German doctor who murdered patients convicted as a serial killer

A palliative care doctor in Germany has been sentenced to life in prison for the murder of 15 patients.

A Berlin court found the 41-year-old medic, named only as Johannes M, guilty of killing twelve men and three women in their own homes between September 2021 and July 2024.

Johannes M’s seriously ill victims were aged between 25 and 94, but none were considered near to death.

Motive

The doctor claimed that murdering his patients saved them from “suffering and infirmity”.

But a mother whose 25-year-old daughter died at his hands told the court that she “never said she didn’t want to live anymore”, and the son of a 72-year-old victim said his mother “wanted to keep on living”.

Prosecutors said that Johannes M had “a lust for murder” and could find “no other motive for killing these people than the act of killing itself”.

Imposing the severest sentence allowed under German law, presiding Judge Sylvia Busch described the man at the centre of the case as a “serial killer”. He remains under investigation for the murder of a further 76 patients.

Assisted suicide

Assisted suicide is not illegal in Germany, having become unregulated in 2020 following a Supreme Court judgment that ruled against a ban put in place by the German Government in 2015.

Concerns have been raised that, were assisted suicide to become available in the UK, unscrupulous or ideologically driven doctors with a low value for life would be able to operate in a system where their actions are under less scrutiny, and that the premature deaths of patients is not only acceptable, but expected.

In 2022, Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson warned that the move to legalise assisted suicide in Scotland would make identifying “another Dr Harold Shipman” incredibly difficult.

And in 2018, former Director of the Christian Medical Fellowship pointed out that Britain’s current law prohibiting assisted suicide helps protect people from “rogue healthcare professionals” who kill their vulnerable patients. He had referred to the case of German nurse Niels Hoegel, who was charged with killing 97 people while working at two hospitals between 1999 and 2005. He was later convicted of 85 of these murders.

Zealous doctors

Parliament is set to consider assisted suicide in September after Lauren Edwards retabled Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill.

In response, UK General Practitioner Dr Katie Musgrave questioned what type of medic might want to become an assisted suicide specialist, should MPs force through the dangerous law.

She said: “As a patient, you would wish to see a sensitive and compassionate doctor at the end of your life. But what if you were met with a zealot, ideologically attached to the premise that life can and should be ended entirely on demand?”

The GP warned that “appalling as it is to consider, a self-selecting group of doctors who choose to specialise in assisted suicide, could even potentially attract bad actors. There are conditions identified by forensic psychologists relating to a fascination with, or desire to induce, death. So how will the system ensure that clinicians involved in the process are driven by acceptable motives.”

She concluded: “While it would be nice to believe that all doctors hold impeccable moral values, recent history provides plenty of evidence to the contrary.”