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Ex-Nurse Niels Högel Sentenced to Life for Murders of Delmenhorst Patients

An Oldenburg court found particular severity of guilt, as Högel admitted about 30 killings but denied any harm at his earlier hospital.

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Niels Högel, bearded, resting his chin on his hand and looking down in court

For years the patients of the intensive care unit in Delmenhorst had been dying under the hands of the man who seemed best at saving them. On Thursday, February 26, 2015, the regional court in Oldenburg sentenced that man, former nurse Niels Högel, to life in prison.

The court convicted him of murder in two cases, attempted murder combined with dangerous bodily harm in two more, and dangerous bodily harm in a fifth. Between March 2003 and June 2005, it found, he had tampered with five patients at the Delmenhorst hospital by giving them drugs no doctor had ordered, and some of them had died. The judges folded in the seven and a half years he had received in 2008 for an attempted murder at the same hospital, when he gave a patient the heart drug ajmaline without any medical reason in June 2005, and they found that his guilt was of particular severity, a finding that makes early release after fifteen years far harder.

The trial had produced something larger than its charges. Before the judges, Högel admitted killing about 30 patients between 2003 and 2005, far more than the indictment covered. Every one of those admissions, he insisted, concerned Delmenhorst, where he had worked from December 2002 until his arrest on July 8, 2005. At Klinikum Oldenburg, where he had worked from 1999 to 2002, he said, he had done nothing of the kind.

That denial would not survive. Investigators were already looking beyond the five cases the court had judged, and the inquiries that followed eventually led prosecutors back to Oldenburg as well.

What this story covers. The verdict, its date, the counts, the period of the crimes, the inclusion of the 2008 sentence, the finding of particular severity of guilt, the dates of Högel's work at both hospitals and his insistence that he had not harmed patients in Oldenburg are taken from the Oldenburg regional court's decision of March 17, 2026 (51 StVK 75/25), which recites the 2015 judgment. His admission in court to about 30 killings is recorded in the Nordwest-Zeitung report of July 15, 2015. The later investigation and the 2019 conviction for 85 murders are covered in this archive's later stories and its case file on Niels Högel. The photograph of Högel comes from news coverage of the case; the date it was taken is not established.

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