In the trial of infanticide in a sect in Hanau, the accused was acquitted of the charge of murder on Tuesday.

The public prosecutor's office had accused Claudia H., who is now 61, of having tied her four-year-old son Jan up to his head in a cloth sack on an August day in 1988.


The child was rendered unconscious by the carbon dioxide that collected in the bag and choked on his vomit, a forensic pathologist found at the trial.

Jan Schiefenhoevel

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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The Greater Criminal Chamber of the Hanau Regional Court saw it as unproven that the accused had pulled the sack over her child's head herself, as the presiding judge Susanne Wetzel said in the verdict.

Another scenario conceivable

Rather, it could also have been another woman, Sylvia D., in whose house in Hanau's Weststadt the accused lived with her husband and son at the time.

It is "possible and probable" that this woman closed the sack over the boy's head.

There are "considerable doubts" about the guilt of the accused, because it could have been different than assumed by the public prosecutor.

Sylvia D. was convicted of murder by the Hanau district court two years ago because of Jan's death.

However, the Federal Court of Justice overturned this decision this spring in response to an appeal by the defendants and ordered a new trial before the Frankfurt Regional Court.

Despite the acquittal, the judges saw Claudia H. as having a "moral responsibility" for the death of her only child, as the presiding judge explained in clear terms.

At that time, Claudia H. belonged to a religious community of 20 to 30 adults and their children in Hanau.

According to her belief, God revealed his will in people's dreams.

Sylvia D. asserted her claim to leadership in the group and determined the group members in a manipulative and inhuman manner.

The adults could not have resisted this personality.

Children controlled the leader in an abusive manner.

Sylvia D. despised Jan, abused and insulted him as a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler.

The boy's life was a "martyrdom" in the last two years of his life, Wetzel said to the accused.

The mother had her little son "defencelessly delivered to Mrs. D."

The other children in the group were older than Jan and had each other.

"Jan had no one to protect him," the judge said.

Sharp criticism of the public prosecutor

Claudia H. had the responsibility to get her son out of this situation.

She could have prevented his death if she had freed him "from the clutches" of the leader.

That would have been her job as a mother.

From a legal point of view, however, these allegations are statute-barred, so that a conviction is no longer possible.

But the mother has to live with her moral responsibility until the end of her life.

Wetzel also criticized the public prosecutor's office and their behavior during the main hearing in an unusually sharp manner.

The two prosecutors had presented their findings and evidence incompletely in their pleadings and had not adhered to the principle "in dubio pro reo - in case of doubt for the accused".

They would have had the task of also taking exculpatory considerations into account.

Instead, they acted against the accused.

The public prosecutor's office did not credibly justify an application for bias against all three professional judges of the chamber made in the spring.

The court had been accused of unlawful conduct in the application.

This harmed the court and the rule of law.