A German Doctor Admits Killing 30 Patients in his Care

A German doctor identified as Niels H has admitted killing 30 patients in his care by deliberately administering cardiovascular medication to them, throwing them into a critical condition just for the sake of resuscitating them and taking the glory.

He told the court-appointed psychiatrist that he had wanted to show off his “excellent” resuscitation skills. He is suspected of having killed 178 patients who were in his care at Delmenhorst hospital, near Bremen, in northern Germany, between 2003 and 2005 but he only admitted killing only 30.

A psychiatrist, Konstantin Karyofilis, told a court in Oldenburg that the accused had administered a cardiovascular drug by injecting it into the patients’ veins in order to orchestrate medical emergencies that would then require him to step in and resuscitate them in the hospital’s intensive care unit.

Niels H, who worked in other hospitals and at a retirement home in Germany and also as a paramedic in his spare time, is already serving a seven-and-a-half-year prison sentence, after being convicted of attempted murder in 2008. A colleague had discovered him giving a patient an overdose.

Files of patients that had been under his care are to be investigated including the body of a patient whose cause of death remained unclear, who had been buried, would be exhumed.

Earlier, Otto Dapunt, a former head of heart surgery at the Oldenburg clinic, who worked with Niels H for almost three years, told the court that the nurse had participated with an “above average regularity” in cases where reanimation was necessary.

He said while he had never considered this to be suspicious as such – particularly as the nurse was regularly on call and often had to deal with serious cases – he had often found Niels H to be “overly zealous” in wanting to take care of the more critical patients.

He was also often unusually moved by the deaths of his patients, Dapunt said, recalling one occasion when the accused took two patients who had died to the morgue and returned in a “completely distraught state”.