Reiner Protsch

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Reiner Rudolf Robert Protsch (born January 14, 1939 in Berlin ) is a former German anthropologist . He had been a professor at the Institute of Anthropology and Human Genetics for Biologists at the University of Frankfurt since 1973 , before he was suspended from work in April 2004 following allegations of embezzlement and fraud and had to leave the university in February 2005. In 2009, he was sentenced to probation for several offenses. With forged dating of fossils and archaeological bone finds, he had triggered one of the largest scientific scandals in Germany.

As a professor of anthropology, Protsch initially had a good reputation as a paleoanthropologist due to his training in the USA and published numerous sensational dating of bone finds, for example supposed Neanderthal skulls , which he dated to the Paleolithic , allegedly using his own analyzes ( radiocarbon method ). In the anthropological and archaeological literature, however, his work was sharply and consistently criticized by some authors as flawed and untrustworthy from the start.

The medical historian of the University of Mainz and Frankfurt orthopedic surgeon Klaus-Dieter Thomann also raised allegations against Protsch, in 2001, files of the National Socialist racial hygiene research by Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer and Josef Mengele , who had worked at the then Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene since 1935, were destroyed and destroyed having previously denied their existence. However, parts of this file were found outside of his institute in 2004.

Surname

Protsch, who officially changed his name to Protsch von Zieten in 1991, claims to be descended from the rider general Hans Joachim von Zieten . This is not only denied by the own family and, according to his older brother, Dieter Protsch, is to be regarded as fictitious.

University career

Protsch was appointed to the C4 chair for anthropology in Frankfurt am Main in 1973 , although he did not have a high school diploma and was not qualified as a professor . According to his own information, Protsch had acquired numerous academic degrees, including a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA; title of the work: The dating of Upper Pleistocene sub-Saharan fossil hominids and their place in human evolution: with morphological and archaeological implications ).

Chronicle of the science scandal (selection)

