Infanticide: The story of a crime
At the children's graves in the cemetery of Frankfurt / Oder, the children were buried anonymously.
At the end you stand on a small piece of lawnon which nothing is, only a hedge of dry shrubs, the branches look like Struwwelpeter hands reaching for the sky. The ground is mossy, the grass lies in tufts on top of it and pushes the drops hanging from it on this cool morning. At one point is a low fir, a flower arrangement is here. Maybe there. Or at the front of the meadow, where it looks like it could have been dug there.
Nine times they must have stabbed the ground, for nine small coffins. None of the family was there on December 4, 2007, at eight o'clock in the morning, almost in the dark. Only one employee of funeral home Ulrich Möss. Somewhere here. In this field. On the section of the main cemetery of Frankfurt / Oder, which is called "kindergarten row graves", because here the children under five are buried. Over there, in sight, are tombs of cockchafers and baby toys, stuffed frogs and angels and stuffed bunnies, tombs that look like cold playrooms, with crosses that say "Love Never Forget." And name. Chanice, Cassandra, Jessica.
The nine siblings on the small meadow opposite in their hidden tombs, seven girls and two boys, remain anonymous. "The mother would have been cynical," says her lawyer Matthias Schöneburg, "give them names now."
They also do not have a surname, only a H., that is the cipher under which the public knows the children: the children of Sabine H., 42, and her husband Oliver H., 45. The nine dead babies of Brieskow- Finkenheerd. Born between 1988 and 1998. Staggered in buckets and tubs on the parental balcony. Manslaughter by omission. The most spectacular case of German criminal history.
At the beginning there is a message that somewhere in Germany a dead baby was found, in a freezer as at the beginning of May in Möllmicke in Sauerland. In a plastic bag in the cupboard, as in February in Nauen. In a suitcase in the basement, as in the Saxon Plauen in November. Or in containers and buckets in a shed, as in the summer of 2005 in Brieskow-Finkenheerd near Frankfurt / Oder. And then the story is usually already over. From the babies you will never hear something again. They are thought to be buried soon.
But it is not like that. If a dead baby is found, then it is first a report, then an evidence. Finally, a regulatory problem, because dead babies have no papers. There is no standard procedure, the goal of which is to bring such a child under the ground as soon as possible, in order to give it a little dignity at the end. It can take years. For the nine babies of Brieskow-Finkenheerd it was almost two and a half. Nine children who could not get up and then under the ground.
The story begins in 1988with the first baby the mother lets die. It falls into the toilet, a fall birth, she pulls it out, winds it in a blanket, then into a garbage bag, buries it in a sand-filled aquarium on the balcony, sitting next to it the next morning.
Of course, the story begins earlier, in Sabine H.'s childhood, there must be reasons, but she does not know her.
A few kilometers south of Frankfurt is Brieskow-Finkenheerd, Sabine H.'s home village, 2700 inhabitants. Her parents' house is a gray estate behind a brown fence, four fir trees in front, a blind is lowered. If you stand for a while at the house, before which nothing happens, because the only movement in this place brings the federal highway 112 to Eisenhüttenstadt, the anger comes back to the people, the curious who besieged the village for days in 2005, and one calls "What do you want here" across the street, "What can the family do for it?"
The mother, in her 80s, still lives there, as well as one of Sabine H's two older sisters. She was the youngest daughter, "the baby," she says in court, often using the word, innocence in it. She calls her childhood "pretty happy"Impersonally, perhaps, she says, "There was little affectionate." The father was at the railway, the mother a housewife. Sabine H. wants to graduate from high school, become a photographer or a decorator, but she does not tackle it, "there were never any conversations at home that one would have sat down at a table, even today".
She leaves school, becomes a dental assistant and does not like the job. She lets her life happen. Meet Oliver H. at the age of 17, get pregnant, marry him, do not realize for a long time that he's with the Stasi. He tells her he is in the construction industry.She becomes a mother of 18 and 19, then he does not want any more, no more children, two years later comes one more, he already insults her or only keeps silent. In her life it is now as speechless as with the parents. Then it starts.
The Plattenbau, in which the H.s lived, is located in Frankfurt / Oder on the Platz der Demokratie 1, in GDR times the Otto-Grotewohl-Straße. The tram stops right outside, stop Hauptfriedhof. In the trees in front of the block of flats, eleven floors, the wind has blown garbage, empty bags hang in the branches, which tap on the balcony with the blue front, where the babies lay.
She could look over from the balcony to the cemeterylying tall and waxed. The entrance gate opens in the middle to two curved wings like those of angels, heavy, metal wings. Perhaps the proximity to the tombs made Sabine H. feel that the children on their balcony were buried, taken out of their world, and given into the earth. Just different.
