The Scholl Case

by Anja Reich-Osang

  It was quiet again in the courtroom. Questions hung in the air, important questions: What had Heinrich Scholl wanted to tell his mistress? That he was free? That he could start a new life with her, without his wife? Who was this man in the dock? Why wouldn’t he say what he had thought and done in those last days of 2011? What was he hiding?

  Psychiatrist Alexander Böhle, an expert witness appointed by the court, was next to testify. He had spoken at length to Heinrich Scholl in prison and observed him during the hearing from his seat between public prosecutor and Frank. From the outset, Böhle made it clear that there was not much he could say. Heinrich Scholl had, it was true, talked to him about his life, but not about the death of his wife. There was very little material; psychiatric conclusions could only be drawn with difficulty. ‘There’s a big hole.’

  During his first conversation with the expert witness, Heinrich Scholl was politely detached; during the second he was ‘more engaged, more open’. He told the specialist ‘cheerfully’ about his educational and professional development. The accused had been anxious to present himself as a moral, robust and upbeat person, said Böhle; he had—consciously or unconsciously—distorted his answers in order to appear in a better light. A test had shown that Heinrich Scholl avoided direct, aggressive confrontation. ‘He doesn’t swear back if he’s criticised; he suppresses anything like that, or doesn’t even register it.’ Moreover, because of a huge superego, Scholl tended to accept accusations made by others, turn them against himself and defend himself: ‘That wasn’t my intention! I didn’t mean to!’ He had a great deal of trouble with feelings in general and difficulty negotiating emotional relationships. Heinrich Scholl struck the expert witness as ‘cold’.

  Böhle sees Scholl’s childhood as the cause of his problems. He spoke of a ‘family background of social and emotional deficiency’ and of ‘authoritarian structures’. He had, in effect, no father; his mother had been the dominant parent. To this day, Scholl defends her harsh treatment of him, becoming ‘really angry’ when asked why he put up with so much from his mother. If his mother said something, it was fact. ‘A boy who identifies with his mother, a very sad adolescence, a situation in which a child cannot mature much,’ was Böhle’s conclusion. Such children often grew up into people who misjudged complex human relationships.

  His submissive relationship with his mother continued seamlessly into his marriage. ‘He went from one regime of dominance to the next,’ the expert said. At first, Heinrich Scholl barely noticed, partly because Frank, Brigitte Scholl’s son, was treated just the same. Later, Scholl’s position as mayor helped him to compensate for his marital problems: ‘He was boss then; he had the say.’

  Heinrich Scholl, Böhle said, had suppressed his marital problems for decades, denying them and drastically playing them down. He was completely uncritical of his mistress Nantana too, but at the same time ‘emotionally very involved’. The relationship was extremely intense on Scholl’s side, ‘no doubt partly as a result of his desire to catch up; he hadn’t had many women’. The expert witness was astonished that a man who had been mayor, and in that capacity had to rely on his ‘intuition’, a form of emotional intelligence, should completely fail to keep his distance emotionally. But there was no question of a psychiatric disorder or significant psychological abnormality. Heinrich Scholl was of above average intelligence, well able to orient himself and capable of independent reflection. ‘Dementia, forgetfulness—all that can be ruled out,’ Böhle wrote in his report, ‘as can hallucinations, paranoia and schizophrenic psychoses.’

  Criminally liable: for the court that was the crucial finding. No mitigation of sentence, then. The psychologist, a composed man with half-moon glasses and a bow tie, analysed the man in the dock like a patient. Scholl listened with interest. Maybe he was comparing the conclusions of the expert witness with those of his therapist at Lake Tegern. Maybe he was sorry that Gitti hadn’t given marriage counselling with the vicar a real go.

  Alexander Böhle described the Scholls’ marriage as a long relationship of dominance and subjugation. Scholl’s inability to show his feelings or let off aggression had led to a psychosomatic disorder. ‘It was more than just a nice detail that Frau Scholl treated her husband so harshly. There must have been extreme defence mechanisms in play.’ That would also explain his bowel disease, Böhle said.

