Berlin: At least 547 boys at a German Catholic choir school suffered sexual or physical abuse in what victims have likened to “prison, hell or a concentration camp”, said an investigator releasing a final report on Tuesday.
The Regensburger Domspatzen, a 1,000-year-old cathedral choir in Bavaria, was in 2010 dragged into the massive sexual abuse scandal plaguing the Catholic Church in recent years. Many victims remembered their time in the choir school as “the worst time of their lives, marked by fear, violence and helplessness”, said lawyer Ulrich Weber, commissioned by the diocese to look into the cases.
Presenting his final report on abuses between 1945 and the early 1990s, Mr Weber said he had uncovered 67 cases of sexual abuse and 500 cases of other physical violence, with some former singers having fallen victim to both.
This more than doubled the 231 reported abuse cases he had uncovered through interviews by January 2016, when he said victims had spoken of rape, sexual assaults, severe beatings and food deprivation.
Mr Weber pointed to a “culture of silence” and placed part of the blame for the situation on the school’s former choir master Georg Ratzinger, the elder brother of former pope Benedict.
He said 49 alleged perpetrators had been identified, but they were not expected to face criminal charges as the alleged crimes took place too long ago.
