A cash-strapped electrician has gone on trial for cutting off at least eight men’s testicles for cash after advertising his services on S&M chat groups – with one of his victims even dying as a result.

The 66-year-old defendant from Upper Bavaria, named only as Horst B. due to German privacy laws, has appeared at the Munich Regional Court, where he is on trial for bodily harm and murder by neglect.

He is believed to have castrated at least eight willing men with a scalpel, with each victim paying him a fee of between EUR 250 (GBP 212) and EUR 1,200 (GBP 1,105), according to reports.

According to the prosecution, the defendant was able to convince his victims he was a trained paramedic. However, he had no medical experience and his ‘operations’ were crude and amateurish, reportedly leaving his victims in agony and in need of medical intervention.

In at least one case, the victim ended up in hospital after the defendant, in addition to severing the man’s spermatic cord and cutting off his testicles, chopped around an inch off his penis.

The defendant is believed to have entered the murky world of S&M when he fell into debt after the passing of his third wife and he reportedly learned from a work colleague that some men paid a lot of money for sadomasochistic practices.

In 2018, according to the news portal t-online.de, he began to offer electric shocks for money online. However, it quickly escalated into him offering to mutilate men’s sexual organs in chat groups about castration.

He found his first willing victim in June of that year, with the illicit procedure taking place the following month on the defendant’s kitchen table.

In total, he is believed to have castrated eight men, one of whom considered himself transsexual and wanted his testicles removed and another of whom reportedly wanted to be ‘treated’ for his porn addiction.

One of the victims even died in the defendant’s apartment a few days after his operation, with the defendant failing to seek medical help, allegedly so his crime would not be discovered and so he would not lose his secondary source of income.

The deceased man’s body was found packed up in a cardboard box during a search a few weeks later, and the suspect was arrested.

As far as the prosecutor is aware, the defendant is not believed to have performed any more illicit castrations following March 2020.

A judgement is expected in late November. The trial, meanwhile, continues.