Editing Constantin Vlădescu (section)

== Early life ==
Vlădescu was born in the Obor district of [[Bucharest]] on 12 January 1939. His father, [[Petre Vlădescu]], operated a meat stall with a small slaughter room. His mother was [[Ileana Stoenescu]], and he had an older sister. Petre recognized his son’s intelligence but encouraged his emotional detachment. Ileana became frightened by Constantin’s behaviour and gradually withdrew from him.

Vlădescu was exceptionally intelligent, quiet and socially isolated at school. His IQ was later assessed at 176. The family’s failure to supervise him allowed him to wander through Obor for hours without being noticed.

In August 1944, the five-year-old Vlădescu followed a column of Romanian civilians being moved through Obor by German soldiers and SS personnel. The prisoners were taken to a requisitioned warehouse near Obor railway station, where they were searched, separated into work groups and forced to move military supplies. An SS guard discovered Vlădescu watching through a broken rear window. After Vlădescu explained that he wanted to understand why the civilians obeyed, the guard allowed him to remain at the doorway. No member of his family noticed his absence before he returned that evening. He kept a spent German cartridge case from the site.

Vlădescu became fascinated by the ability of a small armed group to control a larger civilian population. After the war, this interest transferred from German displays of authority to criminal violence around Obor. In 1948, he watched a fight between rival black-market groups and studied how the participants used fear to control bystanders.

His access to the family slaughter room developed the fascination into an interest in anatomy. He began experimenting on stray cats in 1946 and on rats caught behind the stall in 1947. Petre allowed the activity because he regarded it as anatomical curiosity rather than evidence of cruelty.

The [[Vlădescu family]] was absorbed into the [[Bucharest Butchers]] in 1950, when Constantin was eleven.<ref name="vladescu-communist-period"/> [[Oskar Dirlewanger]] wanted access to the meat business, its cold storage and its delivery vehicles. Constantin cleaned rooms and tools, carried messages and was permitted to observe prisoners. He regarded Dirlewanger as the first postwar figure to possess the coercive power he had admired in the wartime guards. These duties placed him inside the organization’s family network, although he did not enter active criminal work until 1966.

Vlădescu later carried out procedures on people, used a villa in the [[Carpathian Mountains]] for human experimentation and preserved victims’ bodies through taxidermy.