When Detlev Zander tells his story, it seems like a miracle that he did not drown under the burden of memories like so many others.
From 1945 to the 1980s, at least 140 girls and boys suffered massive psychological, physical and sexual violence in children's homes of the Korntal Brethren in Baden-Württemberg.
There was the pastor who insulted Zander and the other children in the home as "devil brood". The caretaker who strapped him and other boys to a workbench to brutally assault them. Aunt G. in the robin group, whose beatings were downright sadistic beating orgies that forced the children to eat vomit. And woe to anyone who went to bed! "She put me under the cold shower," recalls Zander, "pulled my penis long and scraped it with a toothbrush soaked in salt."