Markus Frenzel

Markus Frenzel (born August 11, 1976 in Ochsenfurt , Lower Franconia ) is a German journalist , book author and head of the press office as well as press spokesman for the SPD parliamentary group in the Berlin House of Representatives.

Markus Frenzel in 2013

Life

As a schoolboy, Frenzel wrote for the Würzburg local newspaper “ Main-Post ”. After graduating from high school, he did his military service as editor of “Bundeswehr Aktuell” in the Federal Ministry of Defense on the Hardthöhe in Bonn. He then studied political science at the Free University of Berlin , in Aix-en-Provence and at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques (“ Sciences Po ”) de Paris and graduated with a German and a French diploma.

After graduating, he worked as a reporter for the Rhineland-Palatinate state news in the SWR Studio Mainz. In 2004 and 2005 he volunteered at Deutsche Welle in Bonn and Berlin before starting as a reporter in the DW-TV studio in the capital . In 2008 he moved to MDR , where he has been working as an editor for the ARD magazine FAKT since then. As a television reporter, he reported from numerous crisis areas , including the Democratic Republic of the Congo , Rwanda , Liberia , the Horn of Africa and the tsunami disaster in Banda Aceh , Indonesia . His research on the President of the Congolese Huturebels ( FDLR ) Dr. Ignace Murwanashyaka , who is said to have directed a war of extermination in Eastern Congo from Mannheim for many years . In an ARD interview with Frenzel in October 2008, the native Rwandan admitted his responsibility for the crimes of the rebels. The federal prosecutor then investigated the African, which ultimately led to his arrest. The television interview was a central part of the indictment in the trial against Murwanashyaka, which began in the spring of 2011 before the higher regional court in Stuttgart.

For several years Frenzel reported in the political magazine FAKT again and again about German involvement in international war crimes (Guinea, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka), genocide (Rwanda) or crimes against humanity (Congo, Uzbekistan, Guinea). For his research on the Huturebellen and their boss in Germany, he received the Marl Television Prize for Human Rights from Amnesty International . In April 2011, Frenzel published a book on the complex ( Leichen im Keller - How Germany Supports International War Criminals ), which met with a wide response. "Politically relevant, excellently researched and very well written," said Christian Humborg, Managing Director of Transparency International , "everything that makes a good book for me." For Eric Beres, investigative journalist at ARD's political magazine Report Mainz , the book includes one Lücke: “A topic that has received little attention is finally being dealt with. Meticulously researched and told in great detail. "

For his research on the German involvement in Guinea and the ongoing training of criminal officers in the Bundeswehr, Frenzel received an honorable mention from the jury of the German Human Rights Film Prize 2011: “The contribution opens our eyes to the fact that human rights violations are frequent in Africa and elsewhere have more to do with us than we suspect. "

In the spring of 2008, Frenzel discovered that dozens of skulls and human remains from the former colony of German Southwest (now Namibia ) are still stored in the basements of German universities and research institutions . The journalist found just under a dozen skulls in the archives of Freiburg University, and according to his own account 47 in the Charité in Berlin . Most of the human remains came from the genocide of the Herero and Nama , which German colonial troops committed between 1904 and 1908. In response to the reporting, the Berlin University Clinic set up the "Charité Human Remains Project", which the German Research Foundation (DFG) funded with 300,000 euros, whereupon the first 20 skulls were returned to Namibia in an official act in September 2011.

In a FAKT report in January 2012, Frenzel proved to the Bundeswehr and the Ministry of Defense that they had knowingly exposed German soldiers to dangerous radioactive radiation for decades and lied to those affected, parliamentarians and even an expert commission about the true extent of the radiation . Accordingly, the " Radar Commission ", which was appointed by the then Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping in 2002 , was not presented with a central key document for assessing the risk - the confidential General Information 76. In addition, according to the FAKT report, radioactive components are still used in vehicles in the Bundeswehr, although this has been strictly prohibited since 1980.