In 1988, the H.s with their three children move in. People call the Stasi block because only Stasi employees live there. People like Oliver H., watchful people, by profession. You crouch but stay to yourself. Nobody wants to know anything about the births wall to wall.
On the 6th floor lived the H.s
Sabine H. says in court that the misfortune started with moving to this house. She feels locked up, isolated, begins with drinking, only in the evening in the kitchen, beer from his box. Then more, even during the day, in the morning, the flag hushed up, hiding her stomach. Everything becomes a façade, it provides the children, goes to work, sells insurance in the field, the family goes on holiday with the caravan, goes to the Giant Mountains and the Polish Baltic Sea coast. It is a double life.
Only one child, the second of the nine, did not get her in this apartment block. A boy, he was born in May 1992 at a training in Goslar. She left him between her legs, still on the umbilical, and when the colleague with whom she shared the room in the guesthouse came in, she pulled the blanket over it. Later, she put him in her green summer coat, packed him with the bedding in the travel bag and took him home. She buried it next to the aquarium on the balcony in a plastic tub.
She reveals the circumstances of the first two births. The others have been lost to her in a fog of alcohol, repression, fear, self-punishment, or indifference. It is unclear why she does not remember, not if she has really forgotten everything or if she is silent to protect her husband. Oliver H. says he did not notice anything about the pregnancies. His complicity is unproven. She says in court that she always hoped he would notice something, say something, but he was silent and slept with her, once or twice a week, in spite of her swelling and dying body. Seven years, from 1992 to 1998, she is almost continuously pregnant. She does not prevent, she does not know why. She does not give up, she is afraid that a doctor would recognize the traces of the many deliveries.
The last of the nine siblings is born in the late autumn of 1998. In 2001, Oliver H. leaves, and Sabine H., now without reason, drinks more and more. She gets lost in acquaintances, becomes pregnant again, a daughter, she is now four and lives with foster parents.
When her apartment at Platz der Demokratie is cleared on 22 August 2003, Sabine H. has the containers transported from the balcony to her mother's farm by a forwarding agency. Nobody should touch her, she says, there are precious tubers in it. She leaves them in the shed, buckets, pots, a basket, a plastic tub, an aquarium.
On July 31, 2005, in the afternoon, her nephew tilts the aquarium.
"Human or animal"says Harald Voß, "that's always the first question." But here he knew right away: human. How to recognize this? Voss smiles. "We see that."
Harald Voß, 46, is a friendly, robust man, blond, a little pale, pathologist for 24 years. He is one of three forensic scientists at the Brandenburg State Institute for Legal Medicine, Frankfurt branch. On July 31, 2005, he was on standby, and the telephone ringing on Sundays did not surprise him. On Sundays, people clean up their gardens and find bones in the beds that they can not match. From birds or rats. Then they call the police, and they call the Forensic Medicine to make sure, and then comes Harald Voss.
He still sees himself crouching there, in front of a heap of earth, the aquarium next to it, a low glass vat, green ingrown on the sides. In it a blue garbage bag, which he opens. The picture has impressed on him, "but still," he says, "you will not see that I am here to tell you something about my private feelings." Harald Voss is not a cynic, only experienced.
Pathologist Harald Voß, the children were left in the middle.
They emptied the jars gradually, 40 investigators are finally at the shed and the prosecutor Anette Bargenda, they empty a plastic tub, a saucepan, a basket, several buckets, the buckets are on top of each other, in some only sand, breath, then again a bucket of bone, small skulls, deformed because the skull plates had not yet grown together when the earth fell on them.
Strange objects are there, Doll's plate, toilet paper, towels, an empty pack for WC-hangers, sanitary napkins, a screw, eight bottle caps, indiscriminate grave goods, the garbage has survived with the corpses. By the evening there are nine baby corpses, and Harald Voss thinks: "We dissect tomorrow."
The children were back. Back in the world. Proven as soapy mass, the contours recognizable. In one there is still umbilical cord and afterbirth, preserved by the fat wax. Harald Voss says that this comes from the foil bags, "because body fat turns into a lye-like substance that surrounds the corpse".
The police fill the remains in the jars. A hearse comes, the windows darkened. The Undertaker charges the pails, it must be so, according to the Brandenburg Funeral Act, "bodies must be transported in vehicles, which are intended exclusively for the transport of coffins and urns". The law makes no distinction, it makes coffins out of rusty buckets and human beings out of nine buried past bodies. It seems that this moment is the only deeply humane in the biography of the nine children: because now they are being treated like deceased, with filial piety, respect, with a ride in a hearse, like dead to be mourned for.
