He murdered Hans Eugen Roth, a truck driver, near Herrenberg on 28 January 1948, in order to get hold of the new tires on his vehicle and sell them on the black market.

He was arrested, convicted of murder and aggravated robbery, and sentenced to death by the Tübingen Regional Court in May 1948.

[4] The execution was carried out with a guillotine on 18 February 1949, at six o'clock in the morning, in the courtyard of the prison at 18 Doblerstraße in Tübingen.

In the years between the end of the war and the entry into force of the Basic Law on 24 May 1949, German courts in the three western occupation zones imposed a total of 34 death sentences; 15 of these were carried out.

[6] In West Berlin, where the Basic Law applied only to a limited extent, capital punishment for civilian crimes was not abolished until 1951; the last person to be executed there was the robber-murderer Berthold Wehmeyer on 11 May 1949.