For decades, sexual abuse and brutal physical and psychological violence against children have occurred in two children’s homes in the Augsburg district. This is what a project group set up by the Diocese of Augsburg to clarify in its final report. In the 1960s and 1970s, two priests in particular are said to have sexually assaulted male children and a young person in the Josefsheim riding book in Fischach, the group reported on Thursday. Other children were molested by staff and even a neighbor of the home. In the Marienheim Baschenegg in Ustersbach, religious sisters are said to have exercised violence against children until 2004.
Most of the accused are no longer alive, reported the President of the Regional Social Court, Elisabeth Mette, who led the investigation. According to her, a total of more than 30 victims, men and women, worked on the reappraisal. Others would initially have reported, but then no longer wanted to talk about the events.
According to the final report, home children were forced to eat vomit again. Runaways had their bald heads shaved, and there was also a windowless three-square-meter basement room for locking up the children. “Isolation and imprisonment were a means of education that was used instead of or in addition to physical violence to sanction misconduct,” the report says. Mette said it was also a common punishment to hit the bare bottom with a bamboo stick for minutes. The former judge was very affected by the descriptions of the former children in the home.
Another investigative commission from Augsburg had previously documented comparable acts for a home in Donauwörth in northern Swabia. Bishop Bertram Meier said it was about clearing up the events and thus getting the truth to light.