In prison in 1947, serving time for killing a man, Rudolf Pleil wrote to apply for a job as an executioner. As proof of his aptitude, he told the authorities to look in the well shaft of a railway guard's hut near Vienenburg. They did, and found the bodies of two women. That was how the police learned that the border guide who had killed a Hamburg merchant was also the man behind a series of murders of women along the zone border in the Harz, and it happened only because Pleil wanted credit for them.
He was born in 1924 and after the war lived in the Harz, where the British and Soviet zones met, working as a waiter, a black marketeer and a guide who took people across the line. In 1946 and 1947 the border was crossed constantly by refugees, traders, and women looking for missing husbands or going home, and nobody kept track of whether they arrived. Pleil offered to take women over, led them into the woods, beat them to death with an axe, a hammer or an iron bar, and raped them. He had two accomplices, Karl Hoffmann, born in 1913, and Konrad Schüßler, who was eighteen at the time; they helped lure the victims and dispose of the evidence, and robbed the dead. On December 14, 1946, with Schüßler present, he killed a thirty-seven-year-old woman in the guard's hut at Vienenburg and threw her body into the well; five days later he did the same to a forty-four-year-old widow. On January 16, 1947, he and Hoffmann offered to take a twenty-year-old woman to the East Zone, and Pleil killed her near the road between Abbenrode and Stapelburg. A widow of fifty-five whom he and Schüßler beat with clubs near Nordhausen survived and became a crucial witness.
He was caught for a different killing. In 1947 he murdered Hermann Bennen, a Hamburg merchant, and cut up the body with an axe that a forestry worker recognized as Pleil's; witnesses had seen the two together. Because he was said to have been very drunk, the Braunschweig court treated it as manslaughter rather than murder, and early in 1948 he was sentenced to twelve years.
In the Braunschweig jail he filled three school exercise books, 127 closely written pages, with an account of his killings, which he acknowledged with evident pleasure, and he called himself the best Totmacher, death-maker, of them all. He claimed twenty-five, at times forty, and said he wanted to be remembered as greater than Fritz Haarmann of Hanover. He also turned on his accomplices; he said Hoffmann's constant cutting off of heads disgusted him.
The trial of all three opened before the Braunschweig court on October 31, 1950, and was the most sensational of the early postwar years in Germany. In November 1950 Pleil was convicted of nine robbery-murders and an attempted murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with permanent loss of civil rights; West Germany had abolished the death penalty the year before. Hoffmann and Schüßler also received life. The judge said he believed Pleil had committed more murders than those charged, and five of the victims were never identified. Pleil's appeals failed, and he hanged himself in his cell at Celle in February 1958; the date is given as the 15th and the 18th. Hoffmann and Schüßler were released on clemency in the early 1970s. He is the subject of the 1995 film Der Totmacher, which dramatizes a psychiatric examination.