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The nurse Niels Högel killed 31 patients at the Oldenburg Clinic (archive image)
Photo: picture alliance / Ingo Wagner / dpa
The former nurse Niels Högel killed 31 patients at the Oldenburg Clinic and 54 more at the Delmenhorst Clinic between February 2000 and June 2005.
In 2019, a court sentenced him to life imprisonment with subsequent preventive detention.
His previous superiors, who allegedly noticed Högel's murders, have not yet had to answer to court.
Now the Regional Court of Oldenburg has admitted the indictment against four former Högel executives to a significantly reduced extent.
They are a former managing director, a former medical director of the cardiological intensive care unit, a head of the nursing division of the cardiological intensive care unit and a former nursing director of the Oldenburg Clinic.
As the court announced, the opening of main proceedings against the head of the anesthesia ward at the Oldenburg Clinic was rejected.
The background to this is that the court only admitted the Oldenburg cases to trial.
The employees in Oldenburg are only responsible for protecting patients in their own hospital, argued the responsible chamber.
However, the head of the anesthesia ward was only charged with deaths in Delmenhorst.
A possible joint responsibility of the accused for Högel's actions in Delmenhorst is fundamentally excluded from a criminal law point of view, because the accused have no professional protection obligations towards patients at another clinic.
This only applies to the three accused offenses in-house, the court justified the move.
The Oldenburg clinic suggested Högel change in 2002 and provided him with a good certificate.
He then moved to the Delmenhorst Clinic, where he continued to murder.
The public prosecutor's office in Oldenburg had accused the former managing director of the Oldenburg Clinic and four other leading employees of manslaughter through neglect.
According to the court, defendants should not be regarded as perpetrators
But the judges also did not follow the prosecutor's office with regard to the allegation itself.
Unlike in the indictment, it could not be a manslaughter on the part of the doctors, it said.
Because that would presuppose that the accused wanted to "adopt" Högel's crimes and are therefore to be regarded as perpetrators in the legal sense.
However, there is only sufficient suspicion that they supported the "actually undesirable acts" by letting him do it out of fear of damage to their reputation.
In this case, however, it would only be an act of "aiding and abetting manslaughter" through omission.
A possible criminal liability for negligent homicide or failure to report planned criminal offenses - due to the statute of limitations - is not the subject of the indictment.
The judgment against Högel became final last year.
The trials against his former superiors had been postponed by the district court.
He is the main witness.
Until his own judgment became final, he had the right to refuse to testify.
Ref .: 5 Ks 23/19
fek / hip / dpa / AFP