  When asked whether Heinrich Scholl could have been the perpetrator, Böhle sketched a possible scenario: Out on a walk in the woods together, the couple get into a fight. In the heat of the moment, Scholl strangles his wife. Later, he ‘wakes up’ elsewhere, returns to the woods, sees the victim before him, covers her with moss and then calls the police, ‘because he can’t understand that he did it’. Such things happened, Böhle said. In people as inhibited as Scholl, there was a particularly high risk of so-called lack of impulse control.

  But all that was only a hypothesis. ‘I don’t know to this day whether Herr Scholl did it or not.’

  Alexander Böhle was the ninety-seventh witness at Heinrich Scholl’s trial for the murder of his wife; there followed further expert and witness statements, including those of a nine-year-old girl who had been out riding in the woods with her father and encountered a couple with a dog: Heinrich and Brigitte Scholl. This was the witness found by the vet at the instigation of the accused. Sitting right in front of her, the judge tried to jog her memory with simple questions. In vain. Neither she, nor her sister, nor her father could say what day they had seen the couple.

  Witnesses had also come forward in response to the notice in the weekly paper, claiming to have seen Heinrich Scholl at the spa a little after twelve o’clock; that is, at the time of the murder. But it wasn’t certain. It could also have been a little before twelve. Brigitte Scholl’s death was retreating further and further into the mists of memory.

  In his final speech, the prosecutor stuck staunchly to the original charge of heinous murder, citing times and witness statements that matched his version of events. Stefan König spoke next, for the defence. He started by unpicking the prosecutor’s chain of circumstantial evidence and then presented his own, according to which Heinrich Scholl could not possibly have been the murderer.

  Scholl’s second lawyer, Heide Sandkuhl, had prepared her own final speech, in which she made a very different argument, attempting to convince the court that her client had killed his wife in the heat of the moment. If Heinrich Scholl had committed a crime of passion, rather than premeditated murder, he might receive a more lenient sentence. She said she was only doing this in case the court hadn’t accepted the first line of argument the defence had presented. This tactical trick was extremely unusual, but Heide Sandkuhl was very convincing, arguing that an apparently insignificant moment, but one that was wounding to Heinrich Scholl, could have provoked him to break out of his marriage. ‘Maybe, in a few highly dramatic seconds, he lost control and exploded.’

  Scholl’s behaviour after the murder—in the police car in the woods, when he told Ricarda Hoss about the early bloomers his wife had torn up—was, his lawyer said, typical of perpetrators of crimes committed in the heat of passion. ‘After the crime, a state of severe shock and bewilderment often sets in; the perpetrator breaks down and can even attempt suicide. A perpetrator who was fully conscious and in control would never have talked like that.’ The fact that the dead woman was covered with moss and the perpetrator had attempted to fake a sex offence did not rule out a crime committed in the heat of passion. On the contrary. ‘Such behaviour suggests the perpetrator’s panicked fury rather than a controlled, calculated act.’

  It was not the first time she had appeared in a criminal court, Heide Sandkuhl said in conclusion, but no other recent trial had brought home to her with such force how hard it was to reconstruct the truth.

  Frank’s lawyer began his final speech with the words: ‘The defendant’s son has been through one of the hardest years of his life.’ He ended by saying: ‘The co-plaintiff pleads for conviction for manslaughter.
The prison sentence should on no account be less than ten years.’ Frank was silent. In the break, afterwards, he said that it had been the little things in particular that had convinced him of his father’s guilt. That on the night of the murder he had parked his car in the garage where his mother’s Mercedes was usually parked. That he had moved straight back into the bedroom she had banished him from. That he had inquired of all sorts of neighbours and friends about his wife, instead of ringing home from time to time. Not a single call had been made to the landline of their house on the afternoon of 29 December. For Frank the answer was clear: his father knew that his wife was not going to return home.

  It wasn’t until after the final speeches, when the judge offered him the last word, that Heinrich Scholl got up from his chair. He had kept up his silence for seven months, listening to what others had to say about him, his wife and his marriage. ‘I can only assure you once again that I did not kill my wife and our dog,’ he said. His voice was husky; he spoke quickly, without pausing. ‘I have tried, in these fifteen months I’ve spent in custody, to prove my innocence, with the few people and means at my disposal. Because I knew I couldn’t find witnesses who would incriminate me. Thank you.’

