Rudolf Pleil

Rudolf Pleil , called Der Totmacher (* July 7, 1924 in Kühberg near Bärenstein , Erzgebirge , † February 16, 1958 in Celle ), was a German serial killer who committed at least 10, according to his own account 25 murders. He was the main culprit in a series of murders in 1946/1947, which took place mainly in the border area in the Harz .

Childhood and youth

Pleil was born in a village in the Saxon Ore Mountains, which was close to the border with what was then Czechoslovakia . His father was an industrial worker and communist . After the National Socialists seized power , he was arrested and then moved with his family to the neighboring Czech town of Weipert . At the age of nine, Pleil had to support his parents through border smuggling and was arrested several times for this. He did not attend school regularly because he had to earn money for his unemployed parents and his sister. His brother died early and his older sister was forcibly sterilized because of her epilepsy under Nazi law . He had his first sexual experience with a prostitute when he was thirteen .

In 1939, at the age of fifteen, he left home and began an apprenticeship as a butcher, which he broke off after a few weeks. He worked as a cabin boy on barges on the Elbe and Oder . Here, too, he ran smaller, illegal businesses on the side. In the summer of 1939 he was hired as a machine boy on a merchant ship to South America. After the beginning of the Second World War , he joined the Navy , where he was sentenced to one year in prison for theft. On October 26, 1943, he was found unfit for service because of epileptic seizures. After his release, he worked as a waiter, but continued to suffer from seizures, which is why, according to a medical certificate, he should also be forcibly sterilized. A bomb attack destroyed the operating room a few days before the scheduled appointment. Pleil had previously fathered an illegitimate child who was being fostered by his sister.

The alleged murders

Pleil became a cook in a labor camp, where he killed and ate cats. After the Red Army marched in , he was hired as an auxiliary policeman in his home village. During this time he felt the pleasure of killing when he shot a Soviet soldier during a plundering operation and wanted to treat his bleeding wound. Pleil married a young woman who was expecting a child from him. He quickly realized that this was not able to satisfy his instincts, and at night began to attack and harass women. He admitted to having committed some murders as early as 1945, but this could not be proven. He then worked as a sales representative and did his own small business on the side, which eventually led to his dismissal. In 1946 he moved from Zöblitz to Zorge in the southern Harz.

Between 1946 and 1947 Pleil worked as a frontier worker in the Harz Mountains and helped paying people, mostly women, to illegally cross the border to East and West. During these two years he killed and abused at least twelve women together with his two accomplices, Karl Hoffmann and Konrad Schüßler. On April 18, 1947, Pleil was arrested after the robbery and murder of the Hamburg merchant Hermann Bennen, whose body was found dismembered by ax blows in the Zorgebach .

The feminicides

From 1945 to 1950, 13 police officers were murdered in the border area of ​​this region, which resulted in the police only patrolling in groups. It was therefore not difficult for cross-border commuters like Pleil and his two accomplices to evade the controls, especially since the responsibility of the police ended at the zone border and its course was not clearly visible. In addition, the individual police forces such as the criminal police and the protection police did not work together very effectively. The investigations into the murders of women in the border area came to a serious mishap when a police officer from Vienenburg reported to the criminal police in Humboldtstrasse that body parts had been found in a well there. The said well actually contained the bodies of two women whom Pleil had killed. Since this notice was ignored, Pleil and his accomplices fell victim to at least three other women before he was arrested. It was only when Pleil applied to be an executioner in the prison in Celle and boasted that he had experience in the field of killing and that two of his victims were to be found in the Vienenburger Brunnen that he was associated with the murders of women in the border area.

Pleil was ultimately convicted for these acts:

1946

• On July 19, he abused and killed an approximately 25-year-old woman in the forest between Walkenried and Ellrich on the edge of the southern Harz. He used a hammer as a murder tool.
• On August 19, Pleil and his accomplice Karl Hoffmann lured a 25-year-old woman in the Upper Franconian border town of Hof to the premises of the freight yard. Hoffmann smashed her head with his knife while Pleil violated her. Then Hoffmann cut her throat.
• On September 2, the two met a 25-year-old woman at the Bergen border crossing. Pleil killed her with a boulder and assaulted her. Hoffmann buried the body in the forest.
• In mid-September they met a 25-year-old black marketeer. From Trappstadt they went together towards the zone border. Hoffmann killed the woman in the forest and robbed her. Then he cut off her head.
• At the end of November, Pleil offered to guide a young woman in order to smuggle her across the border. In the forest between Ellrich and Walkenried near the area of ​​the former Ellrich-Juliushütte satellite camp , he suffered an epileptic seizure, heavily alcoholized. When he came to, the girl was lying slain next to him.
• On December 12th, Pleil and Schüßler robbed a 55-year-old widow near Nordhausen and beat her with clubs. The woman survived this attack, as the two were only after their liquor supplies. She was later a witness in the process.
• On December 14th, Pleil killed a 37-year-old woman in the trainman's house in Vienenburg in the presence of Konrad Schüßler and threw the body into a well. Five days later, a 44-year-old widow fell victim to him there, who he also threw into the well.

