This entry exists to say that the story attached to Bruno Ludke is almost certainly false, and that he was very probably innocent of everything.
He was born in Kopenick, Berlin, on April 3, 1908, and had a significant learning disability. He worked as a horse-drawn delivery man for his family's laundry business. Under the Nazi programme against those it classified as asocial he was sterilised in 1940. The German records of the period call him the Gross, which is part of the invention this entry sets out to correct.
In January 1943 the body of Frieda Rosner was found in woodland at Kopenick. Ludke was known to have been in the area collecting laundry and was picked up. Under interrogation by the Kripo he confessed to killing her, and then, over months, to fifty more murders going back to 1928. He was a highly suggestible man being questioned by officers who had every incentive to close cases and no incentive to test the answers.
He was never charged and never tried. Under a Nazi decree he was declared criminally insane and handed to a medical facility in Vienna, where on April 8, 1944, he died after being injected as part of an experiment. He was thirty-six.
The case was published after the war and became famous. It was the basis of the 1957 film Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam, which was nominated for an Academy Award, and Ludke entered the reference books as the killer of fifty-one people. In the 2000s the German historians Axel Dossmann and Susanne Regener went back to the surviving files and found that the confessions did not fit the crimes, that the Kripo had assembled the case to clear its books and to demonstrate the doctrine that criminality was hereditary, and that there was no evidence Ludke had killed anyone. That is now the accepted view in Germany. He belongs in this archive as a victim of the police, not as a serial killer.