For four weeks, Tobias K. stood as a teacher in front of the third grade at the Pater Rupert Mayer elementary school in Pullach and gave “solid lessons for a career changer”, as his employer, the Archbishop’s Ordinariat, reports. On Monday, the 23-year-old was picked up from school by Grünwald police officers for questioning. The young man is, that’s for sure, an impostor, not a trained elementary school teacher. He got his job by using forged certificates.
The young man would probably still be teaching boys and girls today if parents hadn’t become suspicious of his boasting of excellent references, including a degree from Harvard University. Tobias K. actually only has a high school diploma. He is now being investigated for forgery. The Munich police said he had confessed.
Tobias K. definitely wanted to teach as a teacher and had already applied to a school in Berg (Starnberg district) before he was hired in Pullach, but he didn’t get a chance. The second attempt, however, worked: On April 1, he was hired as a substitute teacher at the Pater Rupert Mayer elementary school, temporarily until July 31. Tobias K. found out the parents of the third graders, for whom the young age of the alleged teacher was very much at odds with his curriculum vitae and the university degrees he had presented. “He must have laid it on thick,” says a police spokesman. So thick that the parents became suspicious and started investigating.
The professor hadn’t noticed anything, only parents found out about the impostor
Ursula Hinterberger, spokeswoman for the Archbishop’s Ordinariate, told SZ on Wednesday that the false teacher only became apparent at a parents’ meeting when he boasted about a Harvard degree, among other things. As a result, the decision was made in agreement between the school management and the Archbishop’s Ordinariate to examine his employment documents more closely.
The documents submitted came from English universities, “but seemed inconspicuous and were not inconsistent with his age,” explains the spokeswoman, who is a representation of the picture-Zeitung contradicts that the headmistress did not react to the information from parents. On the contrary, she immediately passed on the suspicions presented by the parents to the Archbishop’s Office in Munich. A parent representative was confirmed by email that the allegations would be taken very seriously and checked.
Using publicly accessible sources on the Internet, parents found out that Tobias K. had neither attended two universities abroad, as he wanted them to believe, nor had he completed any degree in this country. With this knowledge, a mother went to the Grünwald police station, which immediately began investigating, reports a Munich police spokesman.
After the police appeared at her school on Monday and Tobias K. confessed to the fraud, the headmistress wrote to the parents that the lessons in the affected class would be replaced. Open questions are being clarified. As soon as there are facts and answers, the parents would be informed. “We are now taking a closer look at recruitment and subjecting the submitted documents to an even more thorough examination,” said the archbishop’s ordinariate on Wednesday.