FRESH ABUSE allegations have hit Germany’s Odenwald School, with claims by former pupils that a former music teacher forced them to participate in pornographic film and photographic shoots.
The Odenwald, Germany’s leading reform educational institution, has already been damaged by admissions of widespread sexual abuse by at least eight former teachers.
Now former students have accused Wolfgang Held, music teacher from 1966 to 1989, of abusing boys on a regular basis in a penthouse near the school and in a holiday home in St Moritz.
In the Swiss resort, Held, who died in 2006, reportedly coerced boys as young as nine to participate in a pornographic film shoot. The former students say a former student-turned-lover of the teacher “initiated inexperienced children” and took care of the lighting, according to a newspaper report yesterday.
In an apartment near the Odenwald school, Held allegedly organised parties with adult friends, also attended by pupils, at which child pornography was shown. A former Odenwald student has demanded the late teacher’s surviving lover destroy any surviving photographic or video material.
However, when he approached police in Heppenheim, near the Odenwald school, they declined to get involved, saying the alleged crimes fell outside the statue of limitations – between 10 and 20 years, depending on the victims’ ages.
The former student told the Frankfurter Allgemeinenewspaper the first complaints against Held were made in 1968.
Established in 1910, Odenwald offers a holistic, student-oriented approach to learning. The boarding school offers pupils co-operation and close contact, living in so-called “families” with their teachers.
In March, it emerged that at least eight teachers were using this model to cover up decades of abuse. Current headmistress Margarita Kaufmann said that in the past, Odenwald had operated “like a cult”. Abuse victims and their claims were suppressed, she said, out of awe for the school’s reform pedagogical concepts championed by Gerold Becker, principal from 1972 to 1985.