Rudolf 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.

Rudolf Pleil
Born
Rudolf Pleil

July 7, 1924
Bärenstein, Erzgebirgskreis, Germany
DiedFebruary 18, 1958(1958-02-18) (aged 33)
Celle, West Germany
Cause of deathSuicide by hanging
Other namesThe Deathmaker
Criminal penaltyLife imprisonment
Details
Victims10-25
Span of crimes
1946–1947
CountryGermany
Date apprehended
April 1947

Biography

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 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 thirteen he had his first sexual experience with a prostitute.

In 1939, when he was fifteen, he left home and began working as a butcher, but broke off 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 as a waiter, but 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 conceived an illegitimate child, which was taken care of by his sister.[1]

Murders

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. During this time he felt like killing, as he shot at a Soviet soldier during a plundering operation and wanted to provide for his bleeding wound. Pleid married a young woman who was expecting a baby from him. He quickly realized that this could not satisfy his urge, and began to attack and harass women at night. He admitted to having committed some murders as early as 1945, but this could not be proven. After that, he worked as a sales representative and in turn made his own small business, which eventually led to his dismissal. In 1946, he moved from Zöblitz to Zorge in the southern Harz.[1]

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 slew and abused at least 12 women together with his 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 was found by the Axthieben dismembered in Zorgebach.[2]

Murders of women

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 responsibility at the zonal border ended and their course was not clear. In addition, the 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 in that mountain were also found. Since no mention was made of this reference, Pleil and his accomplices claimed at least three other women before his arrest.[3] Only when Pleil competed in a Celle prison as an executioner, boasting that he had experience in the area of killing and had to find two of his victims in the Vienenburg Well, he was charged with the murders of women in the border area.[2]

Pleil was ultimately convicted of 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 southern Harz. As a murder tool he used a hammer.
  • On August 19, Pleil and his accomplice Karl Hoffmann lured a 25-year-old woman to the grounds of the freight depot in the Upper Franconian border town of Hof. Hoffmann smashed her head with his knife while shaming her, before slitting her throat.
  • On September 2, the two men met a 25-year-old woman crossing the border at Bergen. Pleil slew her with a fieldstone, and Hoffmann buried the body in the forest.
  • In mid-September, they met a 25-year-old black woman from Trappstadt who was going towards the zonal border. Hoffmann killed her in the nearby forest and robbed her, decapitating her corpse afterwards.
  • At the end of November, Pleil offered to guide a young woman to help her cross the border. In the forest between Ellrich and Walkenried he suffered from a strong alcoholized epileptic seizure. When he came to, the girl lay slain next to him.
  • On December 12, Pleil and Schüßler robbed a 55-year-old widow near Nordhausen and beat her with clubs. The woman survived this attack, as the two had their sights on a liquor store. Later, she was a crucial witness in the trial.
  • On December 14, Pleil killed a 37-year-old woman in the guard booth of Vienenburg in the presence of Schüßler, then threw her body in a well. Five days later, a 44-year-old widow fell victim to Pleil and was also thrown into the well.

1947
  • On January 16, Pleil and Hoffmann offered a 20-year-old woman to take her to the East Zone. Pleil slew her near the road that runs between Abbenrode and Stapelburg. The corpse was then thrown into a stream.
  • In mid-February, Pleil killed a 49-year-old woman in a forest near Dudersieben, with Hoffmann robbing the corpse.
  • At the beginning of March, Pleil and Hoffmann committed another murder near Zorge in the Soviet occupation zone. Hoffmann killed the young woman with his knife and then separated her head. Her body was later found in the British sector.

The beginning of the trial in the district court of Brunswick was set to October 31, 1950.[4] Prior to that, because Pleil was already sentenced to 12 years in prison on a manslaughter charge by the Landgericht Braunschweig.

Background to the arrest

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.[5]

Pleil's arrest was initially not because of the murders of women, but because he had slain the merchant Hermann Bennen in a clash on a border crossing with a hatchet. Bennen was his second male victim. The court found Pleil's act as a manslaughter, as he was heavily intoxicated at the time. If he had been found guilty of murder, he would have received the death penalty. The remaining crimes remained unsolved, for which a superficial approach was shared by the police and judicial authorities. The fact that many of the victims were not from the area was also considered, as they were often people uprooted as a result of the war and post-war conditions. While in custody in Celle, Pleil finally confessed to further murders. In a memoir, he spread the gruesome details boastfully with the title Mein Kampf. He claimed to have committed a total of 25 murders, and thus one more than Fritz Haarmann, being able to call himself the "greatest murderer" of all.

