In one of the most extraordinary trials in German criminal history, the self-confessed cannibal admitted that he had met a 43-year-old Berlin engineer, Bernd Brandes, after advertising on the internet, and had chopped him up and eaten him.
It was, he said, something he had wanted to do for a long time. "I always had the fantasy and in the end I fulfilled it," Meiwes told the court on the first day of his trial for murder in the nearby city of Kassel.
Yesterday German prosecutors described how Meiwes had fantasised about killing and devouring someone, including his classmates, from the age of eight.
The desire grew stronger after the death of his mother in 1999, prosecutor Marcus Köhler said.
In March 2001 Meiwes advertised on the internet for a "young well-built man, who wanted to be eaten". Brandes replied.
On the evening of March 9, the two men went up to the bedroom in Meiwes' rambling timbered farmhouse. Mr Brandes swallowed 20 sleeping tablets and half a bottle of schnapps before Meiwes cut off Brandes' penis, with his agreement, and fried it for both of them to eat.
Brandes - by this stage bleeding heavily - then took a bath, while Meiwes read a Star Trek novel.
In the early hours of the morning, he finished off his victim by stabbing him in the neck with a large kitchen knife, kissing him first.
The cannibal then chopped Mr Brandes into pieces and put several bits of him in his freezer, next to a takeaway pizza, and buried the skull in his garden.
Over the next few weeks, he defrosted and cooked parts of Mr Brandes in olive oil and garlic, eventually consuming 20kg of human flesh before police finally turned up at his door.
"With every bite, my memory of him grew stronger," he said.
Behind bars, Meiwes told detectives that he had consumed his victim with a bottle of South African red wine, had got out his best cutlery and decorated his dinner table with candles. He tasted of pork, he added.
The unprecedented case has proved problematic for German lawyers who discovered that cannibalism is not illegal in Germany.
Instead, they have charged Meiwes with murder for the purposes of sexual pleasure and with "disturbing the peace of the dead".