1947

• On January 16, Pleil and Hoffmann offered a 20-year-old woman to take her to the Eastern Zone. Pleil killed them near the road that runs between Abbenrode and Stapelburg. The violated corpse was then thrown into a stream.
• In mid-February, Pleil killed a 49-year-old woman in a forest near Dudersieben and Hoffmann robbed her.
• In early March, Pleil and Hoffmann committed another female murder near Zorge within the Soviet-occupied zone. Hoffmann killed the unknown young woman with his knife and then severed her head. This was later found in the British sector.

The start of the trial before the Braunschweig Regional Court was set for October 31, 1950. Pleil had previously been sentenced to 12 years in prison by the Braunschweig Regional Court for manslaughter .

Background to the arrest

The most frequent references to Rudolf Pleil came from the Harz region, but people in other regions still knew about him and drew attention to him as a person. A resident from Hof ​​in Upper Franconia, who maintained a small pension for returnees in the 1940s and was informed about the conditions at the border, thought she could still remember him impressively.

Pleil's arrest was not initially due to the murder of women, but because he had killed the businessman Hermann Bennen with an ax while crossing the border. Bennen was his second male murder victim. The court only rated Pleil's act as manslaughter, as he was very drunk at the time of the crime. Had he been found guilty of murder, he would face the death penalty . The remaining crimes remained unsolved, for which superficial action by the police and judicial authorities was partly responsible. In addition, many of the victims did not come from the area. They were often people who had been uprooted as a result of the war and post-war conditions. While in custody in Celle, Pleil finally accused himself of further murders. In a memoir titled Mein Kampf, he boasted the gruesome details. Pleil claimed to have committed a total of 25 murders, one more than Fritz Haarmann , in order to be able to call himself the “greatest dead man”.

The accomplices

• Karl Hoffmann, born in Hausdorf in 1913, was a needle setter by profession. He was considered brutal, callous and killed in order to get hold of stolen goods. He died in prison in 1976.
• Konrad Schüßler from Leukersdorf in the Erzgebirge was a butcher, 18 years old at the time of the crime and was pardoned in the late 1970s .

process

The trial of Rudolf Pleil and his two accomplices Karl Hoffmann and Konrad Schüßler in Braunschweig was followed by the press at home and abroad. Foreign newspapers sent reporters. Pleil enjoyed the attention around himself and tried to be the center of attention as often as possible. In his statements in court, he shamelessly exaggerated, which resulted in corresponding press reports. With a smile, Pleil confessed to numerous murders of women in the so-called “Brunswick Trial”. He boasted that he had committed 40 murders in total.

Pleil was portrayed as a murderous beast. He himself speculated on being classified as insane as a result. Then he would not have been sentenced to imprisonment but, according to his assumption, would have been admitted to psychiatry. This trial tactic did not work, three weeks after the start of the trial, on November 17, 1950, Pleil and his two accomplices were each sentenced to life imprisonment for multiple murders. Pleil hanged himself in his cell on February 16, 1958.

