Between 1977 and 1984, a series of killings in northern Italy and in Munich was claimed in letters and leaflets signed "Ludwig." The writers described themselves as the last heirs of Nazism and said the purpose of their lives was the death of those who betrayed "the true God." Their targets were people they judged immoral. Fifteen deaths were claimed in that name.
On March 4, 1984, two young men from Verona were caught at a disco in the province of Mantua while trying to set fire to it during a Carnival party attended by about 400 people. They were Wolfgang Abel, a German citizen who had grown up in the Verona area, and Marco Furlan. In February 1987 the assize court of Verona convicted both of ten of the deaths, recognized partial mental infirmity, and sentenced each to 30 years, later reduced to 27. The court acquitted them, for insufficient evidence, of the other killings claimed by Ludwig. Abel always said he was innocent. He was freed of his last legal restrictions in 2016 and died in October 2024.
Abel was born on March 25, 1959, Libero reported in 2010. Reports differ on where: Il Sole 24 Ore and L'Adige gave Munich in 2024, while Libero gave Duesseldorf. His father managed the Italian branch of a German insurance company, according to l'Unita's reports of the 1987 verdict, and the family settled at Negrar, in the hills outside Verona. Abel took a degree in mathematics with top marks.
Furlan was born in Padua on January 16, 1960, according to Libero. His father was a senior physician at Verona's main hospital: l'Unita described him in 1985 as head of the burns unit, and Libero in 2010 as head of plastic surgery. Furlan studied at university; l'Unita in 1985 said chemistry, and Libero said physics.
The two met at the same high school and became friends there. Both were drawn to the far right in Verona, l'Unita reported in 1985. A 2026 review in Il Sole 24 Ore of a new book on the case, by the journalist Alessandra Coppola, summarized her account: the two frequented extreme right-wing circles in Verona, were influenced by the writers Rene Guenon and Julius Evola, and moved in a milieu in the Borgo Trento district that, according to the book, led toward the neo-fascist movement Ordine Nuovo.
The name first appeared in November 1980, in a letter mailed from Bologna to the Venice newspaper Il Gazzettino. It claimed three killings going back to 1977 and contained details that, l'Unita reported in 1985, only the killers could have known. Later messages carried a Nazi eagle and a swastika and were sometimes written in runic script. Some bore the motto "Gott mit uns." Many arrived long after the event they claimed: the claim for a 1981 fire in Verona came two years later.
The slogans in the leaflets set out the writers' ideology in a few lines. "We are the last heirs of Nazism," one said after the killing of two friars in Vicenza. Another read: "Our faith is Nazism. Our justice is death. Our democracy is extermination." The victims were people the writers considered immoral, and the attacks moved over the years from single killings to fires set at places of entertainment.
The first death later claimed by Ludwig was that of Guerrino Spinelli, 33, who died of burns after his car was set on fire in Verona on August 25, 1977. It was with this case that the Verona investigating judge, Mario Sannite, later began his inquiry into the whole series.
Luciano Stefanato, 44, was stabbed to death in Padua on December 19, 1978, according to l'Unita's 1985 list of the attacks. Claudio Costa, 22, was stabbed to death in Venice on December 12, 1979.
Alice Maria Baretta was killed in Vicenza on December 20, 1980. Her surname appears in several spellings in the press of the period, including Beretta and Buretta. Her age was not given in the contemporary reports.
Luca Martinotti, a student from Turin, died in a fire set in Verona on May 24, 1981. L'Unita gave his age as 18 in 1985; Il Fatto Quotidiano gave it as 17 in 2023. In March 1984, l'Unita reported that two men from Verona, P. Q. and B. C., had been sent for trial over that fire, and that the case might be removed from the Ludwig list.
Abel and Furlan were charged with all five of these deaths. At the 1987 trial the court acquitted them of each for insufficient evidence. In law, none of these killings is theirs.
On the evening of July 20, 1982, two elderly men were attacked in Vicenza and died of their injuries. They were friars of the Servite order. Their names appear in two forms in the reporting. L'Unita in March 1984 and an ANSA report in 2022 gave them as Giuseppe Lovato and Gabriele Pigato; l'Unita's reports of 1985 and 1987 gave them as Mario Lovato, 70, and Giovanni Battista Pigato, 65. A Ludwig claim followed. "We are the last heirs of Nazism," it said.
