A regional court in Berlin has delivered the maximum sentence available under German law to a 41-year-old palliative care physician, identified publicly only as Johannes M., after finding him guilty of murdering fifteen of his patients. The Landgericht Berlin announced on Wednesday that the doctor would serve a life sentence, while judges also determined that the "particular severity of guilt" applied to his case, a legal finding that makes early release far less likely.
The court further ordered that he be placed in preventive detention once his prison term concludes, meaning he could remain confined indefinitely even after serving his life sentence. Following an extensive evidentiary hearing, the panel of judges concluded that the physician had killed twelve women and three men during home visits carried out as part of his medical duties.
The ruling closely mirrored the arguments presented by prosecutors, who had called for exactly this combination of penalties. Judges also imposed a lifelong professional ban, barring the convicted doctor from ever practising medicine again, a measure the prosecution had likewise requested. The defence team had pushed back only against the preventive detention order, arguing it should not be imposed, but the court rejected that request.
The murders took place over a period stretching from September 2021 to July 2024, with victims ranging in age from 25 to 94. All of those killed were under the physician's care at the time of their deaths. According to prosecutors, the doctor administered a combination of an anaesthetic and a muscle relaxant that paralysed the respiratory muscles of his victims, causing respiratory arrest and death within minutes.
In several instances, the physician set fire to victims' apartments afterward in an apparent effort to destroy evidence and disguise the killings as accidents. Authorities documented at least five such arson attempts linked to the case.
One of these took place on July 8, 2024, when the doctor killed a 75-year-old man in the central Berlin district of Kreuzberg during the morning, then killed a 76-year-old woman in the nearby district of Neukölln later that same day. Investigators noted that his attempt to set fire to the second crime scene failed because the fire never properly caught.
Presiding judge Sylvia Busch described the case as incomprehensible, telling the court that the physician had not killed to spare his patients pain, nor out of any misguided sense of assisted dying. Instead, she said, he had been driven by a feeling of power.
Busch drew on a confession the physician gave only toward the end of the trial, in which he described feelings of omnipotence surrounding his actions. She told the court that dictionary definitions of the term point to something akin to divine omnipotence, or absolute power, and said the court had accepted that such a feeling of power was indeed what had motivated him.
The judge was emphatic that the case had nothing to do with euthanasia. Most of those killed had wanted to live, and many still had weeks, months, or even years of life ahead of them despite being under palliative care; only two of the fifteen victims were bedridden at the time of their deaths. All fifteen, she said, had wanted the right to decide for themselves how, where, and in whose presence they would eventually die.
As an illustration, the judge cited the case of a 25-year-old woman who had begun a new course of treatment for a thyroid tumour only days before she was killed. The woman had wanted to live, remained independent, and was still able to leave her apartment and meet friends. When the physician visited to kill her, he had brought his three-year-old son along with him.
Adding an unsettling detail to the case, German media reported that the defendant had written his doctoral thesis on the subject of homicide, opening the paper with the question, "Why do people kill?"
Earlier in the trial, on the Monday before the verdict was handed down, the defendant acknowledged responsibility for the deaths, telling the court that he had "killed people" and that he despaired at himself. He said that only at that point did he grasp the full extent of the suffering he had caused.
The physician had been employed by a nursing service specialising in palliative care throughout the period in which the killings occurred. It was this care provider that eventually grew suspicious of the pattern of deaths among patients under the doctor's supervision, prompting a formal police investigation. He was taken into custody in August 2024.
Investigators initially examined four suspicious deaths, but as the inquiry expanded, the number of cases under scrutiny continued to climb. Multiple relatives of the victims took part in the trial as joint plaintiffs, a role available under German law that allows victims' families to actively participate in criminal proceedings alongside the public prosecutor.
Separate from the fifteen murders for which he has now been convicted, the physician is suspected of having killed more than seventy additional patients. Judge Busch told the court that the murders covered by this verdict were likely only the tip of the iceberg. She pointed to telephone conversations the doctor had with his wife, in which he spoke of having killed "always, for a long time."
Prosecutors have confirmed that their investigation into these further suspected cases remains ongoing, meaning the final scope of his alleged crimes may not yet be fully known.
The case draws inevitable comparisons to that of Niels Högel, a German nurse who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2019 for murdering 85 patients in one of the country's most notorious healthcare killing sprees. More recently, in November, a palliative care nurse was also sentenced to life in prison for murdering ten patients and attempting to murder twenty-seven others through lethal injections. Together, these cases have renewed scrutiny over oversight and safeguards within Germany's palliative and long-term care systems.
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