Michael Schneider, 45, left 37-year-old Carsten Schmidt's severed head cooking on the stove at his apartment in Berlin, in what police described as a 'horror show'.
After the sordid incident, remains of the victim's body were also found strewn around Schneider's home, wrapped in baking foil and
paper.
Now Schneider has now been jailed for less than four years, after being found guilty of bodily harm resulting in death.
A police official, who said the men knew one another, said: 'It was a horror show. The body parts had been sawed, hacked and sliced.
'He put them all over the apartment as if saving them up for a rainy day.
'But only the head was cooked, bobbing in a stewpot on top of the cooker.'
During the hearing at the Berlin Regional Court, the court heard how the victim had invited Schneider to his apartment in Marienfelde, south Berlin, for sex in January 2012.
In court, the defence claimed Schmidt asked the defendant to tie him to the bed and cover his mouth and nose with tape.
The victim then died of suffocation, the court was told. It was then that Schneider cut up Schmidt's corpse.
Schmidt, who was openly gay, was due to go on to a party that evening with his friend. When he did not show up, the friend alerted police.
'The body parts had been sawed, hacked and sliced. He put them all over the apartment as if saving them up for a rainy day'
When it became clear Schneider was a suspect, the defendant slashed his wrists with a knife, but was saved by paramedica.
During the trial, prosecutors argued that the defendant should have been sentenced to six years and nine months for manslaughter.
But his defence team called for their client to be found guilty of bodily harm resulting in death
rather than manslaughter.
They successfully argued that the victim had wanted to die and that the accused was used simply as 'a tool in that process'.
In the court judgement it reportedly said: 'He is responsible for the death but he didn't want to
kill his sexual partner.'
Cannibalism as a sexual fantasy is widespread in Germany. It first hit the headlines in 2001 when Armin Meiwes killed, butchered and ate a
computer technician called Bernd Brandes at his remote farmhouse home in Rotenburg near Kassel.
At his trial, several men who harboured fantasies of eating human flesh testified that there was a large network of like-minded
individuals who connected through cyberspace in a bid to satisfy their fantasies.
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