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Details :
Category: Spree Killing
Location: Cologne, Germany
Date: June 11, 1964
Crime: On the date of his 42nd birthday, took a lance and a flamethrower into a schoolyard, killing eight students and two teachers, while injuring twenty-two others.
Biography: Walter Seifert was born on June 11, 1922 and lived a fairly non-descript life before serving in World War II. Seifert's life turned upside down when his wife died in childbirth in 1961. It was that tragic event that sent his life spiraling into chaos. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and with his tuberculosis flaring up, began claiming that the German government was cheating him out of his war pension. On the day of the Cologne school massacre, his 42nd birthday, Seifert took a homemade flame thrower and a lance into the schoolyard and began shouting, 'I am Adolph Hitler the Second!' He then viciously killed eight students, began smashing windows in the school and setting classrooms on fire. He stabbed one of the teachers who confronted him with his lance. He then left the schoolyard and ingested a bottle of poisonous insecticide, hoping to kill himself before the police arrived. Instead, he survived long enough to be apprehended, but died the next day in custody at the local hospital.
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