During several months of joint research by the ARD magazine FAKT and Der Tagesspiegel , Frenzel and Michael Schmidt shed light on the personal backgrounds of the military top of the Federal Ministry of Defense. The Afghanistan Connection received a lot of media coverage and caused some unrest in the leadership of the Bundeswehr. High-ranking sources in the military described an overly one-sided occupation of leadership positions around Minister Ursula von der Leyen with Afghanistan veterans who had got to know each other in action and had organized an influential network.

From 2011 to 2013 Frenzel was a member of the board of the journalists' association " Netzwerk Recherche - Association for the Promotion of Journalistic Quality in Media Reporting eV". As one of six elected board members, he coordinated the development of regional structures for the journalist network in East Germany. As a first step, a regular get-together has been organized by the Research Network in Leipzig since January 2012.

Frenzel has also been working as a thriller writer since autumn 2015. "The Purge" is the first case for the Berlin Detective Inspector Vuk Tolstoy, the student Tonia Schlesinger and the police psychologist Ana Cayart. The book was received euphorically by the critics. “A great book!” Said Gerd Kuka in the crime show NDR - CRIME TIME. According to the author's statements to a journalist, research into war crimes during the Balkan wars was incorporated into the crime plot. "With his debut novel THE CLEANING, the television journalist Markus Frenzel has succeeded in creating a thriller that is as gripping as it is intelligently researched," wrote Gerhard Meißner in MAIN-POST.

Awards and grants

• 2016: Axel Springer Prize (with Bastian Schlange)
• 2012: Winner of the German-Polish Journalism Award (TV category)
• 2011: Medium-sized media prize for ARTE documentation
• 2010: Winner of the Journalism Award of the European Parliament (national)
• 2009: Marler Television Prize for Human Rights from Amnesty International (magazine category)
• 2005: Fellow of the German Marshall Fund (GMF) of the United States
• 2004: Junior grant from the Netzwerk Recherche eV
• 1997: "Best Price" from the Bundeswehr

Nominations

• Long Breath (2011)
• Georg von Holtzbrinck Prize (2011)
• German Human Rights Film Award (2010, 2014)
• German-French Journalism Award (2005)

Works

• The Purge (Thriller), Sutton, Erfurt 2015, ISBN 978-3954006199 .
• Corpses in the cellar - How Germany supports international war criminals. DTV, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-423-24876-1 .
• The Return of the Dead - MDR 2016.
• The Animal Thieves - MDR 2015
• How far left? - 150 years of the SPD , history in ERSTEN, ARD 2013, broadcast May 12, 2013.
• Fear of falling (with Inga Klees, Helmuth Frauendorfer, Frank Wolfgang Sonntag and others), ARTE documentation, broadcast February 16, 2009.
• Culinary delights are a top priority - How a protected bird is exterminated and politics join in , SWR2-Feature, Mainz 2004.
• The US armaments industry goes Europe? The case of Howaldtswerke Deutsche Werft AG , together with Diana Dinkelacker and Joachim Rohde, Science and Politics Foundation, Berlin 2002.

Web links

• Literature by and about Markus Frenzel in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Short biography at Deutsches Taschenbuchverlag
2. ↑ "He's an absolute hardliner", interview with the journalist markus Frenzel, dradio.de, May 4th 2011
3. ^ Press comments on Frenzel's book Leichen im Keller
4. ↑ Shocking coverage, dtv magazin, 06/2011
5. ↑ Series of articles on the Afghanistan Connection , published in Tagesspiegel, October 7, 2014
6. ↑ FAKT article on the Afghanistan Connection , broadcast on October 7, 2014
7. ^ Between novel and reality, Main-Post, on December 18, 2015
8. ^ TTT contribution to Frenzel's book "Leichen im Keller", ARD 2011, broadcast on May 8, 2011
9. ↑ The Return of the Dead, MDR 2016
10. ↑ Die Tierdiebe, MDR 2015.
11. ↑ SWP-aktuell from August 2001