The woman was found on January 31, 1943, in the woods near Köpenick, on the southeastern edge of Berlin, strangled with her own shawl. Her purse was gone, and there were signs she had been sexually abused after death. Later accounts name her as Frieda Rösner. The Kriminalpolizei knew a man in the area who seemed to fit: Bruno Lüdke, thirty-four, a coachman and day laborer with an intellectual disability, known to local officers as a petty thief and a peeping Tom. On March 18 they brought him in.
He confessed almost at once, first to her death and then, over the months of questioning that followed, to dozens more, going back to 1928. The figure most often repeated is fifty-one; a reviewer of the historians' later study put the number of unsolved murders eventually hung on him at eighty-four. He could not, one of his interrogators recorded, say how many minutes there are in an hour. Witnesses said he showed signs of having been beaten, and he is reported to have said that "they would kill me if I didn't confess."
He had been in the hands of the state before. Born in Köpenick on April 3, 1908, a former special-school pupil, he was picked up in the late 1930s for a series of small thefts, and under the regime's hereditary-health laws doctors diagnosed him with "congenital feeble-mindedness." In 1940 a Hereditary Health Court ordered him sterilized. The officer who took charge of his case in 1943, Kriminalkommissar Heinrich Franz, has been described by the historians who studied the files as overambitious and trained in racial biology. The evidence they assembled suggests that senior figures in the Reich Security Main Office wanted to use the case as a pretext for a new law against people the regime classed as asocial.
None of it was ever tested. Lüdke was never charged and never tried. Declared insane, he was transferred on December 10, 1943, to the Institute of Criminal Medicine in Vienna, where experiments were carried out on him, and he was killed there in April 1944. The Die Welt headline on a 2018 account called it an execution. Most sources give the date of death as April 8; some older reference works give April 26. He was thirty-six.
The case was kept secret under the Nazis and became famous after them. Beginning in 1950, magazine exposés presented the Lüdke files as proof of a monster, and some of the officers involved were recast as politically independent professionals. In April 1958, according to the historians, a court in Hamburg gave the story of the mass murderer legal sanction. The year before, Robert Siodmak's film Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam, released in English as The Devil Strikes at Night, had made him one of Germany's most notorious killers, with the young Mario Adorf in the role. It won the German Film Award for best feature and was nominated for the Academy Award for best foreign language film. Reference books called him the deadliest serial killer in continental Europe.
The case against him began to fall apart in the 1990s. Jan A. Blaauw, a former Dutch police chief, went through the original reports and found them vague, incoherent and inconclusive. He could not believe that a semi-literate man once caught stealing a chicken had evaded the police for nearly twenty years, and he showed that Lüdke could not physically have committed many of the crimes, spread as they were across Germany. The fifty-odd crime scenes had no common method, signature or motive, and no fingerprints or other evidence tied him to any of them.
In 2018 the historian Axel Doßmann and the cultural scholar Susanne Regener published Fabrikation eines Verbrechers, The Fabrication of a Criminal, a study of the case built from the police photographs, body casts, medical reports, interrogation records and death certificate that had been used for decades to prove his guilt. Their conclusion, now the accepted one in Germany, is that there is no evidence Lüdke killed anyone. Adorf, who came to regret the role, campaigned for a memorial, and in 2021 a Stolperstein was set into the pavement outside Lüdke's former home. It reads, in German: Bruno Lüdke lived here. Born 1908. Forcibly sterilized 1940. Arrested March 18, 1943. Transferred December 10, 1943, to the Institute of Criminal Medicine, Vienna. Murdered April 1944. The woman found in the Köpenick woods in 1943, and the many other deaths once put down to him, remain unsolved.