Early life Born as the seventh and youngest child of his parents, Adolf was initially trained as a locksmith, then as a
watchmaker who repaired grandfather clocks and pocket watches. He moved to
Lübeck in 1890 and married Katarina Seefeldt, who divorced him in 1910. His son was committed to a
lunatic asylum for moral crimes at the age of nineteen. Seefeldt was reportedly abused by two men at the age of 12. He was first imprisoned at 25 for the sexual harassment of a boy. Psychiatrists diagnosed him as mentally unstable, which led to him spending most of his life in mental hospitals and prisons.
Serial murders The traveler and watchmaker Adolf Seefeldt, also known as "Sandman" or—because of his profession—"Uncle Tick Tock" and "Uncle Adi," abused and killed at least twelve boys during the reign of the
Third Reich. He usually selected pine groves as crime scenes, with one exception. A common feature among the victims was their clothing, as they consistently wore
sailor suits. Since all the children appeared to be “sleeping peacefully” and showed no signs of external violence, the police were mystified by the circumstances of death. It is therefore possible that Seefeldt committed additional murders that were misclassified as natural deaths. Contemporary experts speculated that Seefeldt used his own homemade poison,
chloroform, or smothered his victims. According to Hans Pfeiffer, a well-known author of popular science books on authentic criminal cases, these theories were easily disproven. Pfeiffer instead suspected that Seefeldt had placed his victims into a hypnotic sleep, then likely performed
oral sex on them and left them asleep in the woods, failing to awaken them from hypnosis. The children later died of
hypothermia, which Seefeldt had either accepted or intended. == The victims ==