At the Hessian Odenwald School, more students have been sexually abused than previously thought. This emerges from two studies that have now been presented in Wiesbaden. Accordingly, up to 900 young people were sexually abused at the former elite boarding school in Heppenheim in Hesse between 1966 and 1989. So far, more than 130 abused students were mentioned.
"The sexual and emotional exploitation of students practiced there for decades leaves no other diagnosis than that of a manipulative, autocratic and shabby pedagogical system in which all children and adolescents were exposed to massive development risks," said Florian Straus from the Institute for Applied Research and Project Consulting Munich (IPP). It has created one of the two studies.
For his research, 64 people from the school's environment were interviewed, 36 of whom were students. The Odenwald School, as an elite school, created a system that turned around itself. She had deliberately distinguished herself from "the laws of the bourgeois world."
More than two dozen perpetrators
The evaluated records and data also allowed to draw conclusions on more than two dozen perpetrators among the educational and technical staff of the Odenwald school, said Jens Brachmann from the Institute for General Education and Social Education at the University of Rostock. It wrote the second study. "The Odenwald School could have no future because it did not put the processing of the crimes," is the verdict of the researchers. The school management has tried again and again to clarify incidents internally.
Unlike suspected, the perpetrators at the elite boarding school were not all men. The materials allowed conclusions to at least five pedagogical employees.
"They have discovered perpetrators, of whom we knew nothing," says Adrian Koerfer, former founding chairman of the association Glasbrechen, the merger of those affected. Koerfer himself became a victim of sexual abuse at the Odenwaldschule. There is no reason for relief, he says. "For the incredible number of victims, 500 to 900, according to one of the two studies, too high. The number of acts and perpetrators as well."
In the seventies and eighties, under the then headmaster Gerold Becker and several other teachers at the elite boarding school, many students had been abused. Of the scandals uncovered just a few years ago, the Odenwald School at Heppenheim, once a leader in reform education, did not recover. She had to file for bankruptcy and was wound up. The operation at the private school ended at the beginning of September 2015.
Minister Klose: "Please forgive me"
The work-up should have been done much earlier, study author Straus said. The studies of the IPP and the University of Rostock were commissioned in 2014 by the then sponsoring association of the Odenwaldschule and the association Glasbrechen and co-financed by the Hessian Ministry of Social Affairs. More than 450 linear meters of files, several hundred plans and 50,000 pictures, audio and video cassettes were processed, former students and teachers questioned.
Minister of National Affairs Kai Klose of the Greens said: "For this failure of the state authorities, I ask all, which is also because of suffering, as the minister responsible today to forgive."