Flax landing processes

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The Flachslanden trials were a series of criminal proceedings before the district court of Ansbach that lasted from 1993 to 1995 . 19 people from Flachslanden and the surrounding area were charged with mass child abuse , which led to the conviction of 13 suspects with up to 14 years in prison. Six proceedings were dropped because, in the opinion of the court, the children could no longer be expected to continue trials.

trigger

The first clues arose in 1991 when a five-year-old girl made questionable statements to a neighbor. The village priest's wife informed the education authority, which in turn informed the special school that the girl's siblings attended. However, no findings resulted from this. In 1993, the four five- to twelve-year-old daughters of the couple in question were distributed to various foster families in the Ansbach district - the reason was not suspected sexual abuse, but other intolerable conditions in the family. Only the two-year-old son stayed with the couple. At the beginning of February 1993, one of the girls at school reported unequivocally about sexual assault at home, whereupon the Ansbach District Youth Welfare Office was informed. Since the children were silent again in front of the investigating judge and the parents denied everything, the proceedings were initially discontinued. In the meantime, the two oldest girls in the foster families had so much confidence that they reported independently, but almost simultaneously, of abuse in the family: relatives and acquaintances had abused them, the mother had held them and other relatives had "helped", the mouth had been taped shut or an apple stuck inside so that they couldn't scream. If they resisted, their father would beat them. The crime scenes were the apartment in Flachslanden and the family's caravans on the nearby campsite. Photos and videos were taken and other relatives were also abused.

Arrests, trials, media coverage

On June 30, 1993, more than 100 police officers were on duty to arrest 15 men and 5 women from Flachslanden, Ansbach and Nuremberg. In October 1993 the police investigated a total of 27 people, 7 of them women. 14 people came into custody. The media response was enormous, television teams and journalists from all over Europe came to the small village. Parts of the media named the accused by their full names even before the conviction (partly not carried out). The mirror described the allegations in all details. On February 24, 1994, the series of main hearings against defendants who had partly confessed to them began. The first two sentences were sentenced to eight and a half and three and a half years in prison. Based on these first final judgments, judges and public prosecutors tried mostly with success to elicit confessions from the other defendants by promising to reduce their sentences in order to spare the children statements (according to another interpretation: to close the unpleasant case). "How the Ansbach court obtained confessions from the mostly intellectually reduced defendants and how it urged the defense attorneys to offer penalty discounts", was also viewed increasingly critically.

Furthermore, the whole place Flachslanden was increasingly stigmatized by various mass media: Due to the clear conditions in the village, some media asked whether such extensive abuse could have gone unnoticed and at least implicitly put the place under the general suspicion of complicity. For example, “ the current ” Flachslanden referred to as “the child molester's village ” and “scandalous village”. The regional Fränkische Landeszeitung (which gets its coat from the Nürnberger Nachrichten ), but also Der Spiegel tried to counter this. The mayor of Flachslanden turned against the "vilification" of the whole village.

On March 25, 1994, the "village doctor" (the only general practitioner in town) was arrested because he was severely incriminated by an abused girl. At the time of his arrest, the doctor had already sold his practice to take over an ENT practice in Nuremberg. Since, in contrast to the previous defendants, he was one of the “ dignitaries ”, the population of the place “besieged” by journalists and television teams reacted with disbelief - also because the previous defendants had been dismissed as “marginalized societies” and “neglected outsider family”. Shortly afterwards it became known that the doctor had given back his medical license in 1982 because of billing fraud in Nördlingen and had resigned from his numerous offices at the time.

The doctor, who was to be heard as a witness on March 30, 1994, denied any involvement and, like the father of the main witness, refused to testify. On the other hand, the mother made a confession. The process climate deteriorated significantly when a lawyer questioned the expert opinion on the girl's credibility, described the child psychologist as an “auxiliary body of the public prosecutor's office” and formulated the accusation, which was later repeated by other lawyers, “that the girl was pervertedly misusing her imagination by several men and reality cannot separate and indiscriminately raise new allegations against people from their former environment ”.

In October 1994 the court sentenced the main defendant to 14 years in prison for rape and sexual abuse of minors. That was the highest sentence in the eight-month trial. The main defendant raped or sexually abused his two eldest daughters, a granddaughter and his son, who was not even a year old. His wife had previously been sentenced to ten years in prison for involvement in the crime.

