Niels Högel is a German former nurse who was convicted of murdering patients under his care at two hospitals in Lower Saxony between 1999 and 2005. He was born on 30 December 1976 in Wilhelmshaven, where his father worked as a nurse; his mother worked as a paralegal. Högel completed his nursing training in 1997 at Sankt-Willehad Hospital in Wilhelmshaven before moving, in 1999, to the cardiac surgery intensive care unit — Ward 211 — of the Oldenburg Clinic.
In August 2001, staff at the Oldenburg Clinic held a meeting to discuss an unusual rise in resuscitations and deaths on the ward; more than half of the incidents had occurred during Högel's shifts. During a three-week sick leave that followed the meeting, deaths on the ward dropped sharply. Högel later said that at the time he believed he had been found out. He was moved to the anaesthesiology ward in 2001 and, in September 2002, confronted by the clinic's head physician after several patients under his care were found in unexplained, life-threatening conditions. Rather than face further scrutiny, Högel left the Oldenburg Clinic in October 2002, receiving a positive reference letter from its director of nursing.
Högel transferred that December to the Delmenhorst Clinic, where emergencies and deaths linked to arrhythmia and sudden drops in blood pressure again rose while he was on duty. On 22 June 2005, colleagues caught him manipulating a patient's syringe pump to administer an unauthorized dose of the heart medication ajmaline, and he was arrested. A police investigation found that deaths at the Delmenhorst Clinic had doubled during his employment, with most of one year's fatalities traceable to his work schedule. In December 2006 a regional court convicted Högel of attempted manslaughter over the June 2005 incident; an appeal led to a revised seven-and-a-half-year sentence in June 2008.
A renewed investigation opened in January 2014 led Högel to confess, that September, to three murders and two attempted murders, and he told investigators he had killed thirty additional patients. In February 2015 he was sentenced to life in prison, a sentence that became final the following month. Police then launched a much larger investigation, identifying 200 suspicious deaths and, through the special commission "Kardio," reevaluating more than 200 cases and exhuming 134 bodies in Germany, Poland, and Turkey. By November 2017 the number of victims attributed to Högel had risen to 106, and in January 2018 prosecutors formally charged him with murdering 100 patients, aged between 34 and 96, between February 2000 and June 2005.
The resulting trial opened in Oldenburg in October 2018 with 120 joint plaintiffs and ran 24 days. On 6 June 2019, the court convicted Högel on 85 counts of murder and acquitted him on the remaining 15, describing his motive — a desire to appear as a lifesaving hero during resuscitations — as legally "base." He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a finding of "severe gravity of guilt," precluding early release. The verdict became final in September 2020, after Germany's Federal Court of Justice dismissed appeals from Högel and a joint plaintiff. Investigators have said the confirmed convictions may represent only part of Högel's true victim total; public estimates have placed the number of deaths at roughly 300 over just over five years, though not all of these deaths were the subject of specific charges. Both hospitals later pledged to compensate victims' families and adopted additional post-mortem review procedures, and a 2022 trial of seven former supervisors accused of failing to act on suspicions about Högel ended in acquittals.
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