  It was a protestation of innocence, no doubt about it, but it was so awkwardly worded that it sounded almost like a confession of guilt.

  Four days later, everyone came together one last time, for the verdict: the defendant’s son, his cousin, childhood friends, business partners, Brigitte Scholl’s girlfriends, the superintendent, police, neighbours, townspeople, legal reporters from all over the country. It was a warm sunny day in May. One spectator turned up in a straw hat, as if to an outdoor concert.

  In the cluster outside the courtroom, the sentence was discussed. Murder, manslaughter, acquittal. The majority gravitated towards manslaughter; almost nobody reckoned with murder. Three of Heinrich Scholl’s friends had come to collect him from the back of the courthouse in case of an acquittal. His childhood friend Hans had prepared a room for him in his house in the country; even the bed was made up. His friend Dieter wanted to take him to Indonesia on his ship as soon as it was seaworthy again. An old business friend with good contacts in America was likewise on standby.

  When Heinrich Scholl entered the dock, he was wearing a grey pin-striped suit and the polo shirt from the first day of the hearing. In his hand he held a yellow exercise book, which he placed on the table in front of him.

  As the judges entered the courtroom for the last time, the spectators rose from their seats. ‘In the name of the people,’ said Judge Tiemann, ‘the accused Heinrich Scholl is sentenced to life imprisonment for murder in coincidence with the killing of a vertebrate animal without reasonable cause. He is to bear the costs of the proceedings and the expenses incurred by the co-plaintiff.’

  Heinrich Scholl swayed back and forth; for a moment, it looked as if he would fall over. The sentence had been delivered, the trial was over.

  Nearly over.

  The reading of the judgment went on for four and a half hours. The judge went a long way back, describing Heinrich Scholl’s marriage, the couple’s strained relations, Brigitte Scholl’s unwillingness to change, her husband’s life in Berlin, his pathological jealousy, his attempts to win back his mistress and the precipitate return to his wife. For the judge, Scholl’s return home was clearly part of a plan: ‘He was entertaining the idea of killing his wife.’

  There followed a disquisition, delivered quietly and impassively, on Scholl’s behaviour before, during and after the crime. Only occasionally, when taking issue with the arguments of the defence, would the judge raise his voice: ‘What rubbish!’ He accused Scholl and his lawyers of seeking to influence witnesses with the notice in the weekly paper. ‘The accused hoped that people who had seen him in and around the spa before twelve o’clock on 29 December would come forward and erroneously allege to have observed him in the time between 12 am and 1.10 pm.’

  What angered him most were allegations that the police had fixed on Scholl too quickly. It was, he said, no wonder some witnesses had said something different at the trial from what they had told the police: ‘They were worried about incriminating Herr Scholl. No one could imagine that he had killed his wife; he was the former mayor of Ludwigsfelde, an honourable man. And yet here in the courtroom you often get to know sides of a person that no one could previously have conceived possible.’

  Scholl’s lawyers left the courtroom. A spectator unwrapped her sandwiches. Finally, Judge Tiemann closed the hearing with a weary wave of dismissal. Heinrich Scholl sat slumped in front of his exercise book.

  He hadn’t written a word.

  Driving to see Heinrich Scholl is like travelling to the end of the world. You pass through deserted villages until you come to one of those thinly populated towns that are abandoned by the young because they can’t find work there. You drive along broad main roads, past industrial ruins, and eventually, when you’ve almost come out at the other end of town, you turn into a side road, leave your car in a large car park, and walk past an end-of-the-line tram stop, a boarded-up clubhouse and a Soviet army tank until you come to a concrete fortress surrounded by high walls and barbed wire.

