A 44-year-old nurse in Germany has been sentenced to life imprisonment for killing 10 patients and attempting to murder 27 others with lethal injections in an effort to reduce his workload.
Prosecutors accused the unnamed nurse of playing “master of life and death” over those in his care while working at a hospital in Würselen, near the city of Aachen in western Germany. The court found him guilty of committing the crimes between December 2023 and May 2024.
Investigations revealed that the nurse injected mostly elderly patients with excessive doses of sedatives and painkillers including morphine and midazolam, a drug sometimes used in U.S. executions simply to make his night shifts easier.
Throughout the trial, the defendant showed no compassion or remorse. Prosecutors described him as having a severe personality disorder, working “without enthusiasm or motivation,” and displaying “irritation and a lack of empathy” toward patients who required intensive care.
The court ruled that his crimes carried a “particular severity of guilt,” meaning he will not be eligible for early release after 15 years, which is typically possible under German law.
Records show that the nurse completed his training in 2007 and had worked for several hospitals, including in Cologne, before joining the Würselen facility in 2020. He was arrested in the summer of 2024 after a spike in suspicious deaths on his ward raised alarms among hospital authorities.
Officials have since carried out multiple exhumations to determine whether there are additional victims, suggesting that a second trial may follow.
The case has drawn comparisons to that of Niels Högel, another German nurse sentenced to life imprisonment in 2019 for murdering 85 patients between 2000 and 2005 one of modern Germany’s deadliest medical serial killers.
