Bruno Lüdke

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Bruno Lüdke (born April 3, 1908 in Köpenick ; † April 8, 1944 in Vienna ) was considered one of the worst serial killers in German criminal history until the 1990s because of self- accusations. It can be ruled out today that he actually committed all of the deeds he confessed. In fact, it is very likely that he did not commit any of the murders. Lüdke, who was never tried, died in the custody of the National Socialist Central Criminal Medical Institute of the Security Police in Vienna, presumably as a result of human experiments.

prehistory

Bruno Lüdke was the fourth of six children of the laundry owner Otto Lüdke. He grew up in poor conditions, attended the auxiliary school and worked as a coachman . He was known to the police because of several small thefts, but was not convicted of being insane due to "innate nonsense ". As part of the " Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Offspring ", his forced sterilization was ordered in August 1939 and carried out on May 29, 1940.

The Bruno Lüdke case

On January 29, 1943, the 51-year-old pensioner Frieda Rösner was found strangled and raped in the Köpenick city forest. During the investigation, the investigating detective, Heinrich Franz , came across Lüdke, known as "stupid Bruno", who is said to have been hanging around as a " spanner " in the woods around the crime scene . Nobody who knew Lüdke personally could imagine him as a murderer. He was considered harmless and fearful, as someone who didn't even like to slaughter chickens. There was also no evidence to incriminate Lüdke. When he was arrested in March 1943, he confessed not only to the murder of the widow Rösner, but also to a number of other unsolved murders across Germany.

The Dutch criminalist Jan Blaauw , who analyzed the investigation files, came to the conclusion in 1994 that Lüdke had developed a relationship of dependency with Franz, who understood how to win him over in a friendly way. He used this to elicit more and more confessions from Lüdke through suggestive questions. Franz had targeted unexplained murder cases in the entire Reich and then asked Lüdke whether he had already been in the city in question at the time. Lüdke answered practically every one of these questions in the affirmative. Franz claimed that Lüdke had subsequently unequivocally identified his perpetrators with detailed knowledge of the crime scene in each case (see also perpetrator knowledge ). Whether this was true or whether Franz put this information into his mouth on the basis of the investigation files available to him cannot be reconstructed because Franz insisted that his colleagues not enter the interrogation room if he elicited new confessions from Lüdke, which suggests the latter suspicion .

Apart from numerous contradictions regarding the individual cases, it was noteworthy that Lüdke was apparently trusted to remember precise geographical, calendar, temporal and evidence-related details of individual acts, which spanned a period of almost 20 years, and to be able to reproduce them linguistically precisely. Questions how the largely penniless Lüdke could have undertaken numerous trips across Germany and how he, as a "moron" who had been caught several times in minor thefts, was able to commit murders several dozen times unnoticed, sometimes in heavily populated areas Areas and even in residential buildings were deliberately ignored by Franz or answered with the empty phrase that a felon like Lüdke was capable of anything.

The ever-new confessions, some of which were made every hour, aroused mistrust and skepticism among Franz's police colleagues in Berlin. Above all, however, investigating authorities from other cities at the time contradicted them, for example from Hamburg, where the responsible commissioners had investigated a number of cases that Lüdke took on. Lüdke's perpetration appeared to them completely absurd for various reasons, which was also explained in detail. The then Reich Criminal Director Arthur Nebe always intervened in the internal police dispute in favor of Franz. The German police officer and SS leader Hans Lobbes , who was one of the skeptics of the Lüdke confessions, warned Nebe that a pending trial could become a "disgrace". This was probably also the reason why a trial never took place.

Overall, Lüdke confessed to having committed 84 murders between 1924 and 1943. The Berlin police considered 53 murders and three attempted murders to be solved through his confessions. The 53 cases differed greatly from each other, as later investigations showed in terms of the course of events, the perpetrator and victim profiles and much more, and there were no indications such as fingerprints that would have incriminated Lüdke. After the investigation was over, Heinrich Himmler ordered Lüdke to be transferred to the newly established Central Criminal Medical Institute of the Security Police in Vienna. Here, as a supposed prime example of a “born criminal”, he was subjected to a series of hereditary and anthropological investigations. Among other things, film and record recordings were made by Robert Ritter . Lüdke had to drink pure alcohol ; then his spinal cord was punctured. On January 15, 1944, a cast of his head was made, which is still in the "Museum of Forensic Medicine" in Vienna.

On April 8, 1944, Bruno Lüdke died under unexplained circumstances. Most likely, he was killed in a vacuum chamber during a medical experiment . His skeleton was added to the institute's forensic medicine collection and was likely lost in the 1960s.

Stylization of the alleged serial killer after 1945

The Bruno Lüdke case was the subject of several publications and a feature film after the Second World War . Bernd Wehner , head of the "Central Office for Combating Capital Crimes" at the Reich Criminal Police Office during the Nazi era , reported as part of his series The game is over - Arthur Nebe. Glitz and misery of the German criminal police in March 1950 in the mirror above. Without fundamentally questioning the perpetrators of Lüdke and despite the naming of various inconsistencies, repeatedly following Franz's argument, he described Lüdke in the article pejoratively as "animal men", "big, strong apes" and "retarded Neanderthals".

