey, large, shaggy animal". Some thought a big dog, others a tiger. A lioness with two cubs was supposedly seen. Herders refused to go to the pastures alone, even by day, and cattle were brought in at dusk. The berry-picking woods were deserted.

The British military administration gave rifles back to German hunters. On 15 June 1948 about 1,500 beaters and 70 hunters, British military personnel among them, held what is described as the largest driven hunt in Lower Saxony's history. They found nothing. Six days later came the currency reform. The killings dropped sharply.

Hermann Gaatz, a 61-year-old farmer from Eilte, went to his stand evening after evening. On the evening of 27 August 1948, in the Schotenheide near Ahlden, he fired at a wolf that was creeping up on some roe deer. It was a large male, about six years old. It measured 1.70 m long and 85 cm at the shoulder, and weighed 95 pounds.

Then the carcass vanished. Two men posing as officials took it. It turned up in a reporter's car boot in Hanover, too decayed to be mounted. Gaatz told his story in a 1949 booklet, Der Wolfstöter von Eilte.

Today most of the killings are thought to have been black-market slaughter and poaching hidden behind the legend. Animals officially lost to the strangler escaped food controls and could be sold illegally. The wound edges were smooth and knife-like. Ulrich Magin, writing in the Zeitschrift für Anomalistik, noted that modern wolves rarely kill more than one lamb before moving on.

Yet the wolf was real. A Bremen criminal police report suggested that two German soldiers brought a young wolf back from Russia and released it near Walsrode. Magin has it crossing the Elbe at Gartow in 1946. Christiane Schilling, who curated a 2019 exhibition at the Landesmuseum Hannover, said the wolf hype was created by sensationalist media.

A memorial stone, the Wolfstein, marks the spot. Hans Stuhlmacher's 1949 book Der Würger vom Lichtenmoor is still read in Lower Saxony schools. Magin set the case beside the Bête du Gévaudan. And in October 1954, forestry workers reportedly saw a wolf in the Lichtenmoor once more.