In late February 1983, Armando Bison, 71, a priest of the Venturini fathers, in Trento, was attacked and killed. L'Adige gives the date of the attack as February 26, 1983; l'Unita's 1985 list gave February 28.
These three deaths were among the ten for which Abel and Furlan were convicted.
On the afternoon of Saturday, May 14, 1983, a fire was set during a screening at the Eros, an adult cinema in Milan. Five people in the audience died. A sixth victim was Livio Ceresoli, 46, a doctor who was passing by, stopped and went in to help. He was later awarded the gold medal for civil valor. Thirty-two people were injured, Il Fatto Quotidiano reported. The attack was claimed by Ludwig. The names of the five other victims were not given in the reporting of 2023 and 2024.
Il Fatto Quotidiano described it in 2023 as the most serious attack in Milan since the Piazza Fontana bombing of 1969, and yet one that the city had largely forgotten. The six deaths at the Eros were among the ten in the 1987 conviction.
In December 1983, a fire at a sex club in Amsterdam killed 13 people. Ludwig claimed it, but Dutch police attributed the fire to a dismissed employee seeking revenge, l'Unita reported in 1985. It was never part of the case against Abel and Furlan in Italy.
On the night of January 6 to 7, 1984, a fire was set at the Liverpool, a dance bar in Munich, where about 30 guests were present. Eight were injured. Corinna Tartarotti, a 20-year-old Italian woman who worked at the club, died of her burns about three months later. A motion put to the Munich city council in 2022 gave the month of her death as April 1984. The claim for the Munich fire was posted in Milan. Corinna Tartarotti's death was the tenth of the deaths for which the two men were convicted. Her name appears in the Italian press of the 1980s as Corinna Tarfarotti and in the Munich motion as Tatarotti; the city's later commemorations used Tartarotti.
German investigators traveled to Italy after the Milan claim and gathered files scattered across northern Italy, the Berliner Zeitung reported in 2023.
On March 4, 1984, about 400 young people were celebrating Carnival at the Melamara, a disco at Castiglione delle Stiviere in the province of Mantua. Abel and Furlan, dressed as Pierrots, were caught there with cans of gasoline trying to set the building on fire. The fire did not spread, and staff and patrons held the two men until police arrived. No one was killed.
What they said that night was reported in different ways. Libero later wrote that Abel told officers he had wanted to set the disco on fire but did not know why, and that Furlan said they wanted to see how the young people would react. In 1985 l'Unita reported that Furlan had called the attempt a "Carnival prank."
The two were held in prison in Mantua. In March 1984, Judge Sannite confirmed to l'Unita that both had received judicial notices for the premeditated double murder of the two friars in Vicenza. A man and a woman who had been nearby that evening identified both in a lineup at the prison. The man was certain. Abel's lawyer, Giovanni Rinaldi, said the identification had taken place but questioned the conditions in which it was held. An identikit image drawn after the killings strongly resembled Abel, l'Unita reported. Bavarian police were said to be preparing an extradition request for Abel over the Munich investigation.
Sannite told the paper that the question of their involvement had to be verified, and said he believed Ludwig was a sect with more than two members. That same month a new letter signed Ludwig reached a news agency in Rome, posted from Latina, saying the arrests did not mean the end of the organization and promising more attacks. It lacked the usual eagle and swastika, and l'Unita questioned whether it was genuine.
By June 1985 the inquiry was close to an end. Witnesses had identified the two men as the authors of several killings, some with certainty and some tentatively. Handwriting comparisons of papers taken from their homes were under way, and so was an analysis of saliva on the glue of envelopes that had carried Ludwig leaflets. Clothing found in Abel's apartment in Munich reportedly matched items found after the Liverpool fire. Psychiatric assessments had been ordered for both men.
Abel had by then attempted suicide three times, l'Unita reported, and was being held in the judicial psychiatric hospital at Reggio Emilia.
Others came under suspicion along the way. Before the arrests, a lecturer from Pavia, S. R., who had studied the Ludwig case, was jailed for about a week as a suspect and then released.
The trial was held before the Corte d'assise of Verona, presided over by Judge Edoardo Raimondo. On December 1, 1986, the two defendants sat together in the courtroom cage during what the press called the Processo Ludwig.