  • 1973: “Even when Prof. Protsch was appointed, the mechanisms of university self-regulation apparently failed; because two reviewers had warned in clear words against the appointment of the professionally unidentified candidate. Obvious inconsistencies in the application documents were ignored. "
  • 1984: An American colleague proves in a publication that Protsch published unbelievable data and used research results of other scientists in his own publications without specifying their origin. The university management becomes aware of these allegations of plagiarism . “In the following years, misunderstood solidarity in the specialist area, the self-limitation of the legal department to what was 'legally' comprehensible as well as an at that time not yet trained sensitivity for the relevance of observing the rules of“ good scientific practice ”led to what has been known since 1984 Massive misconduct on the part of the university management was not vigorously and not resolutely investigated. ”Only in 1998 did the University of Frankfurt adopt the principles“ How to deal with academic misconduct in universities ”adopted by the university rectors' conference in the same year on October 22nd In 2003 it also resolves its own “Principles of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University for Safeguarding Good Scientific Practice”.
  • 2001: The then Greifswald private lecturer Thomas Terberger and a colleague, Martin Street, are amazed at the accumulation of sensationally old skull finds of modern humans that are repeatedly associated with the name Protsch. They have found objects re-dated by a laboratory in Oxford using the 14 C method. As a result, it is established that various skulls found in human prehistory were antedated by tens of thousands of years. Including the skull of Hahnöfersand , which Protsch dated around 36,000  BP , while the Oxford dates were 7470 ± 100 BP and 7500 ± 55 BP. Other prehistoric finds (such as the " Lady von Kelsterbach " - Protsch dated her to an age of 31,200 years) have disappeared from the institute's safe and are not available for follow-up measurements.
  • January 16, 2004: After the University of Frankfurt learned “that Protsch is offering a unique collection of chimpanzee skulls from the Institute for Anthropology for sale abroad”, the University's ombudsman is informed of this process, and investigations by the public prosecutor are initiated.
  • March 2004: After investigations by the legal department of the university, a criminal complaint is filed against Protsch, at the same time the president of the university bans him from the house and forbids him to conduct business until formal disciplinary proceedings have been initiated.
  • April 2004: The university initiates formal disciplinary proceedings against Protsch; at the same time he is temporarily relieved of his duties and his salaries are reduced.
  • August 2004: An article in the news magazine Der Spiegel makes the allegations of embezzlement and the repeated misdates known to a broad public. The University of Frankfurt reacts by convening a commission to deal with scientific misconduct to assess the Protsch case.
  • 10 January 2005: In its final report, the Commission made serious allegations. In the opinion of the commission, he "abused the office of a university professor to a high degree" and thereby "disqualified himself professionally and through his conduct of office". He had "deceived clients of skull dating, misused or plagiarized the intellectual property of others, systematically concealed his violations of rules and illegally appropriated objects belonging to others or misled about their origin".
    • The commission stated that it was “convinced that the dates given by Prof. Protsch before 1982 and after 1985 are very likely to be forgeries”, combined dating numbers (FRA-UCLA) “were apparently invented.” Between 1982 and 1985 he had a doctorate Physicist employed as an assistant who was able to operate the measuring equipment. The commission is convinced that “the dates of the finds from Mainz-Gonsenheim (1984) and from Bassenheim-Schweinskopf (2002) were“ undoubtedly falsified ”. In addition, there was […] a number of other such dates that can no longer be determined ”.
    • According to the findings of the commission, Protsch “handwritten the words ' Franz Weidenreich ', a Nazi victim, on items from the estate of his predecessor Hans Fleischhacker in order to make the pieces interesting for an exhibition at the Jewish Museum (Berlin) . In fact, they were also exhibited there. "
    • In essence, the allegations of Klaus-Dieter Thomann were also confirmed: “Glass plate pictures, patient files and paternity reports (from the Nazi era and from the post-war period) were destroyed without any prior expert examination. Even if some of the missing material is found again, there is serious scientific misconduct in the order to destroy it. "
    • His second doctoral thesis, accepted in Vienna, which was based on a fossil monkey skull allegedly found by Protsch in Switzerland ( Egerkingen ), but which he seemed to have acquired in France, is also considered a total forgery ; its "find allocation" was based essentially "on the forged signature" of the fossil.
    • Ultimately, Protsch "is convinced that the commission has repeatedly had more casts made of the finds that had been given to him by other institutes than had been agreed, sold these casts" and no longer returned the loans to the owners - including the original of the lower jaw of Wall  - which "led to disputes up to and including diplomatic interventions".
  • February 17, 2005: The Executive Committee of the University of Frankfurt announces that “Prof. Protsch has been retired by the Hessian Ministry of Science and Art at his own request . ”Nevertheless, the disciplinary proceedings“ will continue. As a result, partial or complete withdrawal of the pension may be considered. "
  • The history of the Frankfurt Institute for Anthropology and Human Genetics for Biologists ended in April 2005: the institute was closed.
  • The Frankfurt am Main regional court sentenced him to a suspended sentence in 2009 after his confession .
  • The procedure for the revocation of his second doctoral degree and the efforts of the University of Frankfurt to revoke his retrospective rights from his professorship are still ongoing.

Legal proceedings against Protsch

On July 22, 2006 the FAZ reported , citing the Frankfurt public prosecutor's office, that Protsch was being charged with forgery of documents, breach of trust, embezzlement, attempted fraud and violations of species protection. In 2001, for example, Protsch had Frankfurt University issue a donation receipt for 300,000 marks for a fossil collection that allegedly came from his own property, but actually belonged to a Hamburg paleontologist who made the collection available to Frankfurt University on permanent loan would have. In this context, Protsch also submitted fake expert reports. Protsch also removed proof of ownership from valuable books in the university library and put his own stamp on them.