Overnight, the containers lined up in the pathology, on August 1 in the morning at half past seven Voß and his colleague Ragna Drescher pour the first on the metal dissecting table. "We looked at the containers as they came in. That's how we numbered them, not age, that was beyond our control," says Voß.
Baby corpses one to nine. Voss dictated, Ragna Drescher examined. Looked for fractures, took DNA samples for sex determination and for the paternity test, two boys, seven girls, father in all cases Oliver H. They measured what they found, the bone length allows conclusions on the month of childbirth. All children were fully discharged.
Harald Voss sits in the break room of forensic medicine, which is housed in the barracks of a former police station on the Nuhnenstraße in the south of the city, a gate in front, no public access. The break room is narrow, more drab than plain, a sink, a microwave, on the table is a flowered oilcloth, no room for social affairs, next door are the dead in their refrigerators. He had a boy on the table this morning, half a year old, starved to death, 200 meters as the crow flies from Democracy Square, up Leipziger Strasse towards the center, Florian. Actually, one of the seven cells in the cold room would have to have a dead body certificate attached to it. But Voss and his two colleagues always know exactly which cells are in operation.
For almost two and a half years, subject number two was in operation. In the middle left, say the pathologists, the numbers do not use them when talking to each other. Center left at four degrees Celsius in nine metal bowls, each 58 centimeters long, 40 wide and six inches deep, stacked like a Jenga tower. One cup per baby. For two who were skeletonized, they tried to make the bones a human whole.
For almost two and a half years, the remains of the children stored in forensic medicine.
Voss gets his atlas of man. The inscription of the body parts is in Cyrillic, he studied in Ukraine. He opens the side with the skeleton of a newborn, the bones are brown, the cartilage blue, much more cartilage is on a human than you think. Cartilage passes. They have nothing weighed, says Harald Voss, "it is no use, to weigh a lazy corpse".
Later he says that dead children approach him on his dissecting table, even if they have the age of his son. The older the boy gets, the more his pity gets old. Now he is eleven. Nearly two and a half years are the nine babies middle left, at four degrees. Artificially kept on earth. They are now evidence, evidence in an ongoing process.
Sabine H. is the process made. She is silent during the trial, her lawyer advises her. The verdict is given in June 2006, 15 years in prison. The prosecution wants to release the bodies, the judge holds them back, because Sabine H. is in revision, and you do not know for sure, if you still need the evidence. Only a few times the forensic doctors open the cooling compartments, for more DNA samples, but they bring nothing new; and to re-examine the bones for fractures, but one can not say clearly whether they occurred before or after death.
The Federal Supreme Court upholds the ruling in April 2007, but demands that the mother's liability be reconsidered because the first ruling did not sufficiently take into account her alcoholism and personality disorders. A new report has to be prepared, it will be autumn. Sabine H. is waiting in the prison Luckau-Duben for her trial. At the beginning of October, the Frankfurt district court finally releases the bodies.
In Frankfurt / Oder, more parks and green spaces are to be created. Many prefabricated buildings are demolished, including the residential block in which family H. lived.
"No city is happy if she has such a thing"says Sven-Henrik Häseker in his hall-sized office in the town hall, the ceilings several meters high. Häseker is spokesman for the city of Frankfurt / Oder, lilac-colored shirt, black, straightened hair, trying to explain. He would like to tell more, but the administration is restrained. "We already have an image problem anyway," he says. "People are leaving, of just under 90,000 people before the turnaround, there are still 61,000 living here. A dying city."
He points to the city map on the wall. The prefabricated buildings are to be demolished, and the block of flats in which the H.s lived in the Platz der Democracy will be demolished, and parks and green spaces will be built. Frankfurt / Oder has space, but no children, next year we expect only 200 births. Schools are closing. "There are nine dead babies who go unnoticed for years, not exactly a positive advertisement."
The city wants to come clean. She offers to provide for the burial.
The office in Brieskow-Finkenheerd has already waved: It refers to the statute of the municipal cemetery, according to which only residents of the place can be buried there. The dead babies are nowhere residents. Brieskow-Finkenheerd declares himself not responsible. By no means do you want to become a place of pilgrimageBeing reminded by a grave to be the village of the dead babies.
Haseker says: "We wanted a worthy and appropriate ceremony, it was a very close affair for many of them, they are also mothers and fathers, but it was complicated." For one thing, you have to get Oliver H. to take care of the children. He, who does not even want to know about them, is now in duty as a father: parents are subject to burial; according to the Brandenburg Funeral Law, the older of the two parents is responsible. Oliver H. has to bring his children under the ground.
