Banality of evil: German nurse kills 10 patients - to reduce workload

It sounds like a line from a Kafka play rewritten by Kafka’s nurse. A man whose job was to ease suffering decided the easiest way to do that was to remove the sufferer entirely.

According to a BBC report, a palliative care nurse in Germany has been sentenced to life in prison for murdering 10 patients and attempting to kill 27 others. His motive? Not money. Not mercy. Just the mundane — to lighten his workload during overnight shifts.

Between December 2023 and May 2024, this nameless nurse — anonymous by law, infamous by act — played God with a syringe. Prosecutors said he injected elderly patients with morphine and midazolam, not to relieve their pain but to make his rounds quieter, his night easier, his burden lighter. He showed, the court heard, “irritation” at those who demanded too much care — as if suffering were an inconvenience on the shift roster.

The court in Aachen called it a crime of “particular severity of guilt,” ensuring he will never walk free again. But what’s truly chilling is not just the scale of his actions — it’s their ordinariness. A man trained since 2007 to heal became, by 2024, an executioner in scrubs, armed not with malice but with indifference.

Investigators are now exhuming more bodies, probing whether this was just the visible tip of a career-long pattern. If confirmed, he could rival the grim legacy of Niels Högel — the German nurse sentenced in 2019 for killing 85 patients in northern hospitals between 1999 and 2005. Högel wanted to play hero: inject, cause cardiac arrest, then resuscitate — a perverse performance of saviourhood.

This new killer? He wanted peace and quiet.

That’s the most terrifying part. Evil, it turns out, doesn’t always come snarling. Sometimes it sighs, glances at the clock, and reaches for the morphine. It isn’t ideological or even sadistic — just tired, overworked, and catastrophically devoid of empathy.

In that sense, this case isn’t only about a man who murdered ten people. It’s about the slow erosion of compassion in systems that reduce care to shift patterns and metrics. When life becomes data, death becomes a shortcut.

Germany has seen this before. It will see it again. Because as Hannah Arendt might have said of this nurse, it wasn’t the devil in him that killed those patients — it was the paperwork.