The public prosecutor's office also assessed as a forgery of documents that Protsch had the registration numbers milled out on chimpanzee skulls and the corresponding index cards replaced by two scientific employees with his own signature "RPvZ". The skulls belong to the unique so-called PAN collection of 278 specimens collected in Africa, which were acquired for the Frankfurt Institute in the 1950s and 60s. Protsch had given this collection as his property and in 2002 offered it to a US colleague for 70,000 dollars on presentation of forged purchase certificates. This attempted sale, which would have been subject to approval under the German Species Protection Act, led to initial investigations against Protsch at the time.

On June 17, 2009, the trial was opened against Protsch before the Frankfurt Regional Court for, among other things, forgery of documents, embezzlement, attempted fraud, breach of trust and a violation of the Federal Nature Conservation Act. Protsch was charged with a total of 17 criminal offenses. On the basis of an agreement with the court, which assured him that if he confessed, he would only be sentenced to probation, Protsch admitted all points of the indictment through one of his three defense lawyers.

The FAZ wrote that the criminally relevant allegations of the public prosecutor's office "reinforce the image of a deeply dishonest person". In the grounds of the judgment, the presiding judge spoke of a “narcissistic personality”, while the psychiatric expert Norbert Leygraf had previously referred to a “clearly narcissistic- histrionic personality accentuation”, the origin of which he saw as being due to the defendant's difficult childhood, but concluded that there was a disorder Sense of debt reduction.

The regional court in Frankfurt am Main sentenced Protsch on June 19, 2009 to one and a half years suspended sentence.

Lady of Kelsterbach

Since the incorrect dating became known and the public prosecutor's investigations against Protsch began in 2004, the alleged 31,000-year-old skull fragment of the Lady von Kelsterbach, until 2003 the oldest evidence of a Cro-Magnon human , has disappeared along with other fossils and leaves considerable doubts about the Dating back by Protsch.

Fonts (selection)

