Vienna Crime Museum, Criminal history museum in Leopoldstadt, Austria.
The Vienna Crime Museum is a history museum in Leopoldstadt that examines criminal cases, police methods, and justice systems from medieval times to the present. The collection spans multiple exhibition rooms and displays original documents, photographs, weapons, and personal items from different periods.
The museum occupies the Seifensiederhaus, a building dating before 1685 with a long history as a residential structure. After its conversion into a specialized crime museum in November 1991, it became a significant venue for documenting Austrian judicial history.
The exhibits feature street ballads, criminal biographies, and newspaper articles that show how society perceived and portrayed crime over the centuries. Visitors can see how people once discussed such events and what mattered most to them.
The museum occupies 20 rooms in the Seifensiederhaus at Große Sperlgasse 24, between the Karmelitermarkt and the Leopoldskirche in Leopoldstadt. A coffeehouse sits in the building's inner courtyard. The house is marked 1685 on the keystone of its portal, and the museum is reached in the second district.
The museum keeps the heads of executed criminals Juliana Hummel, Franz Zaglauer von Zahlheim and Franz Hebenstreit; Hebenstreit's head was removed from the collection in 2012 after protests. The skeleton of Theresia Kandl, hanged in 1809 for killing her husband with an axe, is also on display.
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