Klingelpütz affair

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The Klingelpütz affair comprised a series of very serious abuse of prisoners at the Klingelpütz penal facility in Cologne , which was uncovered in 1965 by a journalist for the Cologne tabloid Express . As a result, there were a number of lawsuits from 1966.

Research

The Klingelpütz was a prison building from the 1830s and named after the street of the same name. It already had an inglorious reputation in the Third Reich . At that time there was not only abuse, but also around 1,000 executions, the judgments of which were often arbitrary.

In the spring of 1965, several released prisoners turned to the Cologne legal journalist Hans Wüllenweber and reported serious abuse and deaths that should have occurred in Cologne's inner city prison . They stated that law enforcement officers and their auxiliaries, the so-called calf factors , were involved. Attempts were made to complain, but each time the petitions were rejected and criminal charges failed. There was a “wall of taboos”.

Wüllenweber researched for eight months. His research revealed that patients in the "psychiatric observation station" had experienced severe abuse from fists, boots, clubs, key rings, as well as from forced baths and electroshock treatments. In June 1964, detainee Anton Wasilenko was allegedly beaten by two officers for ten minutes with rubber truncheons in a bathtub, "until his skin hung down in pieces and the water turned blood red." He died four weeks later on July 22, 1964.

The journalist started a series of articles in the Kölner Express under the heading “Suffered and died in the Klingelpütz” . He also notified Wasilenko's widow Katharina. She filed a criminal complaint on October 28, 1965, and together with Wüllenweber she submitted the case to the Cologne Public Prosecutor's Office under Walter Haas. With the remark that there was “nothing wrong” with the whole story, however, he remained inactive.

Investigations

When another prison scandal (the “bell scandal”) shook the Federal Republic, Artur Sträter ( CDU ), Justice Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia , ordered the exhumation of Wasilenko's body in March 1966 . The autopsy on the body revealed a fracture of the skull, a broken rib and signs of a bruise over the right eye. The investigators did not rule out "that the injuries were due to ill-treatment by inspectors". The death certificate was issued at the time by the prison doctor Walter Schramm, but this only identified "weak heart" as the cause of death. Until September 1966, the Cologne public prosecutor's office heard almost 80 witnesses on the Wasilenko case. Subsequently, however, she stopped the proceedings for bodily harm resulting in death “in the absence of evidence”.

Then, however, two more events occurred that caused the public prosecutor to rethink the conditions in this prison and to reopen the case: On May 9, 1964, 19-year-old Armin Milewski hanged himself in Klingelpütz after having requested several transfers to asked for a shared cell and this request was not followed. He even announced his suicide to the prison doctor; On October 4, 1965, the 26-year-old Turkish guest worker Mohammed Ali Tok was found dead in the sick cell after he had been beaten several times in his cell by fellow prisoners while the guards “looked away”. A special department of the prosecuting authority now investigated emphatically against employees of the Klingelpütz '. The number of preliminary investigations rose to more than 100 and many allegations by former inmates were confirmed.

The first major Klingelpütz case in November 1966 was directed against the previously exonerated trivial factors: Hospital manager Hubert Naudet (his recipe: "preventive beatings for newcomers, so that it was immediately clear to them what to expect if they later became unruly ") And Sergeant Heinrich Halfen (" I would have preferred to be an executioner "). In eleven cases, they are said to have mistreated a total of 15 hospital inmates. B. the recalcitrant prisoner Lothar Sommerfeldt. He was maltreated by both police officers at the same time with the most severe blows of rubber truncheons, and hours later he was mistreated again. During the trial, Naudet tried to intimidate and influence witnesses. In the subsequent judgment of the Cologne regional court, Naudet were sent to prison for eight months and Halfen for twelve months without parole. The presiding judge Walter Schmitz-Justen explained the comparatively mild verdict: "The greater the failure of the supervisory authorities, the less the defendants are at fault."

Committee of Inquiry

At the end of the year, the events in the Cologne Klingelpütz were also the subject of an investigative committee of the Düsseldorf state parliament . There it turned out that there had been no more inspections of the Klingelpütz sick area for over ten years. The authority responsible for this, the “Working Group on Prisons” in the Düsseldorf Ministry of Justice, headed by the now deceased ministerial director Hubert Hey (1901–1965, judge-martial before 1945), showed itself unsuspecting. The lack of inspection reports since 1955 had not been noticed by anyone. The Cologne Prosecutor General Walter Haas, who is at the top of the hierarchy of the Cologne penal system, relied on information from his subordinates, who in turn had the doctors working on site, chief physician Rolf Wachsmuth and Walter Schramm, assure them that the facility was running properly and that the facility was being forced to take a bath and was force-fed as well as the calming cell "Measures of therapy and treatment" and the "medical instruments" belonged. This enabled the medical professionals to use their questionable methods unhindered for years. Wachsmuth's predecessor, Chief Medical Officer Günter Meisenbach, who worked for the Klingelpütz for ten years until 1958, put before the investigative committee what he thought of the "allegedly sick" as the attending physician in the Klingelpütz: "Scrap of the scraps" and : "An incredibly rotten material on prisoners". The doctor who was working in the Aachen prison at the time of the examinations showed himself to be very focused on taming restless patients. They were immediately “isolated” and he also did without signal systems, because during the day “someone was always there” and “at night there was nothing to be desired”. And if so, he left medical laypersons, such as the guards, to do "what [this] he thought was right."

consequences

The Klingelpütz prison director, Walter Balensiefer, was relieved of his post, as were the neurologists Wachsmuth and Schramm, who subsequently practiced privately. Both were sentenced to fines of 10,200 DM (Wachsmuth) and 7,500 DM (Schramm) at the beginning of December 1969 (AZ: 34 Js 676/66). The Cologne Public Prosecutor Haas also had to give up his office. The process was accompanied by numerous reports in national and international newspapers. The service and technical supervision was strengthened by planning special correctional offices (in Cologne and Hamm ) as intermediate authorities and putting them into operation at the beginning of the 1970s.

Not as an immediate consequence, but formally accompanying it, a new and modern penal institution was built in the Cologne district of Ossendorf (foundation stone laid for the Cologne prison on November 3, 1961). The new building also took place against the background that the 130-year-old walls of the old Prussian prison at Klingelpütz were morbid. In the early 1960s alone, 27 prisoners managed to escape. The move took place at the end of the 1960s. The old Klingelpütz was demolished by demolition on June 4, 1969.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Hans Wüllenweber, The Klingelpütz Affair. Aspects and Consequences, in: Dietrich Rollmann (Ed.), Prison in Germany. Situation and Reform, Frankfurt a. M. 1967, pp. 121-124, here p. 123.
  2. ^ Collection of press clippings on the Klingelpütz case, Barch, B 141, no. 72661.
  3. ↑ The violent death of the detainee on remand Ernst Haase was discovered, who died in June 1964 in an overheated Hamburg prison cell. The cell was nicknamed the bell and served to reassure unruly prisoners. The process became the subject of investigation in the Hamburg Senate in 1966 ; online in Die Zeit of February 2, 1973
  4. ↑ a b c d affairs: "Rotes bath water" from Der Spiegel 49/1967 of November 27, 1967
  5. ↑ Hans Wüllenweber: “Instructions from the Ministry” in Die Zeit of September 20, 1968
  6. ↑ "Who are the real gravedigger of our freedom?" , Information from the KPD member and former concentration camp prisoner Heinz Junge
  7. ↑ Hans Wüllenweber: "Unbändiger Tiger" in Die Zeit of December 5, 1969
  8. ^ "Before the sieve is tight" from Die Zeit of August 2, 1968