Criminal Career
For the next decade, Haarmann lived as a petty thief, burglar and con artist. He was frequently arrested and served several short prison sentences. He gradually began to establish a relationship with Hanover police as an informer, largely as a means of redirecting the attention of the police from himself, and later admitted that the police began to view him as a reliable source of information regarding Hanover's criminal network.
In 1914, Haarmann was convicted of a series of thefts and frauds and was imprisoned just as World War I began. Upon his release in 1918, he was struck by the poverty of the German nation as a result of the loss the nation had suffered in World War I. The country was bankrupt. Fritz Haarmann immediately reverted to the criminal life he had lived before he was arrested in 1914. The new state of Germany provided him with even more opportunities to operate on the fringes of the criminal network, and because of the increase in crime as a result of the poverty the nation was enduring, police again began to rely on Haarmann as an informer.
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