This article is about the German book. For the 1963 cult film, see The Sadist (film)

The Sadist (film)

The Sadist is a 1963 black-and-white exploitation film written and directed by James Landis, and stars Arch Hall, Jr...

The Sadist (German: "Der Sadist") is a book published by psychiatrist Karl Berg, following the confessions of Peter Kürten

Peter Kürten

Peter Kürten was a German serial killer dubbed The Vampire of Düsseldorf by the contemporary media. He committed a series of sex crimes, assaults and murders against adults and children, most notoriously from February to November 1929 in Düsseldorf.-Early life:Kürten was born into a...

, a well-known serial killer

Serial killer

A serial killer, as typically defined, is an individual who has murdered three or more people over a period of more than a month, with down time between the murders, and whose motivation for killing is usually based on psychological gratification...

 in the late 1920s in Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

.

The book was originally written in German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

. The first English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

edition was issued in 1938, by Acorn Press. A second edition was published by William Heinemann Medical Books in 1945.