The prosecution relied on the Ludwig claim letters, which contained details only the authors could have known; on indentation traces on blank sheets found at the two men's homes, which matched the letters; and on personal items found at crime scenes that belonged to Abel. Searches of their homes in Verona and Munich had also turned up Nazi material, l'Unita reported in 1988.
The prosecutor, Pavone, asked for life imprisonment and told the court that the killings had been committed "out of boredom." The defense, led by the lawyers Piero Longo and Tiburzio De Zuani according to Il Fatto Quotidiano, argued for partial mental infirmity. Neither defendant confessed.
On February 10, 1987, after a full day in chambers, the court gave its verdict. Abel and Furlan, then 28 and 27, were found responsible for ten deaths: the two friars in Vicenza, Armando Bison in Trento, the six people who died at the Eros cinema, and Corinna Tartarotti in Munich. The court recognized partial mental infirmity and held it equal to the aggravating circumstances charged, which were premeditation, futile motives and cruelty. Each man was sentenced to 30 years in prison, to be followed by three years in a judicial psychiatric hospital. Abel was also ordered to be expelled from Italy after serving his sentence.
They were acquitted, for insufficient evidence, of the other killings claimed by Ludwig. Neither defendant was in court for the verdict. About fifty people attended, among them relatives of victims. The defendants' parents were not there.
The appeal opened in Venice in January 1988, before a court presided over by Judge Corrado Ambrogi, l'Unita reported on January 16. With the agreement of both sides, it ordered new psychiatric assessments from three experts from Padua. The prosecutor at the appeal, Stefano Dragone, said he was convinced Abel was wholly insane, pointing to an earlier expert finding of Abel's "absolute incapacity" to assess reality validly. The defense was also seeking a finding of total insanity, which would have meant commitment to a psychiatric hospital in place of prison. Furlan, silent until then, told the court he was ready to answer questions as long as there were no television cameras or photographers. Abel sent the court a telegram suggesting he might attend.
Messages signed Ludwig had continued to appear after the arrests, l'Unita noted, which fed suspicion that the organization had more than two members.
In 1988, before the final verdict, both men were released because the legal time limit on detention before a final judgment had expired, and they were placed under compulsory residence orders. Abel tried to slip away from his on a bicycle and was arrested, Il Fatto Quotidiano reported. The final judgment, which Il Fatto Quotidiano dates to 1991, reduced the sentence to 27 years. Blitz Quotidiano reported in 2010 that the 27 years were final and covered ten murders, with partial infirmity recognized and a care-home measure added.
Furlan fled his compulsory residence in 1991. He was found in May 1995 on Crete, where he had been living under a false name and working at an airport, and was returned to prison in Italy.
He left prison in 2008 after serving about 18 years, a term reduced by pardons and good conduct, and was placed on probation under the supervision of social services, Blitz Quotidiano reported. In September 2009 a Milan surveillance judge replaced the care-home measure with supervised liberty. In November 2010 the same judge, Cristina Ceffa, ruled that he was no longer socially dangerous and ended that measure. By then Furlan held a degree in computer engineering and worked for a software company. L'Adige gave a different account in 2016, saying Furlan had been released in 2010 after 13 years in Milan's Opera prison.
Abel, for his part, said in 2010 that there had been no quarrel with Furlan and that "our paths have separated," Libero reported.
Abel spent 23 years in prison, L'Adige reported. He was released in 2009 and placed under house arrest; Libero dated the start of the house arrest to June 5, 2009. The Austrian newspaper Der Standard reported that he was released after 23 years in all, having spent the last two of them under house arrest at his parents' villa near Verona.
After house arrest he was placed on supervised liberty because the courts still considered him socially dangerous. On November 24, 2016, L'Adige reported that he had been freed the previous day, when the Verona surveillance judge lifted his obligation to report to the police, the last measure still in force. He was 57 and living near Negrar. He served, in all, 32 years in prison and under house arrest, and he maintained throughout that he was innocent.
On December 13, 2018, Pope Francis received a delegation from the Catholic broadcaster Telepace in the Vatican's Clementine Hall. Among its members was Marco Furlan, accompanied by his spiritual adviser, Father Guido Todeschini. According to Todeschini, as reported by ANSA in 2022, the Pope knew who Furlan was. Furlan, in tears, asked for forgiveness, and the Pope placed his hands on his head.
