A verdict of the retrial is expected in January at the earliest.
Dressed in an off-white shirt and sweater, Guenzel attended Tuesday's hearing but did not address the court.
The victim's wish "did not open the possibility to reduce the penalty", said the appeal court. The Dresden court had taken into account the death wish of the victim and imposed a sentence that is just above half of the maximum 15 years for murder. It also disputed the sentence imposed by the Dresden court as too lenient for a murder conviction, and ordered a retrial. But the Federal Court of Justice overturned the verdict, arguing that the regional court had failed to sufficiently probe whether the victim had actually killed himself through strangulation - as the accused had claimed. There was no evidence that he ate any part of his victim. Guenzel had cut the body into small pieces in a slaughter chamber he built in his cellar, before burying them in his garden, the court found.
Detlev Guenzel, 58, was last year sentenced to eight years and six months in jail by a regional court in the eastern city of Dresden, which found him guilty of killing Polish-born Wojciech Stempniewicz in 2013. A German ex-police officer convicted of murdering a willing victim he met on a website for cannibalism fetishists went on trial again Tuesday after the verdict against him was overturned on appeal.
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