The journalist Stefan Amberg alias Will Berthold took up the case again in 1956 for the Münchner Illustrierte in 15 parts as the "greatest mass murder in German criminal history". His alleged "factual report" Night When the Devil Came , for which he invented new documents and arguments, provided the template for the film of the same name by Robert Siodmak based on a script by Werner Jörg Lüddecke with Mario Adorf as Bruno Lüdke. The film received the Federal Film Award in 1958 and was nominated for an Oscar for “best foreign film”. In the film Lüdke is presented not only as insane mass murderer, but in the figure of the investigating commissioner also the supposedly apolitical and in the " Third Reich " decent remaining criminal investigation . A little later, Berthold processed the story into a “novel based on facts”.

The Bruno Lüdkes sisters, who lived in East Berlin , sought an injunction against the feature film in February 1958. In October 1957 they wrote to the Hamburg criminalist Gottfried Faulhaber: “Our brother explained to me: 'Herta, if I don't say that I murdered the Rösler, shoot me!'” The Hamburg Higher Regional Court decided, however, that Lüdke had established himself through his confessions as a person of contemporary history who did not need any protection. The author also came to the book series "Criminal Cases Without Example" by Günter Prodöhl (1st episode, Verlag Das neue Berlin , 1965, 6th edition), which appeared shortly after the film in the GDR and which was based on the relevant files to the conclusion that Lüdke was deliberately set up as a serial killer and that the film did not correspond to the facts.

media

Radio feature
Movies
radio play
  • Will Berthold: At night when the devil came , radio play from Europe radio play , 1983.

literature

Fiction

  • Will Berthold : At night when the devil came. Novel based on facts. Current book publisher, Bad Wörishofen 1959 (last as Bastei-Lübbe-Taschenbuch, Bergisch Gladbach 1989, ISBN 3-404-11357-8 ).
  • Horst Bosetzky : The devil of Köpenick . Documentary detective novel. Jaron Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-89773-599-6 .
  • Franz von Schmidt: Murder in the Twilight. Experienced criminal history. Verlag Deutsche Volksbücher, Stuttgart 1961.

Secondary literature

  • Ingrid Arias: The Viennese forensic medicine in National Socialism . Vienna 2009.
  • Johannes Albertus (Jan) Blaauw: Bruno Lüdke: Seriemoordenaar. Uitgeverij De Fontein, Baarn 1994 ISBN 90-261-0732-3 .
  • Johannes Albertus (Jan) Blaauw: Criminalistic charlatanisms. Bruno Lüdke - Germany's greatest mass murderer? In: Kriminalistik 48 (1994): pp. 705–712.
  • Axel Doßmann, Susanne Regener: Fabrication of a criminal. The criminal case Bruno Lüdke as media history , Spector Books, Leipzig 2018, ISBN 978-3-959-05034-0 .
  • Klaus Hermann: mass murderer Bruno Lüdke? In: Neuköllner Pitaval: true crime stories from Berlin , Rotbuch 1994, p. 113 ff.
  • Kathrin Kompisch and Frank Otto: At night when the devil came: Bruno Lüdke . In: dies .: Beasts of the Boulevard - The Germans and their serial killers , Militzke Verlag, Leipzig 2003, p. 175 ff.
  • Günter Prodöhl : Criminal cases without example , 1st episode. Verlag Das neue Berlin, 6th edition, Berlin 1965.
  • Susanne Regener: Media transformations of a (supposed) serial killer: The Bruno Lüdke case. In: Kriminologisches Journal 33 (2001): pp. 7-27.
  • Angelica Schwab: serial killer in reality and film. Troublemaker or stabilizer? A socio-aesthetic investigation (North American studies. Munich contributions to the culture and society of the USA, Canada and the Caribbean 1). Lit, Münster 2001, ISBN 3-8258-4542-7 .
  • Anna Maria Siegmund: Bruno Lüdke . In: this: "We determine sex life": Sexuality in the Third Reich - Between morality and racial madness . Heyne, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-453-13728-8 , p. 237 ff.
  • Patrick Wagner: The death of 'stupid Bruno'. (Introduction to the book 'Hitler's Criminalists. The German Police and National Socialism', pp. 7-13). Beck, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-406-49402-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ingrid Arias: The Vienna Forensic Medicine in the Service of National Socialist Biopolitics - Project Report (2009; PDF; 850 kB), pp. 10-16. (last accessed: September 6, 2010).
  2. ↑ Der Spiegel , 9/1950 (March 2, 1950), pp. 24-27. ( PDF )
  3. ↑ Axel Dossmann et al. Susanne Regener: Look angry! (PDF; 1.5 MB) In: TAZ, 8./9. September 2007 (last accessed: September 6, 2010).
personal data
SURNAME Lüdke, Bruno
BRIEF DESCRIPTION alleged German serial killer
DATE OF BIRTH April 3, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Koepenick
DATE OF DEATH April 8, 1944
Place of death Vienna