Helmcke, son of a Cuxhaven grocer emigrated to the United States in 1953. In 1959, under dubious circumstances, he received an inheritance of 250,000 dollars and returned to Germany. Helmcke, who dominated Berlin's red-light district in the postwar period, came to fame as the operator of the Pension Clausewitz, a luxury brothel he had acquired with part of his inheritance at the beginning of the 1960s. He came into the public eye when, in 1965, the Pension Clausewitz had to close because there were accusations that the Stasi used the brothel for espionage purposes. Nonetheless, Helmcke remained the king-pin in the red-light underworld, as was known as the Brothel King and the King ofBerlin. In addition to prostitution, Helmcke was also active in drug trafficking and gambling. He also tried to use his contacts with the business world and the political circles of West Berlin, both closely intertwined, for profitable investments in real estate and construction projects. He invested three million deutschmarks in the construction of the :de:Steglitzer Kreisel|Steglitzer Kreisel. When it became apparent in 1970 that the project could fail, and invested funds would have been lost, Helmcke commissioned the assassination of the architectSigrid Kressmann-Zschach. However, the contract never came to fruition. On 27 June of the same year Helmcke was involved in an armed conflict with Iranian pimps, over supremacy in the West Berlin red-light district. The firefight on Bleibtreustraße caused one fatality and three others were injured.
Death
On 14 August 1973 Hans Helmcke was lured to an apartment in Mathildenstraße in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg by some younger pimps and held captive. Two days later, on the 16 August, after failing to agree to their demands, he was strangled with his own tie. They tried to burn the body in a fire at a salvage yard, but the fire was prematurely extinguished as the yard didn't have a permit for outdoor fires. Two days later his partially burned body was found on the edge of Bundesautobahn 1 between Hamburg and Lübeck. Heinz-Uwe Röhl, Röhl's former wife Bärbel and Franz Holzer stood trial for his murder.