The accomplices
  • Karl Hoffmann, born in 1913 in Hausdorf, was a tailor of women’s clothing by profession. He was considered brutal, callous and killed to get stolen goods. He died in prison in 1976.
  • Konrad Schüßler, from Leukersdorf, was an 18-year-old butcher. He was pardoned in the late 1970s.[4]

Trial

Pleil and his accomplices were persecuted by the press, at home and abroad. Foreign newspapers sent reporters. Pleil caught the attention and tried to focus on it as much as possible. In his remarks in court he exaggerated shamelessly, which had corresponding press reports. The smiling Pleil confessed in the so-called "Brunswick trial" to the numerous murders of women, boasting to have allegedly committed a total of 40 murders.[6]

Pleil was depicted as a murderous beast, with he himself speculating this would classify him as mentally ill. Then he would not have been sentenced to imprisonment, but instead, sent to a psychiatry. This process did not work out though, and 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 on February 16, 1958 in his cell.[4]

Witnesses and later analysis
  • Jutta Schultz, at the time a stenographer, described it as follows: Pleil was then hardly older than she was and yet it was not possible to estimate his true age. His hair was already very thin, he wore small round glasses and spoke only broken German. However, she noticed that he always had a small folder with him, in which he apparently took notes. He also appeared very self-confident and stated that he was the "dead man". She considered him, as well as the psychiatric reviewers, fully sane, her conclusion was: "He was a sadist and has every action before exactly adjusted: I find myself a woman, robbing her and then I make her cold. That was his logic. The guy knew exactly what he was doing. "[7]
  • Erich Helmer, a former prisons recollect, remembered that he was allowed to visit Pleil initially only in company, as this was considered dangerous. He was particularly reminded of one event: when he visited Pleil, he sat in his cell crying and showed him a letter from England in which Christian women wrote that they were praying for him. On that day, Helmer received from Pleil as a farewell three notebooks, which he had written in prison: a kind of diary entitled Mein Kampf - by Rudolf Pleil, Totmacher aD, in which he boasted of having committed 25 murders. Another font bore the title Without mercy I will kill the child and the old man, and after a hundred years one should still speak of me, it told of Pleil's youth and described his actions.[8]
  • The criminal psychologist Ulrich Zander said in his analysis of Pleil that he was not stupid, but rather very devious. A letter from Pleil he examined showed a clear reflection of the ego of Pleil and the overall picture of a murderer who considered it his special talent to be a "deadmaker".[9]
  • In 2007, the filmmaker Hans-Dieter Rutsch filmed the documentary film Der Totmacher Rudolf Pleil about the life of Rudolf Pleil for the Das Erste series Die großen Kriminalfälle.[10]
  • Hella Mock, the daughter of one of Rudolf Pleil's victims, tells in a newspaper article about her mother's diaries.[11]

Literature
  • Wolfgang Ullrich: The case of Rudolf Pleil and comrades. In: Archive 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 92ff.
  • Gerhard Feix: Death came by mail. From the history of the FRG-Kripo. Publisher Das Neue, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-360-00197-4.
  • Hans Pfeiffer: The compulsion to the series - serial murderers without mask, Militzke publishing house, OA (1996), ISBN 3-86189-729-6 , (on- line (P. 163 ff.)), Retrieved on May 30, 2014
  • Kathrin Kompisch, Frank Otto: Monster for the masses the Germans and their serial killers. Militzke, 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 "Deadmaker" Rudolf Pleil. In: border experiences compact: the border regime between South Thuringia and Bavaria / Hessen from 1945 to 1990. Leipzig / Hildburghausen 2009, ISBN 978-3-939611-35-6 , P. 277ff.
  • Does the herring have a soul? In: Der Spiegel. No. 29 , 1958 (online - Pleil Memoiren).
  • Wiltrud Wehner-Davin: The case Rudolf Pleil, Totmacher aD, in: Kriminalistik - independent journal for the criminal science and practice 1985, pp. 339–341.
gollark: 22cwt
gollark: 1 fluid ounces
gollark: 2 roods
gollark: 124 acres
gollark: 120 links

See also

References
  1. Fritz Barnstorf (1950). "The Pleil case" (in German). Der Spiegel. Missing or empty |url= (help)
  2. The Deadmaker Rudolf Pleil on daserste.de, retrieved on September 19, 2013
  3. Jörn Stachura (13 August 2013). "Pleil and the bad time" (in German). braunschweiger-zeitung.de. Retrieved 19 September 2013.
  4. Ulrich Zander (30 July 2013). "The beasts of no man's land" (in German). braunschweiger-zeitung.de. Retrieved 19 September 2013.
  5. Andreas Hartmann and Sabine Kunsting. Border Stories - Reports from the German No Man's Land (in German). Frankfurt am Main. p. 187. ISBN 3-10-029906-X.
  6. Jan Malte Andresen (2010). Diary 10 - Preview 2010. Dates, Anniversaries, Remembrance Days, Birthdays (in German). Hamburg. p. 325.
  7. At a table with serial killer Rudolf Pleil on braunschweiger-zeitung.de, retrieved on September 19, 2013
  8. Eye to eye with the Deadmaker on piener-zeitung.de, retrieved on September 19, 2013
  9. Jörn Stachura (26 July 2013). "I shook myself in disgust; Interview with Ulrich Zander" (in German). braunschweiger-zeitung.de. Retrieved 19 September 2013.
  10. TV movie about the murdering border guards on braunschweiger-zeitung.de, retrieved on September 19, 2013
  11. Survivors from the Wesseling reports: Mother fell victim to serial murder on Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, accessed on November 9, 2017
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