Bruno Lüdke (3 April 1908 – 8 April 1944) was a German alleged
serial killer
A serial killer (also called a serial murderer) is a person who murders three or more people,An offender can be anyone:
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* (This source only requires two people) with the killings taking place over a significant period of time in separat ...
. Police officials connected him to at least 51 murder victims, mainly women, killed in a 15-year period, which began in 1928 and ended with his arrest in 1943. He was killed during the
Nazi
Nazism (), formally named National Socialism (NS; , ), is the far-right politics, far-right Totalitarianism, totalitarian socio-political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Germany. During H ...
regime without a trial. It is now considered very likely that he did not commit any of the crimes he is accused of.
Arrest
Born in
Köpenick, Lüdke had a mild intellectual disability (he could not, for example, tell interrogators how many minutes there were in an hour) and worked as a
coachman
A coachman is a person who drives a Coach (carriage), coach or carriage, or similar horse-drawn vehicle. A coachman has also been called a coachee, coachy, whip, or hackman.
The coachman's first concern is to remain in full control of the hors ...
. He was well known by the local police as a petty thief and
peeping tom. On 31 January 1943, a woman was found murdered in the woods near Köpenick, strangled with her own shawl. The victim showed signs of post-mortem sexual abuse, and her purse was missing. Police brought in Lüdke for questioning on 18 March 1943, where he quickly confessed to murdering not only the woman but also several other victims, and was taken into custody. Witnesses report Lüdke showed signs of physical abuse and he stated that "they would kill me if I didn't confess".
Lüdke was never put on trial for any of the killings. Declared
insane, he was sent to the
SS-run Institute of Criminological Medicine in
Vienna
Vienna ( ; ; ) is the capital city, capital, List of largest cities in Austria, most populous city, and one of Federal states of Austria, nine federal states of Austria. It is Austria's primate city, with just over two million inhabitants. ...
, where medical experiments were carried out on him until his death, when an experiment went wrong in 1944.
Controversy and question of innocence
The 50-odd crime scenes showed no similarities in
modus operandi, signature, or motive. No fingerprints were ever found and no evidence against Lüdke has ever been presented. Attempts at reopening the case by members of the Kriminalrat (Detective Major) Faulhaber yielded no results. The true nature of the 51 murders remains unsolved.
Former
Dutch police chief Jan Blaauw investigated original police reports and found them to be inconclusive, incoherent, and vague. He also expressed his disbelief that a semi-illiterate, who once got caught stealing a chicken, could evade authorities for nearly 20 years, let alone get away with murder. Blaauw also proved that Lüdke could not have committed many of the crimes across Germany logistically.
The opinion of Lüdke as a murderer persisted until the 1990s. Today most historians believe Lüdke to be the victim of a frame-up, carried out by an ambitious Kriminalkommissar (Detective Captain) Franz, the heavily censored
Reichskriminalpolizeiamt, and the Nazi government, that saw people with intellectual disabilities as inferior and welcome scapegoats.
Film adaption
A 1957 movie directed by
Robert Siodmak, ''
Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam'' (English-language title ''The Devil Strikes at Night''), doubted Lüdke as one of Germany's worst serial killers. The successful film won the
German Film Award for Best Fiction Film and received a nomination for the
Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Memorial
In 2021, a ''
Stolperstein'' was erected at Lüdke's former home in memory of him as a victim of the Nazi regime. The campaign was initiated by the actor
Mario Adorf, who played Lüdke in ''Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam'' and later regretted the role after Lüdke's near-certain innocence was established.
See also
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List of serial killers by number of victims
References
Further reading
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1908 births
1944 deaths
People killed by Nazi Germany
People from Treptow-Köpenick
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