In September 2021, Abel was found unconscious at home in Negrar by the caregiver who looked after his elderly mother. He had fallen, apparently after a sudden illness, and suffered a severe head injury. He was taken in serious condition to the Borgo Trento hospital in Verona and fell into a coma.
He did not recover. He was moved to the unit for patients in a vegetative state at the Sacro Cuore Don Calabria hospital in Negrar, and died there in late October 2024 without regaining consciousness. LaPresse reported his death on October 28, 2024, saying he had died three days earlier. He was 64, according to LaPresse and L'Adige.
For decades the Eros victims were largely forgotten. On May 14, 2023, the fortieth anniversary, the city of Milan placed a memorial in front of the former cinema. Its inscription records that between 1977 and 1984 the name Ludwig claimed 15 killings in all, and states that the group's accomplices and supporters have not been identified. Speakers and guests included the city councillor Lamberto Bertole, the journalists Alessandra Coppola, Ferruccio de Bortoli and Mario Calabresi, and Saverio Ferrari, author of a book on the Ludwig group and the Eros fire.
In Munich, a motion put to the city council in January 2022 asked for a plaque at the site of the Liverpool club, noting that the attack was remembered only by civil society. On January 7, 2022, the 38th anniversary, the city held its own commemoration. The second mayor, Katrin Habenschaden, called it a further step toward naming right-wing terror in Munich as such. A year later, about 150 people watched as the words "In memory of Corinna Tartarotti" were projected onto a facade at the former club, and the city's culture department said it was considering a permanent plaque.
Several questions have outlived the trials. The first is the count. Fifteen deaths were claimed in the name Ludwig, and many later news reports, including those on Abel's death, describe the two men as convicted of all fifteen. The 1987 verdict and the final sentence covered ten. The five earlier killings, from 1977 to 1981, ended in acquittals for insufficient evidence.
The second is whether the two acted alone. The investigating judge said in 1984 that he believed Ludwig had more than two members; and claims continued after the arrests. Alessandra Coppola's 2026 book, Il fuoco nero, argues that Ludwig was a more structured organization rooted in the extreme right of Verona.
The third is Abel's own position. He never confessed and always said he was innocent.
August 25, 1977: Guerrino Spinelli dies after his car is set on fire in Verona; the killing is later claimed by Ludwig (acquittal, 1987).
December 19, 1978: Luciano Stefanato is killed in Padua (claimed by Ludwig; acquittal, 1987).
December 12, 1979: Claudio Costa is killed in Venice (claimed by Ludwig; acquittal, 1987).
November 1980: the first letter signed Ludwig reaches Il Gazzettino in Venice, claiming three killings.
December 20, 1980: Alice Maria Baretta is killed in Vicenza (claimed by Ludwig; acquittal, 1987).
May 24, 1981: Luca Martinotti dies in a fire in Verona (claimed by Ludwig; acquittal, 1987).
July 20, 1982: two friars are killed in Vicenza (conviction).
February 1983: Armando Bison is killed in Trento (conviction).
May 14, 1983: six people die in the fire at the Eros cinema, Milan (conviction).
December 1983: a fire in Amsterdam kills 13; Ludwig claims it, Dutch police attribute it to someone else.
January 6 to 7, 1984: fire at the Liverpool club, Munich; Corinna Tartarotti dies of her burns in April (conviction).
March 4, 1984: Abel and Furlan are caught trying to set fire to the Melamara disco, Castiglione delle Stiviere.
March 1984: both receive judicial notices for the Vicenza killings.
February 10, 1987: Verona assize court convicts both of ten deaths; 30 years each, with partial mental infirmity.
January 1988: appeal opens in Venice; new psychiatric assessments ordered.
1988: both released when detention time limits expire; placed under compulsory residence.
1991: final judgment, 27 years; Furlan flees.
May 1995: Furlan arrested on Crete.
2008: Furlan leaves prison on probation.
2009: Abel leaves prison for house arrest.
November 2010: Furlan's last measure lifted.
November 2016: Abel's last measure lifted.
December 13, 2018: Furlan meets Pope Francis and asks forgiveness.
September 2021: Abel falls at home and falls into a coma.
May 14, 2023: Milan unveils a memorial to the Eros victims.
October 2024: Abel dies at Negrar.