Contemporary witnesses and later analyzes

• Jutta Schulz, then a shorthand typist at Pleil's interrogation, described him as follows: Pleil was hardly older than she was at the time, and yet she was unable to estimate his true age. His hair was already very thin, he wore small round glasses and only spoke broken German. However, she noticed that he always had a small folder with him in which he seemed to be making notes. He was also very self-confident and showed that he was the "dead man". Like the psychiatric experts, she considered him to be completely sane. Her conclusion was: “He was a sadist and carefully planned every act beforehand: I look for a woman, rob her and then I kill her. That was his logic. The guy knew exactly what he was doing. "
• Erich Helmer, a former prison chaplain, remembers that at first he was only allowed to visit Pleil when accompanied, as it was considered dangerous. One event in particular sticks in his memory: when he visited Pleil, he was sitting in his cell crying and showing him a letter from England in which Christian women wrote to him that they were praying for him. On that day Helmer von Pleil received three notebooks as parting, which the perpetrator had written in prison: a kind of diary with the title Mein Kampf - from Rudolf Pleil, retired Totmacher , in which he boasted that he had committed 25 murders. Another book was entitled Without mercy, I will kill children and old men, and after a hundred years they should still talk about me . It told of Pleil's youth and described his deeds.
• The criminal psychologist Ulrich Zander said in his analysis of Pleil that he was not stupid, but rather very cunning. A letter from Pleil examined by him shows a clear reflection of Pleil's ego and the overall picture of a murderer who considered it his special talent to be a "dead man".
• In 2007 the filmmaker Hans-Dieter Rutsch shot the documentary Der Totmacher Rudolf Pleil about the life of Rudolf Pleil for the ARD series The Great Criminal Cases.
• Hella Mock, the daughter of one of the victims Rudolf Pleils, tells about her mother's diaries in a newspaper article.

literature

• Wolfgang Ullrich: The case of Rudolf Pleil and comrades. In: Archives for Criminology. Volume 123, 1959, pp. 36-44, 101-110.
• Christian Zentner : Illustrated history of the Adenauer era. Munich 1984, ISBN 3-517-00845-1 , p. 92 ff.
• Gerhard Feix : Death came in the mail. From the history of the BRD Kripo. Verlag Das Neue, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-360-00197-4 .
• Hans Pfeiffer : The compulsion to series - serial killers without a mask. Militzke Verlag, OA (1996), ISBN 3-86189-729-6 , p. 163 ff.
• Kathrin Kompisch, Frank Otto: Monster for the masses, the Germans and their serial killers. Militzke Verlag, Leipzig 2004, ISBN 3-86189-722-9 .
• Kathrin Kompisch, Frank Otto: Devil in human form. The Germans and their serial killers. Bastei-Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 2006, ISBN 3-404-60571-3 .
• Reinhold Albert, Hans-Jürgen Salier : The "dead maker" Rudolf Pleil. In: Border experiences compact: the border regime between southern Thuringia and Bavaria / Hesse from 1945 to 1990. Leipzig / Hildburghausen 2009, ISBN 978-3-939611-35-6 , pp. 277 ff.
• Pleil Memoir: Does the Herring Have a Soul? In: Der Spiegel . No. 29 , 1958 ( online ).
• Wiltrud Wehner-Davin: The case of Rudolf Pleil, Totmacher ret. In: Kriminalistik - independent journal for criminal science and practice. 1985, pp. 339-341.

Web links

• The dead maker Rudolf Pleil. The first to air on October 22, 2007
• Firouz Vladi : Rudolf Pleil: The dead man also murdered in the southern Harz. Karstwanderweg.de

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Fritz Barnstorf, prison doctor: The Pleil case . In: Der Spiegel . No. 45 , 1950 ( online ).
2. ↑ ^{a b} The dead maker Rudolf Pleil. at daserste.de, accessed on September 19, 2013.
3. ↑ Jörn Stachura: Pleil and the bad time on braunschweiger-zeitung.de, August 13, 2013; Retrieved September 19, 2013.
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Ulrich Zander: The beasts from no man's land . braunschweiger-zeitung.de, July 30, 2013; Retrieved September 19, 2013.
5. ↑ Andreas Hartmann, Sabine Künsting: Border Stories - Reports from the German nowhere. Frankfurt / Main 1990, ISBN 3-10-029906-X , p. 187.
6. ↑ Jan Malte Andresen (Ed.): Diary 10 - Preview 2010. Dates | Anniversaries | Remembrance Days | Birthdays. Hamburg 2010, p. 325.
7. ↑ At a table with the serial killer Rudolf Pleil on braunschweiger-zeitung.de, accessed on September 19, 2013.
8. ↑ Eye to eye with the dead man on peiner-nachrichten.de, accessed on September 19, 2013.
9. ↑ Jörn Stachura: I shook myself with disgust . braunschweiger-zeitung.de, July 26, 2013; Interview with Ulrich Zander; Retrieved September 19, 2013.
10. ↑ TV film about the murdering border guide braunschweiger-zeitung.de, accessed on September 19, 2013.
11. ↑ Survivors from Wesseling reports: Mother fell victim to serial killer Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, accessed on November 9, 2017.