Rudolf Pleil

On February 16, 1958, Pleil hanged himself in his cell.

The beginning of the trial in the district court of Brunswick was set for October 31, 1950. Pleil had already been sentenced to 12 years in prison on a manslaughter charge by the Landgericht Braunschweig.

During the trial, Pleil claimed to suffer from mental illness, in the hopes of being institutionalized in lieu of prison. This ploy was unsuccessful, however; 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.

Between 1946 and 1947, Pleil worked as a frontier worker in the Harz and helped paying people, mostly women, to cross illegally to East and West. In these two years he raped and murdered at least 12 women, with help from two accomplices, Karl Hoffmann and Konrad Schüßler. On April 18, 1947, Pleil was arrested after the robbery of the Hamburg businessman Hermann Bennen, whose body, dismembered by axe blows, was found in the creek Zorgebach.

After the war, he worked as a sales representative, eventually starting his own small business on the side; he was soon fired, however, and his enterprise went out of business. In 1946, he moved from Zöblitz to Zorge in the southern Harz.

Pleil became a cook in a labor camp, where he killed and ate cats. After the invasion of the Red Army, he was hired as an auxiliary policeman in his home village. In 1945 During this time, he claimed that in his hometown to have shot and killed a drunken looting Soviet soldier while robbing him. However, he managed to escape punishment for this crime, as local residents helped bury the body in the forest.

Pleil married a young woman whom he had impregnated. Around the same time, he began sexually assaulting women at night. He admitted to having committed murders as early as 1945, but this could not be proven.

From 1945 to 1950, 13 police officers were murdered in the border area of this region, which led to the fact that police went on patrol only in groups. It was not difficult for frontier workers such as Pleil and his two accomplices to evade the patrols, especially as police authority ended at the zonal border. In addition, individual police departments, such as the Kriminalpolizei and the police, did not cooperate effectively. So it came to an investigation of murders of women at the border area to a more serious one, as a Schutzpolizist from Vienenburg reported that body parts were found in a well there. In fact, the corpses of two women whom Pleil had killed on that mountain were also found. Pleil and his accomplices killed at least three other women before they were arrested. When Pleil worked in a Celle prison as an executioner, he boasted that he had prior experience with killing, and had left two of his victims in the Vienenburg Well. Shortly afterward, he was arrested and charged with the murders of several women in the border area.

In 1939, when he was 15, he left home and began working as a butcher, but quit after a few weeks. He worked as a shipboy on barges on the Elbe and Oder. Here too, he operated smaller, illegal businesses. 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 came to the Kriegsmarine, where he was sentenced to one year in prison for theft. On October 26, 1943, he was found unfit for service due to epileptic seizures. After his dismissal worked as a waiter, he continued to suffer from seizures, which is why, according to a medical report, he was supposed to be sterilized. A bomb attack destroyed the operating room a few days before the scheduled appointment. Pleil had previously fathered an illegitimate child, which was taken care of by his sister.

The most frequent references to Rudolf Pleil came from the Harz, but also in other regions one knew about him and pointed towards this person. A resident of Hof, who maintained a small pension for returnees in the 1940s and was informed about the conditions on the border, thought that he still had an impressive memory of Pleil.

Rudolf Pleil (July 7, 1924 – February 18, 1958) was a German serial killer known as Der Totmacher (literally: "The Deadmaker"). He was convicted of killing a salesman and nine women, but claimed to have killed 25 people. Many of his crimes took place mainly in the Harz mountain range.

Pleil was born on July 7, 1924 in a small village, close to the border of former Czechoslovakia. His father was an industrial worker and communist. After the seizure of control by the Nazis, he was arrested and then moved with his family to the neighbouring Czech town of Vejprty. At the age of nine, Pleil had to support his parents through border smuggling and was repeatedly arrested. He did not attend school regularly because he had to earn money for his unemployed parents and his sister. His brother died prematurely and his older sister submitted to forced sterilization due to her epilepsy, according to Nazi law. At the age of 13, he had his first sexual experience with a prostitute.