German Tourist Returns Stolen Cathedral Skull After 60 Years of Guilt

A man in Germany lived with a disturbing secret from his youth for six decades before finally making things right.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:11):
I'm Darren Marler and this is weird dark news. Bronze
as a hetner, sat at his desk in Saint Stephen's
Cathedral in Vienna when a package arrived. As the cathedral's archivist,
he dealt with all sorts of deliveries, but opening this
one gave him a shock he wasn't prepared for. Inside
the parcel, carefully wrapped, was a human skull. Next To

(00:32):
it lay a hand written a letter from a man
in northern Germany confessing to something he'd done roughly sixty
years earlier, when he was just a young tourist. The
letter explained everything. The parcel had arrived suddenly on his desk,
large and tied up, with no specific sender listed during
a guided tour of the cathedral's catacombs. The man had
stolen the skull, and now, all these decades later, he

(00:56):
was sending it back. The tourist to grab the skull
during one of the guided tours that take visitors through
the catacombs beneath Saint Stephen's, where about eleven thousand people
are buried. These aren't typical underground crypts with neat rows
of tombs and plaques. The history of how all of
those remains ended up down there reveals just how dark

(01:16):
and chaotic these burial chambers really are. Back in seventeen
thirty five, Vienna got hit hard by a pubonic plague outbreak.
The authorities had to close eight cemeteries that surrounded the cathedral,
plus a chart house where they'd been storing bones. They
moved everything to newly dug pits in the catacombs underneath
the cathedral itself. People kept getting buried down there until

(01:38):
seventeen eighty three, when new laws put a stop to
burials inside the city limits. When the underground chambers started
filling up with corpses, authorities would send prisoners down into
those dark pits to handle a genuinely horrific job. These
prisoners had to scrub rotting flesh off plague infected bodies,
break down the skeletons into individual bones, and then stack

(01:59):
everything in neat ordered rows with the skulls placed on top.
They never actually finished the work. Even today, certain sections
remain scattered with jumbled piles of bones and old coffins
slowly falling apart. The sections built in the eighteenth century
spread out beyond the footprint of the cathedral building above ground.

(02:20):
These particular rooms ended up darker and damper than the
older parts, and they are filled with skeletal remains. The
bones are stacked up, visible through metal grates or in
open chambers, depending on which part of the tour route
visitors are taking Somewhere in those dark rooms. During a
tour that took place decades ago, a young man saw
a skull and decided to take it. How he managed

(02:42):
this without getting caught remains unclear. Tour groups moved through
fairly quickly, and guides keep watch, but somehow he pocketed
a human skull and carried it out of the cathedral.
Then he took it home to Germany, where it sat
for sixty years. The letter laid out everything plainly. The
man wrote that he was getting older, now approaching the
end of his life, and he wanted to make amends.

(03:03):
He needed to come to terms with himself. According to
wasa Hetner later shared with reporters, the letter specifically mentioned
wanting to make peace before he died. Opening the package
meant discovering not just the physical skull itself, but also
getting a window into somebody's conscience. After six decades, the
man lived with that theft for sixty years, every time

(03:25):
he saw that skull, wherever he kept it in his home,
he had to remember taking it, had to remember that
it once belonged to a real person who died during
one of history's darkest periods. Zahetner found the whole thing touching.
He told reporters he thought it was moving that someone
would want to make amends for what he called an
act of youthful exuberance. He also pointed out that the

(03:45):
man had carefully preserved the skull over all those years.
He hadn't just tossed it in a box in his
attic or thrown it away, even though keeping it obviously
wasn't according to any proper rules. He had taken care
of it rather than carelessly getting rid of it. This
wasn't somebody who grabbed a skull on a whim, forgot
about it, and then stumbled across it decades later while

(04:06):
cleaning out a closet. He had kept it, preserved it,
and apparently thought about it enough over the years that
returning it became important to him before he died. Saint
Stephen's Cathedral dominates Vienna's skyline and serves as probably the
city's most famous landmark. Construction started way back in the
twelfth century, and the structure visitors seat today was finished

(04:28):
in fifteen eleven, though they never did complete the north tower.
The cathedral contains multiple different burial spaces, each serving its
own purpose. Some areas are for bishops and other clergy,
other sections hold nobility, and then there are the mass
burial chambers, filled with thousands of plague victims and regular citizens.
The Ducal Crypt represents the oldest of viennas, three burial

(04:50):
places reserved for Austria's rulers and high ranking noble families.
They've been putting people in there since thirteen sixty five,
starting with Archduke Rudolph fourth, But the Habsburgs, who ruled
Austria for centuries, used this crypt specifically for storing their
internal organs. They kept them in urns, completely separate from
where they bury the actual bodies and their hearts. They

(05:12):
split up the bodies into three different locations. Hearts went
to one church, bodies went to another burial site, and
their organs ended up in jars at Saint Stephen's. More
than sixty years of imperial intestines sit down there in
the ducal crypt, including one that contains Empress Maria Theresa's
internal organs. Those jars have caused problems over the years.

(05:35):
Not that long ago, the seals on one of them
broke open. Two hundred year old visceral fluid leaked out
onto the floor, and apparently the smell was so overwhelmingly
awful it took a full day or two before anyone
was willing to go down there and deal with it.
The catacombs aren't just some sealed off historical site. The
most recent person buried down there was Franz Cardinal Koenig,

(05:57):
Vienna's archbishop, who was laid to rest in two thousand
and four when he was ninety eight years old. In
the eighteenth century section, specifically, about thirty different rooms were
used for burials between seventeen forty five and seventeen eighty three.
Eventually they had to stop because they were running out
of space. The stench from decomposing bodies in the catacombs
would actually rise up through the cathedral itself. Sometimes it

(06:20):
got so bad that priests couldn't conduct their religious services
in the church above. The skeletal remains down there include
everybody from plague victims to members of Vienna's wealthiest and
most powerful families. The skull could have belonged to a
peasant who died in agony from the plague, or it
might have been from some noble who lived in luxury
before death came. According to what officials reported, the skull

(06:43):
couldn't be clearly identified because so many of the cathedral's
remains came from second burials, where bones removed from one
location to another. Zahetner confirms that the cathedral has now
laid the skull to arrest with proper dignity. Tours through
the catacombs let people look into rooms filled with scattered bones,
including mass graves specifically for plague victims. In sections where

(07:06):
the prisoners actually finished stacking, bones are piled up high
against the walls like cordwood, with skulls peering out from
the stacks. They're empty eye sockets staring at whomever walks past.
Modern tourists taking these tours walk through rooms not that
different from what the young German visitor saw sixty years ago.
The difference is that now, presumably security and supervision make

(07:28):
it harder for someone to just pocket a piece of
human remains and walk out with it. The cathedral staff
must have been surprised by this return, but also probably relieved.
This skull spent six decades in Germany sitting in someone's home,
kept carefully by a man who eventually couldn't live with
what he had done anymore. Now it's back in the
darkness beneath Vienna, reunited with the thousands of others who

(07:51):
died during one of history's recurring nightmares. The anonymous tourist's
letter and his act of returning the skull closes out
what he described as youth exuberance. Most people would probably
call it something else, but in the end he tried
to make it right. The skull, belonging to someone who
lived and died centuries ago in Vienna, is back where
it started, back in the catacombs beneath the cathedral, surrounded

(08:14):
by the remains of roughly eleven thousand others who share
that same dark, silent space under the city streets. If
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(08:36):
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