Rudolf Pleil was born in Elbing in East Prussia in 1924 and served in the Wehrmacht. After the war he lived in the Harz, in the strip of country where the Soviet and British zones met, and worked at various times as a lorry driver, a coal merchant and an informal border guide.
Germany in 1946 and 1947 was full of people trying to cross that line: refugees from the east, black marketeers, women looking for missing husbands, people going home. There were no records and no reliable way of establishing that anyone had ever arrived. Pleil offered to take women across, walked them into the woods, and killed them with a hammer, an axe or a knife. At least twenty-five died. He worked at times with two accompanying men.
He was arrested in 1947 on an unrelated matter and convicted of one murder in 1948. From prison he then began writing, unprompted, to prosecutors and to the press, announcing that he had killed a great many more and demanding recognition for it. He referred to himself as der beste Totmacher, the best death-maker, and produced a list of victims with details.
He was tried again at Braunschweig in 1950, convicted of nine murders and given life; he complained about the sentence and about not being credited with the rest. He hanged himself in his cell at Celle on February 15, 1958. He is the subject of the 1995 German film Der Totmacher, which dramatises a psychiatric examination of him.