Hans Hetzel

Hans Hetzel (born April 29, 1926 ; † 1988 ) was a master butcher who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1955 for murder in the so-called calf rope case. Fourteen years later, after a successful reopening of the proceedings , Hetzel was acquitted in a new main hearing . The Hetzel case went down in legal history because, on the one hand, it revealed the dilemma of contradicting expert reports and judicial judgments based on them , and, on the other hand, because it had received a great deal of attention from the press. This case of a miscarriage of justice served the writer Thomas Hettche as the material model for the novel Der Fall Arbogast , published in 2001 . Details of the Hetzel case are described in detail in the autobiography of forensic doctor Albert Ponsold (1980).

background

In September 1953, the unclothed corpse of 25-year-old Magdalena Gierth was found on a federal road near Offenburg . Shortly afterwards, the young butcher Hans Hetzel reported to the local authorities and stated that he had recently hitchhiked the young woman and that there had been several sexual intercourse that evening . Hetzel explained that during anal intercourse , in which he was completely inexperienced, he suddenly felt that Magdalena was dead. He tried to revive her but couldn't. In his panic, he then hid the body in nearby bushes. None of the officers believed his version of what had happened, so it came to trial.

This trial attracted a great deal of attention from the West German public, especially because it was the first time that piquant sexual details were discussed in a German court. So the supposedly special size of Hetzel's penis was added to the chain of evidence - a shock to the prudery of the 1950s. The fact that Hetzel was considered a philanderer despite his marriage, often took hitchhikers with him and had a criminal record for an accident resulting in death, worked to his disadvantage in the process. The court placed particular trust in the medical professor Albert Ponsold , the star of West German forensic medicine at the time. His report was based on the autopsy protocol and the corresponding autopsy photos of the corpse, on the corner of the jaw bones apparently clear imprints of a rope and, in Ponsold's opinion, typical throttle features. The enlargement of the heart found during the autopsy also spoke in favor of death from suffocation by strangulation.

The autopsy revealed a total of 20 different findings, ranging from the aforementioned throttling features to numerous bleeds in various parts of the body. From the autopsy findings and photographs, Ponsold concluded that the sequence of events was successive: the victim was knocked unconscious in the face with his fist, inhaled blood (findings “blood in the lungs”), was penetrated anally and finally strangled with a rope. Ponsold's key argument was that each of the individual findings could have different, in some cases postmortem, causes, but that the combination of the individual findings into a coherent chain of findings considerably limited the range of possible causes.

acquittal

Even after the conviction, Hans Hetzel insisted on his innocence and tried, with the help of his lawyer, to initiate a new trial. Several retrial had previously failed. In the end, there were eleven other expert opinions contradicting Ponsold, but the court refused to take it back on the grounds that Ponsold was more competent. The resumption was only possible in 1969 - 14 years after the verdict and 16 years after the death of Magdalena Gierth and against the vigorous protest of the public prosecutor. With the help of Professor Otto Prokop , who came from Austria and taught in the GDR, who argued in his decisive counter-opinion that the alleged "throttle features" arose after death and came from a fork in which the head lay after death, and that the young, weakened by a just attempted abortion in the third month and immediately before conquered syphilis woman probably by a pulmonary embolism a sudden cardiac death suffered, Hetzel was acquitted in this procedure. Prokop accused Ponsold of gross negligence. In addition, he reprimanded the court in 1955 because it followed an expert opinion that was not based on an examination of the dead, but was only based on an inadequate SW photo.

This is precisely where the forensic medical and legal historical sensitive case is based, because 16 years after the death of the victim, Prokop was dependent on the same allegedly inadequate photos and the first autopsy report. The autopsy report, in which cardiac death was found to be the cause of death, was unfavorable for Ponsold's argument and decisive in the second procedure. However, the doctors at the time had overlooked important pressure marks on the neck and jawbone area and therefore misinterpreted similar marks in the neck area as strangulation marks. Ponsold, on the other hand, included all visible marks in the neck and neck area in his observations and interpreted them as throttling features that usually appear in the upper neck area, whereas strangling marks in the lower neck area are to be expected. Seen in this way, the victim must have been strangled with a rope (so-called "calf rope"). In the second process, the throttle features visible in the photos were evaluated as post-mortem traces, and their hypothetical cause was e.g. For example, a fork of a branch was specified on which the deceased might have come to lie - although it should be noted that the symmetrical appearance of the marks on both sides of the face on the jaw angle bone below the ears make the fork version appear as an improbable construction if photos of the location of the corpse seem to show this. Nevertheless, Ponsold, who was no longer admitted as a witness in the second trial, was accused of not having known the possibility of post-mortem subcutaneous hemorrhage, although he had already discussed this in detail in his textbook from 1950, and only excluded it as a possibility in this specific case.

With the Prokops report, the court finally found it to be proven that Ponsold's report was superficial and false. All injuries that were found on the dead were now explained with the unsuccessful attempts at resuscitation, which Hetzel stated, but also with the subsequent transport of the dead and their storage on a fork in a bush. The thrush features recognized by Ponsold (calf rope) were also assigned by the corresponding storage of the dead by Hetzel.

Prokop proved with his own series of tests that the injuries could only have occurred after death, and referred to similar studies by Dr. R. Schulz from 1896, which proved the same and generally belonged to the basic knowledge of every forensic doctor. Ponsold had long referred to these findings in his textbook from 1950, which I mentioned earlier. They were not unknown to him, as Prokop claimed, but seemed extremely improbable to him in the specific case.

The fact that Otto Prokop taught in the GDR and proved the West German forensic doctor to work incorrectly made the process a political issue and shook trust in the West German judiciary immensely. After all, an expert from the " unjust state " of the GDR had convicted the West German judiciary of bias with his obvious evidence.

Hetzel received compensation of around DM 75,000  . In 1974 he met his second wife. They have two children from their marriage. However, Hetzel never really gained a foothold both professionally and privately. He was often depressed, sometimes locked himself up for two to three days, and died of cancer in 1988. He left his family in debt of 560,000 marks.

literature

• Hans Pfeiffer: The traces of the dead . Verlag Das Neue Berlin, Berlin (GDR) 1979
• Hans Pfeiffer: The language of the dead . 4th edition. Militzke Verlag, Leipzig 1995, ISBN 3-86189-047-X
• Hans-Dieter Otto: The lexicon of errors of justice . Ullstein-Verlag, 2003, ISBN 3-548-36453-5
• Albert Ponsold: The river was the Neva. From the life of a coroner . JG Bläschke Verlag, St. Michel 1980, ISBN 3-7053-0904-8 , pp. 255-267.
• Gerhard Mauz : Old man with rope at dinner . In: Der Spiegel . No. 41 , 1968 ( online - full article on the case).

Web links

• Vemke Arnhold, Nils Burghardt: The Hetzel Case - Murder or Miscarriage of Justice? (PDF; 155 kB) Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Institute for Modern German Literature and Media

Individual evidence

1. ^ T. Hettche: The Arbogast case . DuMont Literature and Art Publishing, Cologne 2001.
2. ↑ Albert Ponsold: The river was the Neva. From the life of a coroner . JG Bläschke Verlag, St. Michel 1980, ISBN 3-7053-0904-8 , pp. 255-267.
3. ^ Albert Ponsold: Textbook of Forensic Medicine . Stuttgart 1950, p. 111.
4. ^ Albert Ponsold: Textbook of Forensic Medicine . Stuttgart 1950, pp. 111-113.