  The prison in Brandenburg an der Havel was built in the thirties, at about the same time as the Ludwigsfelde munitions factory where Heinrich Scholl’s father found work. Nazi resisters were locked away here: communists, social democrats, dissident academics and artists. Erich Honecker spent eight years here as young man, imprisoned by the Nazis for high treason, before being freed by the Red Army and going on to become a dictator himself, leading East Germany for nearly two decades. Another prominent inmate was Horst Mahler, a founding member of the Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof group. Initially an extreme leftist, Mahler subsequently became one of the most dangerous right-wing extremists and Holocaust deniers in the country.

  History is complicated. Lives are complicated. The prison is a reminder of that, an unintentional monument.

  Heinrich Scholl is sitting facing the wall in a corner right at the back of the visitors’ room, two plastic bottles—Coke and fizzy apple juice—on the table in front of him, and a bar of Ritter Sport chocolate left over from the previous visit. Dieter Fahle has just been, the friend with a boat at anchor in Indonesia. An acquaintance from Berlin was supposed to be coming too, but it looks as if she’s changed her mind. ‘Not many come now,’ says Heinrich Scholl.

  It is a day in late May, two weeks after the verdict. His lawyers have gone straight to appeal, but that does nothing to lift his mood. Heinrich Scholl feels let down. His childhood mates remain loyal, but he no longer hears from his powerful politician friends. When he was the model mayor from the East, they liked to be seen with him. Now he’s in trouble, they have dropped him. A few days after his conviction, a letter came from the SPD with no salutation; only a subject line: ‘Immediate action against Heinrich Scholl’. The party executive were notifying him that internal proceedings had been initiated, because of ‘severe damage to the party’s political standing and credibility’. ‘Prompt intervention’ was called for. It made no difference, the letter informed Heinrich Scholl, that he had been involved and active in the party in many ways over the years.

  The party he had helped to found in Brandenburg was ashamed of him. It was almost as much of a blow as the judge’s verdict. Only two days ago had Heinrich Scholl summoned up the strength to reply. ‘Dear Sir/Madam,’ he wrote, ‘Although my verdict is not yet final, I would like to avoid any further damage to the party and hereby resign my membership of the SPD with immediate effect. I apologise for the dishonour I have brought on the SPD.’

  He meant it ironically, but after posting the letter, it occurred to him that it sounded more like a confession of guilt.

  It was a year and four months ago that he was arrested. Since then he has been sitting in the remand prison, fluctuating between despair, self-pity and pugnacity. It is only here in prison that he has woken up to what he�
�s lost—not just his wife, but his son too, his whole family. He says he doesn’t know how it could have come to this—he didn’t do anything to deserve it—and there have been times when he’s thought about ending it all. But then, almost in the same breath, he starts to talk about his old exciting life or the appeal his lawyers are working on. He laughs and cries. One moment, he’s as bitter as an old man; the next, he’s as high-spirited as a boy.

  He often talks about his son. Long before the trial began, Frank visited him in prison for the last time. He doesn’t call or write any more either. Their lawyers are negotiating the sale of the house in Ludwigsfelde. At the thought of the house, tears well up in Heinrich Scholl’s eyes: the lovely house, his garden, his fireplace, his barbecue. All lost.

  They had such a good relationship in the past, he says. He never referred to Frank as his adoptive son; he always looked after him. Frank had such a lot to thank him for. Heinrich Scholl shakes his head, uncomprehending, disappointed, and lists all the charges Frank brought against him in court, commenting on them, correcting them, criticising them. That he and his lawyers didn’t show Frank any documents, for instance—simply not true, he says. ‘I managed to bring the indictment out here into the visitors’ room so that he could read it. Don’t ask how. But Frank wasn’t interested; he didn’t even want to look at it.’

  Or the scene in the woods on New Year’s Day when he got out of the car and bent down, and his son thought he was planting evidence: it was a mouse! He saw a mouse! A dead mouse! In court, Heinrich Scholl kept silent. Now it comes bubbling out of him—all the injustices and injuries he has had to bear in silence. Heinrich Scholl stares at his hands, and when something particularly annoys him, he thumps on the table top. The police were biased—bang. The judge locked him up—bang, bang. Witnesses claimed things that weren’t true—bang, bang, bang.