The frontrunner in doctoral examinations is the Charité with 21 completed procedures, followed by the Free University with 11 cases.

This will also include Franziska Giffey's doctorate.

The Technical University (TU) reports four completed procedures, the Humboldt University (HU) three, and the University of the Arts (UdK) one case.

However, “completed” does not necessarily mean “completed”.

Some HU cases are still pending in court.

This probably includes the argument about the Mainz sociologist Marina Hennig, who is defending herself against the deprivation of her degree before the administrative court.

Not all procedures end with the revocation of the degree.

The FU with its 11 cases withdrew the degree 8 times, there was a reprimand and three times the deprivation was waived.

The fact that there are 12 terminations of proceedings in 11 cases can probably be explained by Giffey.

She was initially reprimanded, which constituted unlawful favoritism, after which her degree was revoked.

No other university, with the exception of the Charité, issued a "reprimand" for the doctorate.

The Charité, where the science platform VroniPlag Wiki had even detected an entire plagiarism cluster with several doctoral theses, last revoked doctoral degrees in 2014.

Other cases are currently pending.

Random checks only

The response from the Berlin state government also shows that the Charité only carries out software-supported checks on dissertations and post-doctoral theses on a random basis.

But the Charité is currently working on establishing a procedure in which all dissertations are to be checked centrally using software, it is said.

However, this was announced years ago.

The CDU politician Adrian Grasse also asked whether whistleblowers who report plagiarism are heard and informed of the outcome of the process once the process is complete.

Such information should actually be good manners and is also provided for in some articles of association.

But Charité, HU and FU have to admit that this only happens “in individual cases”.

VroniPlag Wiki comrade-in-arms Debora Weber-Wulff told the FAZ: “I was invited to coffee by the Charité, but not to the hearing in the cases.

And I was only informed of the outcome, if at all, when I persistently asked for it as a collective information, and not broken down into the individual cases.

The Senate Administration does not explain why the practice within a city differs so much.

In any case, the FU only wants to inform if the plagiarism reporter is also the victim who was copied.

The Charité does not see an obligation to provide information as a given - this demotivates internal and external whistleblowers.

The withdrawal is not always noted

A mixed picture also emerges when it comes to the question of whether plagiarized work is still available on the university servers.

Charité, HU and FU affirm this, while the TU removes such work from the server.

All universities state that they would note the omission of the dissertation status, partly as a clear indication (according to the FU), partly only in the metadata (according to the HU).

However, reality lagged behind this claim in the past, as a list maintained by Weber-Wulff of withdrawal notices found in German library catalogs shows.

In at least two cases where the doctoral degree was revoked,


the FU has not yet marked it.

As early as 2018, the data protection lawyer Rolf Schwartmann explained in the FAZ that plagiarism must also be recognizable in library catalogues: "As long as the work in question is available, the credibility of science can only be maintained if the notice of withdrawal remains public.

Just as plagiarism does not become statute-barred, the obligation to make it public does not become statute-barred.”

The HU no longer wanted to say whether the withdrawal of a degree would be reported to the German National Library.

Nevertheless, the state government writes: "From the point of view of the Senate, the described procedure of the Berlin universities is not objectionable." Finally, it is also astonishing that the HU has only dealt with cases in recent years that were reported to it by VroniPlag Wiki.

The figures for 2013 (3), 2016 (1), 2018 (1) and 2020 (1) fully correspond to the VroniPlag Wiki documentation on the HU.

Christdemokrat Grasse demands transparency in all procedures from the FAZ, complete information for those reporting plagiarism and the regular marking of plagiarized works on university servers and in library catalogs - in compliance with data protection.