Bruno Lüdke is said to have murdered 53 people, six of them in Thuringia. In the life of the alleged serial killer, however, there was only one murder, and that was of himself. Mirko Krüger tells this case as a dark chapter in German criminal history. It stretches from the Weimar Republic through the Third Reich to reunified Germany. This book brings together 20 criminal cases. They include Goethe's yes to the death penalty as well as two series of bank robberies in the 1990s. The author traces the trail of a murderer convicted after 40 years by DNA evidence back to his youth. He unravels in detail the unbelievable failure of the Criminal Investigation Department and the Stasi in two cases of art theft.