Vienna Crime Museum

The Vienna Criminal Museum is a museum in Vienna’s 2nd district, Leopoldstadt, in the area of the same name.

The museum, which arose at the end of 1991 from the Criminal Police Museum of the Vienna Federal Police Headquarters (founded in 1984), is located in the Seifensiederhaus, one of the oldest houses in the 2nd district, at Große Sperlgasse 24 (until 1862: Herrengasse 297).It was erected about 1685 (as shown by the wedge stone of the gateway) and stands where the communal center used to be in the (expelled) Jewish community.The home got its name from the fact that it was purchased in 1794 by a soap manufacturer. The museum is now located about between Karmelitermarkt and Leopoldskirche.

In the courtyard of the building, there is a coffee shop.

The museum has 20 rooms that depict the history of justice, police, and crime from the Middle Ages to the present.The presentation includes medieval jails and the final public executions in Vienna.Individually interesting criminal instances from the interwar period, such as those of the poisoner Hofrichter or Josefine Luner, are also featured.

Numerous genuine papers and copies of criminal cases, crime scene images and court transcripts, as well as body parts of condemned criminals, including the heads of Juliana Hummel, Franz Zaglauer von Zahlheim, and Franz Hebenstreit, are included in the displays.Hebenstreit’s head was removed from the collection in 2012 after objections.There is also the skeleton of “Vienna’s most beautiful murderess,” Theresia Kandl, who murdered her abusive husband with an ax in December 1808 and became the first woman in Vienna to be hanged on March 16, 1809.

Modern displays include the jacket of the assassin of SP city councilor Heinz Nittel, who was shot dead in 1981, and the blood-stained garments of the victims of the prostitute murderer Jack Unterweger.

Vienna, Austria