A court has sentenced a 67-year-old electrician to eight and a half years in jail for castrating several men with an S&M fetish to earn some cash on the side, resulting in one man’s death.

The Second Regional Court of Munich found Horst B., full surname not reported due to strict local privacy laws, guilty of grievous bodily harm and dangerous bodily injury.

He was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison yesterday (Tuesday, 7th December).

The defendant admitted in court to having offered his ‘services’ in online S&M forums and said that several men paid him to torture them and cut off their testicles.

He is known to have castrated eight men, one of whom later died and whose body was found in a cardboard box a few weeks after his death.

The defendant was also on trial for murder by neglect over the death. However, presiding judge Thomas Bott acquitted him of the charge in dubio pro reo, which is a term referring to the fact that there was a lack of “reliable evidence” as to his guilt.

It was only after the dead victim’s body was found that the defendant’s crimes, committed between July 2018 and March 2020, came to light.

Cops searched his home and found electric shock devices with “genital area” and “anus” written on them.

The victims had distinct motives for assenting to being castrated. One reportedly wanted to be a eunuch, another said he wanted to live as a woman, and a third wanted to tame his porn addiction.

The fact they all apparently agreed to be castrated by the defendant was a key factor in the brevity of his sentence.

One factor that led to his conviction was the fact he had passed himself off as a “paramedic with operational experience”.

However, he was no such thing, and his castrations, performed with a scalpel, were crudely executed. In one case, he is said to have chopped an inch off a man’s penis.

The defendant entered the murky world of S&M following the death of his wife to pay off debts incurred from her end-of-life care and funeral.

It was reportedly a work colleague who had told him that some men paid a lot of money for sadomasochistic practices.

He started out offering electric shocks online before he moved into advertising castrations.

He earned a total of EUR 4,150 from his victims, and he was ordered to pay the court the same amount.

Though the court ruled he had “multiple sexual preference disorder”, it did not consider it so pronounced as to cite extenuating circumstances.

It is not clear if the court’s decision can be appealed.