Around two weeks after the evangelical community of the Christ Bearer Brotherhood in Triefenstein am Main published a report on a decades-long “abuse system”, the Würzburg public prosecutor’s office opened a preliminary investigation. The public prosecutor’s office told the Evangelical Press Service (epd) on Thursday that the community had “submitted relevant documents.” It will be examined whether there are “crimes that are still prosecutable and have not yet been dealt with in court” in relation to the allegations mentioned in the community’s report.
According to the 99-page report on sexual, spiritual and power abuse in the Protestant community, the first prior, Otto Friedrich, in particular, had sexually assaulted fellow brothers for decades and sometimes severely sexually abused them. Three other brothers, some of whom were abused by Otto Friedrich, later became perpetrators themselves. Since Friedrich died in 2018, the preliminary investigations are now focusing on the cases of the three other perpetrators, the investigators said.
The allegations had been known within the community for 25 years – but it was only two years ago that the decision was made not to ignore the issue any further. The brotherhood set up a so-called trace group, which has examined documents and had many conversations with current and former brothers over the past few months. Their verdict: What happened primarily through Prior Otto Friedrich “can only be understood as a system of abuse.”
The four-person tracking group consisted of the former judge Christa Dreiseitel, the psychotherapists Ilse Hellmann and Sebastian Küffner and the former Leipzig superintendent Martin Henker. They interviewed a total of 13 former and current brothers to talk about their experiences and experiences.
The Christ Bearers have been around since the early 1960s. The community has its roots in southern Hesse – as does the Christ Bearer Sisterhood from Offenbach. At that time, young adults lived together in a kind of Christian community in Bensheim-Auerbach (Bergstrasse district), played Christian pop and rock music and were socially active. In 1961 an association was founded, from which the now separate brotherhood and sisterhood emerged.