It took the public prosecutor less than 15 minutes to read out the first part of the indictment against the Catholic priest Hans Bernhard U.

But just what can be heard in room 210 of the Cologne Regional Court in this short period of time is likely to cause every conceivable disgust to rise in the ear witnesses.

The prosecution accused the clergy, who is now 70 years old, of 31 cases of sexual violence.

He is said to have perpetrated it between 1993 and 1999 in his apartment in Gummersbach, the victims were three childhood nieces.

Daniel Deckers

in the political editorial department responsible for “The Present”.

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Touching presents, assaults in the bathtub, bed scenes with girls crying in pain - the prosecutor speaks hastily, as if he wanted to give as little space as possible to the adversities.

But not only the accused and his two defense lawyers are not spared any detail.

The auditorium of the largest hall of the Cologne Justice Center is only sparsely filled, but there is hardly enough press space.

Because the public interest in this process is as great as otherwise only in abuse proceedings such as "Bergisch Gladbach" with several defendants and dozens of victims.

According to research by the FAZ, it was not only the Cologne Public Prosecutor who had been aware of the activities of the pederast in the rank of hospital chaplain since the summer of 2010.

His church superiors were also fully aware of the events between 1993 and 1999.

The guidelines were not followed

In October 2010, the head of the pastoral care / human resources department, today's Archbishop of Hamburg, Stefan Heße, became aware through an anonymous tip that the three nieces had reported their uncle as pederasts over the summer, but that they had soon made use of their right to refuse to testify. Instead of following the guidelines for dealing with cases of sexual abuse that have been in force since 2002, i.e. summoning the accused for an interview and drawing up a protocol signed by both sides, subjecting the priest to a psychiatric assessment, initiating a canonical preliminary examination and the case of the Vatican Congregation for To report the doctrine of the faith, Heße and the highest church judge Günter Assenmacher counted on it as early as November,that the public prosecutor's office will have to discontinue the proceedings - then one could not use the testimony of the three victims in the event of the case, even in a church process.

However, in order to be absolutely sure that all internal processes within the bishopric could not give the public prosecutor any further action against the priest, the priest was summoned.

But with Hesse's consent, no written record was made of the conversation, as it was "capable of being seized".

Instead, people in Cologne were happy about the weak response that the announcement of the suspension of the hospital chaplain, who was well known in Wuppertal, had left in the local press, and thought about rehabilitating the man immediately.