On the other hand, death certificates are required for the funeral, but there are none, as there are no birth certificates of the nine babies. There are only the death certificates from forensic medicine. The birth certificates in turn can not be issued simply because the children have no names. First, the parents have to decide if they still want to name the children. Nothing happens. The city is considering a forced naming.
It takes another two months. The babies are stacked in the refrigerator compartment.
Finally, Oliver H. is asked by the city council to take care of the funeral. He contacted a funeral home, which agreed with the public order to keep silent about the operation. "The registry office then decided on a provisional solution," says Häseker, "and made a preliminary recording of the dying process." So the funeral director can finally do his job.
On 4 December 2007 the time has come. The mother is not informed about the appointment. She finds out from the newspaper days later. Her lawyer Matthias Schöneburg says she was disappointed. She would not have gone, but she would have silently agreed with herself.
On February 14, 2008, the appeal proceedings will commence at the district court of Frankfurt / Oder, room 007, a modern hall with parquet and heavy wooden benches, oversized. Sabine H. comes in through the side door in handcuffswhite blouse, make-up, hairdressing, the pony plucked in highlights, the facade intact; a small, narrow woman with hard features, behind which one still suspects the drinker's face; she says, bent forward, her shoulders hunched up, as if she were sitting on her hands: "My emotional world, if I knew more there."
She is struggling. She wants to talk, but she does not know what. Many sentences stay halfway, nobody explains anything. She says there is "less than nothing" in memory"not even a black hole, nothing, it's like a bubble you hang in". How deep, how genuine amnesia is remains as unclear as the reasons for the act, the experts can not say for sure. Clearly, only the blame remains. And that the role of her ex-husband is not tangible.
She says, "I guess I watched it, admitted it and drank it."
She says: "I was happy about every child, otherwise I would not know each other anymore."
She says, "I would endure any punishment, if only I knew, but I can not explain it myself." She says, "I never thought to kill a child, they would all have room with me." She says: "I loved each one of the kids, it was mine."
She must have always sat there, in the blood and afterbirth, on the bathroom floor, in the bed, next to the toilet, wherever she got the children, in a four-room apartment the possibilities are limited. What the adolescent children have noticed, remains unclear, in court, they have denied the statement. She gave birth, her husband watched TV, she drank. Then she waited. Newborns who are not cared for do not fight. They die silently. The mother does not bring her to life, she gives her back into the gray area between being and being, just lets her go out, lighter, quite different from older children, because there is no true attachment yet. "One has to take into account," says evaluator Matthias Lammel in the process, "that infanticide under birth is something completely different than killing older children." Especially if the mother did not want to admit the child during pregnancy.
The mother in February in front of the district court, room 007.
At some point she came to herself every time, must have understood that to act. She turned the babies into rubbish bags with the rubbish lying around, buried them in buckets and put them on the balcony. None of the last children is her own memory. Only the shopping bags are from different department stores.
At the end, one stands on this meadow, at the nameless graves, whose exact location remains just as conjecture as the life and death of the children. The only certainty is that there was no moment in their existence when they were welcome in the world. Not after her death, certainly not in her life. They remain imprintless in the real world.
Your stay is 15 years.
The case Brieskow-Finkenheerd in court - the facts
In June 2006, Sabine H. was sentenced by Frankfurt / Oder district court to 15 years imprisonment for manslaughter in eight cases; the case of 1988 is barred by GDR law. The Federal Supreme Court upholds the verdict, but demands that the sentence be reviewed. A new report is to clarify whether Sabine H. was fully guilty - she was drunk at birth and has no memory of the deeds. In the second trial this year, Sabine H. charges her ex-husband. She claims he said around the year 2000, in an argument with her, "Do not think that I did not know you were pregnant." The prosecution then takes up the investigation against Oliver H., but sets it at the end of May without result. In court, Oliver H., like the couple's three big children, invokes his right to refuse to give evidence. The second procedure confirms the sentence. Appraiser Horst Krüger certifies that Sabine H. was completely guilty because she was able to act in the birth phase and after the act "always meaningful and appropriate to the situation". In the rush, that would not have been possible, at least not alone: "If we help, we would have a completely different situation." Attorney Matthias Schöneburg states that from his point of view "a correct judgment is only possible if one includes the role of the ex-husband". A reduced debt capacity can not be ruled out with at least seven acts. He announces new revision. Prosecutor Anette Bargenda says at the end of the trial: "We will never know what has happened."
