MUNICH — A German doctor who cared for palliative patients was charged with murdering more than a dozen people while providing nursing care and then setting fire to some of their homes to conceal the crime, according to prosecutors.
The doctor was arrested in August on a warrant that was “repeatedly amended” as the investigation progressed, according to the Berlin Public Prosecutor’s Office. He was not named due to German privacy laws.
Authorities mentioned four known cases when he was arrested last year. On Wednesday, the office announced that it had filed 15 counts of murder with malice against the 40-year-old doctor.
“To commit the crimes, he is alleged to have administered an anesthetic inducer and then a muscle relaxant to his patients without medical indication and without their knowledge and consent,” according to the attorney general’s office.
According to prosecutors, death occurred within a few minutes because the muscle relaxant paralyzed the respiratory muscle, resulting in respiratory arrest.
All of the patients, ranging in age from 25 to 94, died between September 2021 and July 2024 while receiving care from the doctor’s nursing service.
The first death for which he was charged was that of a 25-year-old woman who died on September 22, 2021, in Berlin-Buckow. There were no details provided.
Some of the details provided by German prosecutors included allegations that the doctor set fire to the patients’ homes after injecting them with the drug cocktail.
They include the death of an 87-year-old woman from Neukölln. He is accused of setting fire to her apartment on June 11, 2024, but when firefighters arrived, paramedics were able to revive her on the spot, according to the prosecutor’s office. She died a short time later in the hospital.
Weeks later, the doctor is accused of killing two people on the same day. The first victim was a 75-year-old man in his Kreuzberg apartment on the morning of July 8, according to prosecutors.
He then went to the apartment of a 76-year-old woman in Neukölln a few hours later, according to prosecutors.
“His attempt to set the apartment on fire is said to have failed, as the fire extinguished itself,” the prosecutor reported. “When he noticed this, he allegedly informed a relative of the woman and claimed that he was standing in front of her apartment and no one was responding to the doorbell.”
Berlin police and prosecutors investigated 395 cases, with suspicion “confirmed” in at least 95. The prosecutor’s office stated that 75 more investigations are still ongoing.
Prosecutors said at least 12 bodies had been exhumed, with five of those cases included in the indictment.
The doctor has not issued a statement, and no attorney has been identified.
Because of the gravity of the allegations, prosecutors have stated that they are seeking not only a conviction, but also a “lifelong professional ban and subsequent preventive detention.”
Niels Hoegel, a German nurse, was sentenced to life in prison in 2019 after murdering 85 patients. Hoegel admitted that during one of his first trials, he intentionally put his patients in cardiac arrest because he enjoyed the feeling of resuscitating them.
At the time of his sentencing, he was regarded as the worst serial killer in German history.