Termination of the process series

The Youth Chamber of the Landgericht Ansbach began on March 1, 1995, the assignment of a public defender of the 13th accused and the corresponding trial from what was described by the media as "one-time process" and - against the background of simultaneously running Worms processes - criticism grew on certain aspects of the process. The criminal chamber, on the other hand, said that since the start of the main hearing on January 19, 1995, the defense attorney had attempted “purposefully and systematically” “by using a specific negotiating strategy to simply prevent criminal proceedings from being conducted”. The public defender had applied for the suspension of the proceedings in February in order to have the constitutional court clarify the question of the composition of the lay judges. At that point in time (after twelve trials) there were no more lay judges at the Ansbach district court who had not already participated in convictions, which raised the problem of bias . The lawyer had previously pointed out various other problems, including the increasing demands on the children in the lengthy series of trials. Among other things, the lawyer brought a judicial interrogation of the then twelve-year-old main witness: The child who attended a school for people with intellectual disabilities was allegedly presented with 822 questions and photos in just under four hours. He also criticized the fact that, in his opinion, leading questions had also been asked in the judicial interrogations . The lawyer was successful with a complaint to the Nuremberg Higher Regional Court: The decisions of the youth chamber to cancel the assignment were canceled in May 1995.

At the beginning of August 1995, the Ansbach criminal chamber decided to suspend the remaining six proceedings, as, according to a medical report, the victims could no longer be expected to appear in court. Without the witnesses, the Chamber did not consider it promising to pursue the proceedings, which is why they decided not to allow the remaining charges and the corresponding main hearings, including those against the grandparents of the victims and against the "village doctor" from Flachslanden. Thus both the possibility of a guilty verdict as well as an acquittal with the accompanying rehabilitation of these accused was given.

consequences

After a corresponding BGH ruling, there was a single successful revision ; the ruling also contains specifications for the use of court reports. In accordance with the general discontinuation of the series of proceedings in 1995 ( see above ), the proceedings against this accused were also discontinued after the appeal, as there was only one suspicion of an offense under Section 176 (1) StGB as a so-called less serious case of sexual abuse , the public interest in criminal prosecution could be "eliminated" through conditions.

The “Flachslanden-Complex” ( Gisela Friedrichsen ) contributed to the general discussion about the reliability of children's statements and criminal procedural credibility reports. Problems arose due to the length of the process and the increasing demands on the children.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Gisela Friedrichsen: Can something be . In: Der Spiegel . No. 32 , 1994, pp. 46-51 ( Online - Aug. 8, 1994 ).
  2. ^ A b Gisela Friedrichsen: Targeted and planned . In: Der Spiegel . No. 12 , 1995, p. 84-91 ( online - March 20, 1995 ).
  3. ↑ “The Current” No. 14/1994 (April 2, 1994), p. 14: News from the scandal village: The family doctor was also a child molester.
  4. ↑ Harald Baumer: "It's bad when suddenly an entire village is vilified". In: Nürnberger Nachrichten of March 29, 1994, p. 3.
  5. ^ Nürnberger Nachrichten of 26./27. March 1994. p. 21: doctor arrested ; Nürnberger Nachrichten of March 28, 1994, p. 15: The doctor was not noticed anywhere ; Harald Baumer: A dark past life? In: Nürnberger Nachrichten of March 30, 1994, p. 20, based on: Zweierlei Schrift . In: Der Spiegel . No. 31 , 1982, pp. 39-40 ( Online - Aug. 2, 1982 ).
  6. ↑ Axel Guthmann: The mother testifies. In: Nürnberger Nachrichten v. March 31/1. April 1994, p. 19.
  7. ↑ Rudolf drift homes . In: Der Spiegel . No. 44 , 1994, pp. 280 ( Online - Oct. 31, 1994 ).
  8. ↑ a b Der Spiegel reported… In: Der Spiegel . No. 20 , 1995, p. 254 ( online - May 15, 1995 ).
  9. ↑ Harald Baumer: Questions to the children are taboo in the future . In: Nürnberger Nachrichten of August 3, 1995, p. 3.
  10. ^ BGH judgment on the appeal of a convicted person
  11. ↑ See on the further discussions z. E.g .: Marion Schreiber, Barbara Supp, Hans-Jörg Vehlewald: Destruction on installments . In: Der Spiegel . No. 35 , 1996, pp. 30-38 ( Online - Aug. 26, 1996 ). Data in the dark . In: Der Spiegel . No.  35 , 1996, pp. 40-45 ( Online - Aug. 26, 1996 ). Focus 47/1994 (November 21, 1994): Tatort Familie (online) ; Clear tracks . In: Der Spiegel . No. 47 , 1994, p. 81 ( Online - Nov. 21, 1994 ). Doctor games permitted . In: Der Spiegel . No.  7 , 1995, p. 112-113 ( Online - Feb. 13, 1995 ).