The men who allowed German cannibals to EAT them: One let a cop hang and butcher him...while another victim severed his own genitals and shared them with his killer

They knew exactly what they were getting themselves into. 

Though they never met and died more than a decade apart, Bern Brandes and Wojciech Stempniewicz became bound by a shared desire that would ultimately seal their fates.

Driven by fantasies of being killed and eaten, both willingly sought out the men who would make those fantasies a reality, meeting their eventual killers on perverse online forums. 

What followed were gruesome rituals that would turn the men into the subjects of two of Germany's most disturbing criminal cases. 

One asked to have his own genitals mutilated in an attempt to share them with the man who would later murder him, while the other travelled to a remote mountain retreat, where he would be hanged and butchered. 

Brandes met his killer, Armin Meiwes, in 2001 on the now-defunct website 'The Cannibal Cafe' - a website frequented at the time by people with a cannibalism fetish. 

Meiwes, a computer repair technician, had posted an advert looking for a 'well-built' man who wanted to be killed and eaten, and it was Brandes, a telecommunications engineer from Berlin, who answered. 

Brandes travelled to the German city of Kassel on March 9, 2001, and was picked up by Meiwes from the train station that morning. 

Brandes had asked to be 'slaughtered' that day, and so the pair drove to Meiwes' home, where they set up video equipment to film the act. 

He had also requested that his penis be cut off and for him and Meiwes to eat his genitals together while he remained alive.

Meiwes had prepared for the killing, having purchased six knives, a hatchet, and a meat grinder, and even downloaded and translated a step-by-step guide on how to butcher a person.  

Before the ritual unfolded, Brandes took 20 sleeping pills and drank half a bottle of cough syrup to withstand the pain.

After Meiwes attempted to bite his penis off and failed, he pulled out a knife instead to castrate him.

The two men attempted to eat Brandes' genitals together, but he was not able to consume them. 

Meiwes then fried the penis in a pan with salt, pepper, wine and garlic, but the genitals were too burnt for either of the men to eat. 

Meiwes then ran him a bath, where Brandes lay bleeding, drifting in and out of consciousness. 

Once Brandes was dead, Meiwes tied him to a table and cut off parts of his body, keeping them in the freezer and gradually eating them over the next few months. 

After putting out an advertisement for a second victim, he was finally caught by police when an Austrian student reported him in 2002. 

By the time police arrived at his home to arrest him, there was less than 40lbs of Brandes remaining.  

Meiwes was convicted of manslaughter in 2004, but federal judges later quashed that verdict, and he was found guilty of murder at a retrial in 2006. 

At his retrial, a psychologist stated that Meiwes could re-offend and still 'had fantasies about devouring the flesh of young people'. 

The case shocked Germany and shone the spotlight on the dark underbelly of cannibalism sites. 

Years later, the killing and dismembering of Stempniewicz would bring up memories of the gruesome cannibal-murder case.

Polish businessman Stempniewicz - who went under the name of 'LongpigHeszla' on perverted websites devoted to torture and bondage - was killed and partially eaten by police forensic specialist Detlev Guenzel at his lonely home in the mountains near Dresden.

Stempniewicz, 59, nurtured lurid fantasies of being killed and eaten and trawled the internet for an entire year before he found a willing predator. 

In one message to a user calling himself 'Butcher755' in November 2012, he asked about a contraption in his house designed to winch up his body after he had been killed.

'Can you describe a little more about the room and your equipment? Did you check the load-bearing capacity of the rods? Will it withstand my weight?' he asked on a cyberspace forum. 

In November 2013, Stempniewicz, who ran a trucking logistics business in Hanover, met up with Guenzel on the internet - his killer, who went by the name of 'Caligula.'

Guenzel collected Stempniewicz from Dresden's bus station on November 4 that year and drove him to the B&B he ran in the Erzgebirge Mountains.

Once inside, he took him to the cellar, where he said he strangled Stempniewicz before cutting him into small pieces while listening to pop music.

A video played in court showed Guenzel in his underwear slicing the naked body of his willing victim into pieces with a knife and saw while it hung from a hook. 

The fiancée of Stempniewicz, a Russian woman identified only as Svetlana, called police when he did not return home again.

'Caligula' was traced via the computer messages and telephone calls he had with his victim, and he was arrested at the police station where he worked as a handwriting specialist early in 2014.

When cops arrived at the property, they found Stempniewicz's remains hidden among flowerbeds in the garden. 

Stempniewicz's penis and one testicle were never found. 

Police also found a disturbing picture of Detlev, which shows him standing next to a skeleton and holding an axe, wearing nothing but socks and sandals.  

Guenzel admitted slicing the corpse up but claimed Stempniewicz hanged himself. He was found guilty of murder in April 2015.