Word: bartsch
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last week Jurgen Bartsch, 21, was sentenced to life imprisonment for the four murders. On the stand, he not only admitted the killings and confessed attempts to abduct 70 other children, but also allowed that he had sought ab solution from a priest after attacking his first victim. In Germany, the trial and its ghastly revelations have stirred a bitter debate on whether the confessional should be inviolate when it is privy to admissions of crime...
...with parishioners. The privilege of the confessional is acknowledged by courts in most West ern countries. In West Germany, for example, both Catholic and Protestant clerics - as well as psychiatrists dealing with mental patients - are exempt from a law requiring citizens to report any knowledge of crimes committed. The Bartsch case, however, has stirred an extraordinary amount of outcry against the silence of the priest involved be cause of the peculiarly repellent nature of the crimes...
...illegitimate son of a tuberculous war widow and an itinerant Dutch street singer, Jurgen Bartsch was adopted in 1954 by a Catholic couple. According to his own testimony, he was sexually molested by a male relative when he was eight, and in puberty displayed homosexual tendencies. All of Bartsch's victims were boys, all had been lured away from carnivals, all had been killed in an abandoned air-raid shelter. On the witnessstand, Bartsch described in detail how he had attempted anal intercourse with two of the boys, masturbated over them, then slaughtered the children as a butcher would...
Western intelligence agencies knew all about Bartsch, however. His name had turned up in the cross reference data at the Berlin Documents Center, an archive of old Nazi membership files rescued from the storage heap of a West German papermill after the war. Resisting the temptation to spill the facts on Bartsch, intelligence bided its time. Fortnight ago, the rising Herr Bartsch became agricultural czar, and at this point out to West Berlin newspapers went full dossiers on the new Communist Cabinet Minister...
...days the East German government ignored the headlines. Then Ulbricht's party control committee met and decided that Bartsch, for causing "serious damage" to the party, would be dismissed from all his party and government functions. He had been in office just 36 hours...