His brother died prematurely and his older sister submitted to forced sterilization due to her epilepsy, according to Nazi law.
[1] Between 1946 and 1947, Pleil worked as a frontier worker in the Harz and helped paying people, mostly women, to cross illegally to East and West.
On April 18, 1947, Pleil was arrested after the robbery of the Hamburg businessman Hermann Bennen, whose body, dismembered by axe blows, was found in the creek Zorgebach.
It was not difficult for frontier workers such as Pleil and his two accomplices to evade the patrols, especially as police authority ended at the zonal border.
[3] When Pleil worked in a Celle prison as an executioner, he boasted that he had prior experience with killing, and had left two of his victims in the Vienenburg Well.
[2] Pleil was ultimately convicted of several murders: The beginning of the trial in the district court of Brunswick was set for 31 October 1950.
A resident of Hof, who maintained a small pension for returnees in the 1940s and was informed about the conditions on the border, thought that he still had an impressive memory of Pleil.
If he had been found guilty of murder, he could have received a death sentence, as the West German judiciary still permitted capital punishment at the time.
In a memoir titled Mein Kampf - after Adolf Hitler’s autobiography - he claimed to have committed a total of 25 murders, and thus one more than Fritz Haarmann.
The German press covered the trial of Pleil and his accomplices extensively, and it eventually drew international media coverage as well.
This ploy was unsuccessful, however; three weeks after the start of the trial, on 17 November 1950, Pleil and his two accomplices were each sentenced to life imprisonment for multiple murders.