German doctor charged with 15 murders between 2021 and 2024.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

A palliative care doctor in Berlin has been charged with 15 murders of patients who died between September 2021 and July 2024. The doctor was originally charged with 4 murders in August 2024 but investigators have uncovered other deaths. More exhumations on potential victims have been planned.

According to the article by Emily Atkinson that was published by the BBC on April 16, 2025:

A German palliative care doctor has been charged with murdering 15 of his patients using a cocktail of lethal drugs.

Prosecutors in Berlin have accused the 40-year-old of setting fire to the homes of some of his suspected victims to cover his tracks.

He allegedly killed 12 women and three men between September 2021 and July 2024, though prosecutors have said they believe that total could rise.

The doctor, who has not been named due to strict privacy laws in Germany, has not admitted to the charges, prosecutors said.

The article by Atkinson continued:

He is accused of administering an anaesthetic and a muscle relaxant to his patients without their knowledge or consent.

The relaxant "paralysed the respiratory muscles, leading to respiratory arrest and death within minutes", the prosecutor's office said in a statement.

He worked in several German states, and the ages of those whose deaths are being treated as suspicious range from 25 to 94.

Notice how the deaths are described as:

administering an anaesthetic and a muscle relaxant, relaxant "paralysed the respiratory muscles, leading to respiratory arrest

Based on the way he killed, the physician likely received training from a euthanasia group.

The euthanasia lobby will claim that legalizing euthanasia prevents medical murders because euthanasia is an option and it is regulated.

In 2019, Niels Högel, a nurse in Oldenburg, Germany, was convicted of murdering 85 patients from 2000 to 2005, and investigators suspect the true number of victims is far higher. Mr. Högel was found to have administered drug overdoses that caused cardiac arrest so that he could revive the patients and be celebrated as a hero.

Cases of medical practitioners intentionally killing patients is not uncommon. Medical practitioners who have been convicted of murdering patients, include: Dr. Harold Shipman, Charles Cullen, Dr Virginia Soares de Souza, Aino Nykopp-Koski and Dr. Michael Swango.

Professor Christopher Lyon, who teaches at the University of York (UK) published a research paper on August 2, 2024 stating that Canada's (MAiD) euthanasia law enables healthcare serial killers (HSK).

It is not safe to give doctors, or others, the right in law to cause the death of others.

When a nation legalizes euthanasia, it gives medical professionals, who were already killing their patients, the legal right to proceed.

Euthanasia becomes the perfect cover-up for medical murder.

Researcher argues health-care serial killer could take advantage of Canada's assisted dying program

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Christopher Lyon

Professor Christopher Lyon, who teaches at the University of York in the UK, recently published a research article concluding that Canada's (MAiD) euthanasia law enables healthcare serial killers (HSK).

(Read the research article with references (Link).

The National Post published an article by Sharon Kirkey on August 9, 2024. Kirkey interviews Lyon and tries to challenge his research.

Previous article: Does Canada's euthanasia law enable healthcare serial killing? (Link).

 Kirkey introduces her article by stating:

“Canada’s MAID (medical assistance in dying) system is criticized as the most permissive or least safeguarded in the world, raising the question of whether it could protect patients who fit the clinical profile of adult victims of HSK (health-care serial killers) from a killer working as a MAID provider,” Christopher Lyon, a Canadian social scientist who teaches at the University of York in the United Kingdom, wrote in a newly published paper.

Insufficient vetting of staff, poor surveillance and oversight, and a failure by authorities to act on concerns raised by suspicious colleagues or witnesses have allowed health-care serial killers to go undetected for considerable periods, Lyon wrote in the journal HEC (HealthCare Ethics Committee) Forum, a partner journal of the American Society for Humanities and Bioethics.

Canada’s MAID regime “has similar features,” Lyon wrote, “with added opportunities for killing” afforded by broad Criminal Code exemptions from homicide and suicide offences “amid broad patient eligibility criteria.”

MAID’s oversight and delivery needs a “radical restructuring” to help mitigate the possibility of abuses, he said.

Kirkey gives some insight into Lyon's concerns. Kirkey writes:

Lyon’s 77-year-old father died by MAID in 2021 in a Victoria hospital room, over the family’s objections that he had not been properly assessed. He’d had bouts of depression and suicidal thinking, but was approved for MAID nonetheless. In essays, Lyon has described his father’s MAID provider as “Death.”

Lyon explains to Kirkey that he is not saying that there are criminally culpable homicides occurring within Canada's MAiD regime, but rather he is saying that based on the law it could happen because the MAiD regime protects homicidal personalities and enables them to legally kill.

Kirkey quotes Lyon as stating:

“I want to be clear: I’m not calling anybody out there a murderer or a serial killer in a culpable sense,” Lyon said in an interview. No police investigations or criminal charges are known.

Euthanasia “is fundamentally homicide by lethal injection,” he said. “Whatever one’s views are on MAID, it should be foremost in our minds that, at a basic level, we are empowering a privileged class of people to poison disabled and distressed people to death.

“A key reference point is health-care serial killers,” Lyon said. “Patient safety and ethical and rigorous medical practice demands that we be extremely careful about who we let do this, but I don’t see that happening in Canada.”

“Disabled people have been raising the risks of MAID being attractive to ‘angel of death’ characters for a very long time,” he added.