German male nurse’s kill count hits 90

A male nurse jailed for life two years ago for killing two hospital patients with lethal drug overdoses murdered at least 90 patients in total, and possibly twice as many, the police said Monday, calling it postwar Germany’s worst killing spree.

Niels Hoegel, 40, was jailed in February 2015 for two murders and four counts of attempted murder or causing bodily harm on intensive-care patients at the Delmenhorst hospital near the northern city of Bremen.

The police said Monday that forensics experts had since exhumed and analysed more than 130 additional bodies and had found evidence of a vastly higher death toll at two hospitals where Hoegel had worked between 1999 and 2005.

“The insights we were able to gain are terrifying, they surpass what we could have imagined,” said Johann Kuehme, police chief in the city of Oldenburg, where the other hospital is located.

Niels Hoegel, 40, was jailed in February 2015 for two murders and four counts of attempted murder on intensive-care patients

Hoegel admitted to injecting patients with drugs causing heart failure so he could then try to revive them and, when successful, shine as a saviour

The death toll “is unique in the history of the German republic,” said the chief police investigator in the case, Arne Schmidt.

There was “evidence for at least 90 murders, and at least as many (suspected) cases again that can no longer be proven,” he told a press conference, declaring himself “speechless” at the outcome. Hoegel admitted to injecting patients with drugs causing heart failure or circulatory collapse so he could then try to revive them and, when successful, shine as a saviour before his medical peers.