Eduard "Ede" Zimmermann (4 February 1929 – 19 September 2009) was a German journalist, television presenter and security expert.

Eduard Zimmermann was born on 4 February 1929 in Alte Heide in the borough of Schwabing-Freimann in Munich, Germany to a teenage mother who worked as a waitress.

Following the Second World War the man who would later be known as a 'criminal hunter' and 'crook's bane' eked out a living as a thief and black market trader, for which he served a sentence at Fuhlsbüttel Prison.

Zimmermann himself revealed his past as a criminal in 2005 through his autobiography, titled Auch ich war ein Gauner (I was a crook too).

In a newspaper interview he said that his time as a criminal had made him tough: "You might say I am living proof that you can come back down from the crooked tracks if that's what you really want.