The Deathmaker: Rudolf Pleil and the Border Murders
In 1948, a man already in a German prison applied to be an official executioner. He signed the letter Rudolf Pleil, Totmacher a.D. — Deathmaker, retired. Then he told them where to look. They pumped out a well by the railway. They found the bodies.
Host Alexander’s Lawson traces Pleil’s crimes in the ruined Harz borderlands of 1946–47: women fleeing the Soviet zone, a guide who offered them a path through the woods, two accomplices, a merchant killed with an axe in Zorge, and a second trial in Braunschweig after the first sentence missed almost everything. Courts proved nine rape-murders plus…
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