  • with Rainer Berger: Earliest Radiocarbon Dates for Domesticated Animals. In: Science 179, 1973, pp. 235-239.
  • with Jeffrey L. Bada, Roy A. Schroeder: The Racemization Reaction of Isoleucine used as a Palaeotemperature Indicator. In: Nature 241, 1973, pp. 394-395.
  • with Jeffrey L. Bada: Racemization Reaction of Aspartic Acid and Its Use in Dating Fossil Bones. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 70, 1973, pp. 1331-1334 ( pnas.org ).
  • with Jeffrey L. Bada, Roy A. Schroeder, Rainer Berger: Concordance of Collagen-Based Radiocarbon and Aspartic-Acid Racemization Ages. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 71, 1974, pp. 914-917 ( pnas.org ).
  • The absolute dating of Upper Pleistocene sub-Saharan fossil Hominids and their place in human evolution. In: Journal of Human Evolution 4, 1975, pp. 297-322.
  • Catalog of fossil hominids of North America. Gustav Fischer, New York / Stuttgart 1978, ISBN 3-437-10554-X .
  • The archaeological and anthropological results of the Kohl Larsen expeditions in Northern Tanzania 1933–1939. Volume 3: The palaeoanthropological finds of the pliocene and pleistocene. Archaeologica Venatoria, Tübingen 1981, ISBN 3-921618-11-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ S. Bökönyi, RJ Braidwood, CA Reed: Earliest Animal Domestication Dated? In: Science . tape 182 , no. 4117 , December 14, 1973, ISSN  0036-8075 , p. 1161–1161 , doi : 10.1126 / science.182.4117.1161 ( sciencemag.org [accessed June 18, 2020]).
  2. ↑ Naber, FB: The end of the Ofnet problem? In: Quaternary . tape 25 , 1974, p. 73-84 .
  3. ↑ uni-frankfurt.de ( Memento from March 17, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 1.9 MB) Uni-Report from November 17, 2004, p. 1 f .: Protsch case: whereabouts of NS documents clarified. President's Task Force reports (archived)
  4. ↑ Dieter HB Protsch: Be All You Can Be. From a Hitler Youth in WWII to a US Army Green Beret. To Immigrant's Memoirs. Trafford, 2004, ISBN 1-4120-3674-7 .
  5. ↑ a b Gisela Friedrichsen : The professor with whom nothing is right , Spiegel Online, June 19, 2009
  6. ↑ Prof. Dr. Dr. Reiner Protsch von Zieten. ( Memento of February 3, 2004 in the Internet Archive )
  7. ↑ quoted in Karl W. Butzer , Glynn Llywelyn Isaac (Ed.): After the Australopithecines. Mouton, The Hague 1975, p. 898 ( books.google.de ).
  8. ↑ a b c d e f g h Summary of the report of the commission on dealing with scientific misconduct. Appendix to the press release of the University of Frankfurt No. 038 of February 17, 2005
  9. ↑ MJ Mehlman: Archaic Homo sapiens at Lake Eyasi, Tanzania: Recent misrepresentations. In: Journal of Human Evolution. Volume 13, No. 6, 1984, pp. 487-501, doi: 10.1016 / S0047-2484 (84) 80003-2
  10. ↑ Principles of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University to ensure good scientific practice. On: uni-frankfurt.de , accessed on January 23, 2016
  11. ↑ Günter Bräuer : The end results of Hahnöfersand - and some aspects of Neanderthal problem . In: Hammaburg . New episode 6 (1981-83), 1984, ISSN  0173-0886 , p. 15-28 .
  12. ↑ Thomas Terberger, Martin Street, Günter Bräuer: The human skull remnant from the Elbe near Hahnöfersand and its significance for the Stone Age in Northern Germany . In: Archaeological correspondence sheet . tape 31 , no. 4 , 2001, ISSN  0342-734X , p. 521-526 .
  13. ↑ a b c d Background: The chronology of the Protsch case. Press release of the University of Frankfurt No. 039 from February 17, 2005.
  14. ^ Matthias Schulz: Cheating in the bone cellar. In: Der Spiegel 42/2004, accessed on June 3, 2019
  15. ↑ a b Protsch case: consequences demanded. Press release of the University of Frankfurt No. 038 from February 17, 2005.
  16. ^ Protsch case: Presidium draws conclusions. Press release of the University of Frankfurt No. 037 from February 17, 2005.
  17. ^ DLF: Decision of the department council, according to which the institute is to be dissolved anyway and the department to be restructured. Protsch von Zieten's early retirement only accelerated it - article from Feb. 18, 2005.
  18. ↑ Thomas Kirn: Probation for Protsch von Zieten . The anthropologist Reiner Protsch von Zieten has been sentenced to 18 months imprisonment with probation by the Frankfurt regional court for embezzlement, forgery, suppression of documents and violation of the Federal Nature Conservation Act. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . June 20, 2009 ( faz.net ).
  19. ↑ The professor and the fake skulls. Reiner Protsch is said to have cheated on Goethe University and is on trial from today. In: Frankfurter Neue Presse , June 17, 2009, Local.
  20. ↑ Professor admits fakes. On: hr-online.de , June 17, 2009 (link expired)
  21. ↑ Trial of the FRankfurter monkey collection: The bone forger. On: fr-online.de, June 17, 2009.
  22. ↑ Thomas Kirn: charges against anthropologists: professor as forger and fraudster. FAZ.NET, July 21, 2006.
  23. ↑ Gisela Friedrichsen : Condemned skull researcher - the professor who is not right. In: Spiegel Online. June 19, 2009 ( spiegel.de ).
  24. ↑ a b Skull forger sentenced to suspended sentence. In: Spiegel Online. June 19, 2009 ( spiegel.de ).
  25. ↑ Thomas Kirn: Transfer of an impostor - probation for Protsch von Zieten. on FAZ.net from June 20, 2009 ( faz.net ).
personal data
SURNAME Protsch, Reiner
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Protsch, Reiner Rudolf Robert (full name); Protsch von Zieten, Reiner
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German anthropologist
DATE OF BIRTH January 14, 1939
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin