Under The Cross

Two old postcards, a strange sender, a sudden thought: had my father been abused by a priest?
In her research, our author makes startling discoveries – and encounters quite a bit of resistance.

I found the postcards that turned my life upside down in a drawer in my parents’ house, where I must have put them myself a long time ago. For almost fifteen years they had lain there, accessible to me at all times. Perhaps there is indeed such a thing as kairos – the right moment for all important things in life? If so, the kairos for opening that notebook was the eve of All Saints’ Day in 2017. The pages were empty, the pages like wrapping paper, seven postcards tucked between the book cover and the first page. Two immediately caught my eye: written in light blue ink, in a handwriting I did not recognise, not easy to decipher.

“Dear Mrs Baumann. Very happy greetings from our first station. So far, your Michael has been doing quite well. He would have loved to have written to you, but I have forbidden him to do so for the next 5 weeks. I will be writing to you every week. If you find it necessary to write, please address the correspondence to me only: Leon Montabaur, Westerwald/Limburg. Poste restante.”

The postcard is addressed to my grandmother, postmarked Montabaur, August 3rd 1954.

The second card is postmarked Rangendingen, Swabia, August 23rd 1954. It reads, lacking all salutation:

“We are all doing very well. Michael is also well, as usual I am very pleased with him and hope that the journey will have a positive effect on him again. Fr. greetings [illegible signature].

Address until August 30th: Leon, Heilige Zimmer (Holy Rooms), Heigerloch. Cath. Rectorate.”

Michael is my father. Mrs Baumann is his mother, my grandmother. Leon: no idea.

My father turned fourteen on August 20th, 1954. Why does a certain Leon have my thirteen- to fourteen-year-old father in his care for more than five weeks, at various stations, in the name of the Catholic Church? Why does he forbid him contact with his mother for the entire period, even on his birthday, and apparently with her approval? Why is he “very pleased” with him, “as usual”? And how is the trip supposed to have a “positive effect” on him, “again”?

When my father hanged himself in the summer of 1994, I was eighteen. I found him in my former nursery. I was spared the sight of his limp form, his head tilted to one side: he had carefully locked the door, turned the key in the lock and lowered the shutters. When I tried to open the door from the outside with another key, I saw his hand through the part of the keyhole that was not blocked. It was up far too high in the room, and far too slack. At this sight, the certainty that my father was dead flooded my whole body at once. His death did not come as a surprise. Or rather, in that terrible moment it did – but I had long lived with his promises of suicide, I knew of his despair, his fear, his years of depression.

I had never known a healthy father. The illness didn’t come into our lives and change them: it was always there. My father and depression were one. When I was little, the illness was referred to as “the headache”, and my mother tried to pretend to me that everything was just fine. But the marriage did not survive the depression. My parents separated when I was eight. My father stayed alone in our large family home, and I spent every other weekend with him. There, I often spent hours by myself because he needed to curl up alone in the dark bedroom.

The older I got, the more would he open up about his depression. He talked about his insomnia, his anxiety, his loneliness. He told me how he’d trudge through the house at four in the morning, how his two slipped discs hurt, how he was tormented by fear. “Fear of what?” I asked once. He explained to me that his fear didn’t need an “of what”. It was a condition that had a complete grip on his body and mind. It dried out his mouth, brought sweat to his forehead, made his hands tremble. I wanted to understand, to be his confidante and help him. At the same time, I was overwhelmed and suffered more and more under the weight of his despair and bitterness. It seemed to me that I knew everything about him: more than I wanted to know and more than I could bear.

Now I’ve realised: I had known far too little.

Two postcards, one riddle. The self-importance of the writer, the consent of the mother and the powerlessness of the boy leave me stunned. I am still working on interpreting the image that was taking shape, when my mother voices a thought that she had been carrying around with her for years. “You know”, she says reflectively, “I never told you this. But back when all the abuse stories first emerged, I thought to myself: I could imagine something like that having happened to Daddy.”

It’s as if all the memories of my father were in a big box, and someone had now shaken it frenziedly and dumped the contents at my feet. I see all the pieces of the puzzle that had always been there; now, they are merging into a new image.

There is my father’s hatred of the Catholic Church. Once I asked him for the reason. He told me about the fear of hell and purgatory the clergy had instilled in him when he was a boy. It had shocked him to the core, he said. I understood and yet I didn’t. I could see how the fear of hell and eternal damnation had tormented him, and that this still made him angry as an adult. Still, his hatred went beyond what I could explain.

Other pieces of the puzzle suddenly fit, too. His unfathomable, incurable despair, his sexual repression that my mother told me about, his good looks and his vulnerability. My father had been slim, blond, blue-eyed, with a finely cut face and a straight nose. He had been tall and athletic but also delicate. Anyone with a penchant for pretty boys had to have been attracted to Dad. He grew up fatherless and with a cold-hearted mother. In a way, he seemed tailor-made for predators: sensitive, vulnerable, in need of attention and without a confidant to share the terrible things that happened to him.

It took a few days for the last piece of the puzzle to fall into place. Once more, it was my mother who saw it. When she asked me about it, my breath caught in my throat. Again, everything had long been there, right in front of me – this time not unseen but unrecognised. Everything before my eyes, I had been blind.

In his last two years – 1993 and 94, before the computer age – my father used to create images by manipulating and combining photos and other material using photocopying, foils and special papers. He called this “copy art”. Usually, every image had a single motif, often himself or me. But one picture was bigger than all the others and made up of many elements. While working on it, he said to me that this was his opus magnum, that his whole life was in it. For me, it was a dark, enigmatic document of his longing for death and his spiritual world, no longer accessible to me.

At the centre of the collage is a portrait photo of him from the sixties. Above it, the defining motifs are otherworldly: heaven and hell, God and death. His father, killed in the war, occupies the upper corners – decapitated, blinded and unreachable. The images below the portrait seem concerned with my father’s past. At the bottom, the base of it all: the crucified Jesus from the Isenheim Altar, flanked by erect penises forming two crosses. From the left and right corner, an attentive observer is looking on – my grandmother.

At some point in the gigantic mess of my father’s house, I came across a cut-up Polaroid picture. I recognised the skin and feet. Then I realised: my father had taken a picture of his erect penis and cut it out. I saw how far he was prepared to go for his collage. This intimate discovery would be safe with me, I decided. I made the Polaroid disappear and never told anyone about it. Not even my mother. For 24 years.

But after almost a quarter of a century, the collage, the postcards, the suspicion and my father’s suffering finally connect for me. I feel like pounding my fists against the wall and screaming “you bastards!” Then I force myself back to the world of reason: I have no proof. Only two postcards. Leon.

Who the fuck is Leon?

 

In November 2017, a few weeks after finding the postcards, I decide to start looking for him. I start at home, in Munich. My father would have been in his late seventies; a person his age might well still be alive. But based on the handwriting and the tone of voice, Leon must have been considerably older. I don’t expect to meet him. I only hope to learn who he was, to find people who can tell me something about him.

At first, I grope around blindly. With a bit of googling, I find out that a study is currently being conducted in Mannheim, Heidelberg and Giessen to clarify the extent of abuse in the Catholic Church since the Second World War. I dial the number provided, and Professor Harald Dreßing, the head of the study, picks up the phone in Mannheim. He explains that the investigation does not concern itself with individual stories. If my request pertains to a specific case, he says, I should contact the abuse commissioner of the respective diocese. He adds that the results of his study should be available by the autumn of 2018.

I don’t want to contact any abuse commissioners. I don’t trust them. Besides, what case do I have? I am not directly affected; my father is dead. All I’ve got are two postcards from a stranger and a suspicion. First, I want to try to get closer to my father, to the way his life had been back then in Karlsruhe.

Three starting points come to mind. First, there is my uncle – my father’s four-year-older half-brother. The two of them had always been weirdly estranged. There had never been much of a connection between us, and a few years before my investigation my uncle had cut off contact with me completely. Still, he is the only companion from my father’s teenage years whom I know. Second, there is my mother, who remembers two names of my father’s school friends. Third, I want to try and find out something from the Karlsruhe parishes about their tent camps in the 1950s.

I don’t dare approach my uncle directly. Instead, I try to find my cousin. He is open enough at first, but then stops responding. I google my father’s school friends and look for them in telephone directories. But one of the names is too common, and for the other, I get no Google hits whatsoever (misspelling the name, as it turns out later). I phone the administrative offices of various parishes in Karlsruhe. Tent camps in the fifties? No, there is no archive material.

Three months later, I find myself none the wiser and deeply frustrated. I’m wondering if the whole undertaking might be quite hopeless. Two postcards from an unknown person, written 63 years ago, with no contemporary witnesses. Am I utterly bonkers? With a job, three small children and a household, I don’t really have the time for this quest. I call on a friend and mentor for help. He encourages me and turns the mess in my head into a three-point plan.

First, the uncle: just go and knock on his door, my friend says. It’s not easy to turn away someone who is standing right in front of you. Second, that school friend with a distinctive surname and a prominent doctor as a father: he should be traceable through the clinics. Thirdly, the parishes: stop talking to secretaries; make an appointment with the parson.

Now a plan is taking shape. A few weeks later, I am on the phone with a school friend of my father’s. They were in the same class all through grammar school (Gymnasium), and once they went on a biking tour together for a few days. The older gentleman on the other end of the line is alert, attentive and happy to talk to me. When I mention the name “Michael Baumann", the reaction is immediate and heartfelt. He had often wondered what had become of my father, had tried to track him down for class reunions. He is shocked to hear about my father’s death. Still, he appears glad I called. He remembers that rainy bicycle tour they went on in 1958. Later, he sends me pictures of my father from their school days.

Nice as the contact is, it does not help with the research on Leon. The friend knows nothing about church camps, neither from my father nor from his own experience, as he is Protestant. He cannot name any other friends. About my father, he says: “You couldn’t really get close to him. He was always very withdrawn, a bit of a loner.”

Nevertheless, I’m delighted: a total stranger has given me a gift – new memories of my father. By remembering him together, we resurrected him for the length of our conversation. All the research was worth it for this alone, never mind Leon and the postcards.

With my uncle, the experience is similar. On a visit home a short time later, in April 2018, I venture out to see him. My heart pounding, I drive there unannounced and ring the bell. He and his wife kindly invite me in. It turns out we are all relieved to break the silence. As we are sitting together like this, I realise what we have in common: the son, the daughter-in-law, the granddaughter – just like my father, all three of us are victims of my grandmother.

For it must be said: my grandmother was a horrible person. That was clear enough even without the postcards. She was cold, bossy, self-centred, manipulative. It is to be assumed that she often beat her two sons. As a child, I always felt uneasy in her presence.

As an adult, I could not stand her for longer than two hours. My father had suffered at her hands and had complained about her all his life, but in periods of weakness he continued to try to get closer to her. In the end, he had broken off contact, even had the locks changed so she couldn’t drop in. For decades, he had been looking for the right word to describe her, he said shortly before his death, and had finally found it: she was a trivenefica, a thrice-cursed poison-mixing witch.

My uncle was also marked for life by that old poisoner. For him, my father was always the favourite son; he himself was rejected, and beaten more often. Now, after decades, I can see a strategy behind all this. I realise how a malevolent mother could sow ill will and mistrust, preventing her victims from finding an ally in one another. Both sons suffered under her despotic rule while remaining strangers to each other. Ditto for both daughters-in-law.

My uncle can’t tell me anything about church camps, though. My father had not talked to him about them, nor does he remember if my father changed after those trips. The name Leon means nothing to him. Instead, he tells me about the physical violence he himself had suffered over the course of four years in the Regensburg Cathedral Boys’ choir. Twice, the beatings ruptured his eardrum. He had also experienced bans on contact with others “so that the abused children could not tell what was being done to them”.

Until the 1950s, my grandmother and her two sons had lived together with her own mother. When the younger woman found a flat of her own, my uncle stayed behind with his granny. From then on, my father lived alone with his mother. This was the time of the Leon postcards. The brothers had only sparse contact. “I thought he was okay with her”, my uncle says.

There are two passport photos of my father from around 1955, one in his student ID card, the other in his lifeguard certificate. In both, he is wearing a checked shirt, and his haircut is a testament to the times: very short at the sides, combed back neatly at the top. His gaze is directed slightly downwards; in one of the pictures, his jaw is protruding, and his eyebrows are knit. He looks as if he were concentrating on something outside of the world around him.

This is not what a happy teen looks like. Serious and lost, this young person seems tense, lonely, withdrawn. A quarter of a century after his death, all I wish is to be able to ask my father what he was thinking and feeling back then.

Now all that is left is the parson in Karlsruhe. It takes me months to get an appointment with Achim Zerrer, head pastor at Karlsruhe Allerheiligen. A week after the 24th anniversary of my father’s death, on June 30th 2018, I finally get to meet him.

The evening train takes me to Karlsruhe. It’s a long journey; the hot Upper Rhine air and the streets, so bustling late at night, put me in a strange mood. For 24 hours, I do nothing of what usually fills my days. An unreal feeling of freedom envelops me. At the same time, long summer days and this leaden Rhine heat bring to mind my father’s suicide. I feel both tinglingly alive and very close to death.

Achim Zerrer welcomes me to St. Stephan’s rectory. He is wearing shorts, a t-shirt and trekking sandals. In a staid little meeting room, I tell him about my father’s life, illness and death. Finally, I get to the postcards. This is the point I’ve been dreading: what happens when I voice the suspicion that my father might have been sexually abused? Will Zerrer stop the conversation? But his alert eyes remain friendly, his boyish face open. “Yes, of course you’re now asking yourself whether he was abused”, he says with a Rhenish accent.

Zerrer cannot help me directly, he explains. He has no idea who Leon might have been. But he is willing to support my research. Two people come to mind who could know something, he says. He promises to investigate and get back to me.

Two weeks after our conversation, Zerrer calls. He has managed to locate an old man who has some answers. The man, who does not want his name mentioned in this article, remembers my father and even his mother. As he was six years older than my father, he never had much to do with him. But the author of those postcards – yes, he knew him well. Leon: that could only have been Hermann Leon, the “great wizard” of youth work in Karlsruhe’s Weststadt in the 1950s. The man says that, for several summers, Leon went on a “drama tour” with a group of teenagers: they biked from place to place, performing a play written by Leon himself in various communities.

The old man is still active in the community and well connected. Zerrer asks him to get in touch with his contacts – in the meanwhile, he says, I should just wait and “let the gentleman get on with it”.

The internet tells me that Hermann Leon was born in 1926. In 1954, he was 28 years old. He was ordained as a priest in Mainz in 1955. From 1962 to 1972, he was a parish priest in Rheinhessen, then in Wald-Michelbach in the Odenwald area until his retirement in 1996. He always specialized in working with youth. Until his death in 2010, he never stopped receiving groups of teenagers at his mill in the northern Black Forest, where he retired. A scout group from Rheinhessen posted a report on such a visit online. The 83-year-old Leon appears in the photos. Now the phantom has an identity, a biography, a face – and a grave, but never mind that. The first big step has been taken: Leon has now been identified.

Three weeks later, Zerrer calls me with news about the old gentleman’s findings. He had spoken to his own acquaintances and to men who had been in the same youth group as my father. They all agree that Leon’s camps had been defined by a harsh regimen. Leon had been both popular and feared, known as a real drill sergeant. A typical punishment for misdemeanours was to be made to walk barefoot across a field of prickly stubble or over sharp stones in a cold riverbed. Two of the interviewees reported another common punishment: the delinquent had to go to Hermann Leon’s tent at night and sleep there. Leon had had his favourites, they say. For them, a night in his tent was a “reward”. The two men had never been assaulted by Leon themselves, they said. But both had seen Leon order other boys to spend the night in his tent.

For nine months, I had kept my feelings at bay. From the first moment, the explanation seemed so plausible, the suspicion almost a certainty. And yet I forced myself to keep my thoughts in the subjunctive form, to add  a “maybe” to the story. It’s as if I had been holding my breath for the greater part  of a year. Now I am letting go.

Anger, pity, pain, relief, pride, gratitude – there is far too much flooding over me to be able to distinguish and fully experience each emotion. I know: each feeling will emerge in its own time. I will have to work through it.

There is no proof that will stand up in court. There probably never will be. But I am not in court. I don’t need a witness who will assure me that on a certain August night in 1954, at a certain time, Leon took my father to his tent. The picture is complete as it is: the postcards, the collage, the statements. From now on, when I talk about my father, I say: I presume that my father had been sexually abused as a youth.

Father Zerrer formulates a report for the abuse office of the Freiburg Archdiocese. Up to this point, researching Leon had been my own affair. Now it’s becoming official. How to live with the new knowledge about my father – this is my private problem. But my father was not the only one who went camping with Leon. What happened to the other boys?

What harm did Leon do in his years as a chaplain, a priest, a teacher of religion?

Hermann Leon is not on record in Freiburg. He had been volunteering in Karlsruhe while studying to become a priest in Mainz, and there was no systematic list kept of volunteers.

In general, my research arouses little interest. At Zerrer’s request, the abuse commissioner sends another enquiry to the diocese of Mainz , where Leon had spent his entire professional life. Zerrer informs me that Leon had been known for acts of violence toward children but not sexual assault. Later, it turns out that a closer look does reveal a few clues.

Just over a week later, my private issue becomes front-page news. On September 25th 2018, about a year after I had called Professor Dreßing, the Catholic Church presents the study he directed. It finds that 3677 children and young people in Germany had been sexually assaulted by 1670 clergymen – and that is just the tip of the iceberg. The researchers call their figures a “low estimate” and assume that there were significantly more acts, victims and perpetrators.

I scroll through the 366 pages of the study, imagining what might have happened to my father. The typical acts of abuse include: touching genitals under clothing, kissing on the mouth, genital penetration, undressing, masturbation of, by and with victims, oral sex, finger penetration. Shocking – but in a way, not shocking enough. These are sober technical terms that almost make you forget: this is what an adult is doing to a child. What does a child feel when this happens to him?

The study also includes a list of health consequences that often occur in those affected. I can tick off most of the items: Anxiety. Depression. Mistrust. Sexual problems. Contact difficulties. Sleep disturbances. Restlessness. Suicidal thoughts. Suicide attempts. One affliction I can definitely exclude – alcoholism. Drug abuse applies, though. For years, my father numbed his body with painkillers. That body of his… As a teenager, my father had been athletic. He was a lifeguard, a rower, went on ski tours and cycling trips. At a dance class in 1958, my mother was enraptured by a tanned young man who had just come from a skiing holiday. But by the time he started university, my father had almost entirely dropped all sports, supposedly to concentrate on his studies. Indeed, he threw himself into studying like a man possessed.

In his later adult life, I knew him as pale and passive, without any joy in sports. He moved stiffly, slowly. For decades, depression sufficed as an explanation: listlessness is a typical symptom, after all. Now, I know an additional reason why an athletically gifted person can become disconnected from his own body.

In the list, I come across another symptom that gives me pause. “Jumpiness” it says, and suddenly there it is, a defining characteristic of my father that I had almost forgotten. My father was always on edge, to a degree that never ceased to amaze me. I could be sitting opposite him, talking to him and looking into his eyes – and then I’d put my hand on his arm, and he’d flinch as if someone were attacking him from behind.

I keep reading and rereading the postcards. “As usual I am very pleased with him and hope that the journey will have a positive effect on him again.” As usual? What was being done to him, repeatedly? And what were the effects that Leon and/or my grandmother considered “positive”? How did my father spend the holidays in 1952, 1953 – years from which I have no postcards? Again and again I look at the old passport photos and imagine my father aged thirteen, at fourteen. Who could he have confided in? He must have been utterly alone.

There is nothing I can do anymore. I must endure this feeling. No way to ask my father, to talk to him, to accuse anyone, to undo anything, to provide any sort of healing. I feel so helpless.

The study is not immediately pertinent to my case. But it changes things. Abuse is now a hot topic, the Catholic Church is under pressure. It might be moved to support research. Sympathy is on the upswing, including for historical cases. And so I am feeling more courageous. If I can no longer find out what happened to my father in Hermann Leon’s care, I will now ask: how did Leon behave later, as a chaplain, priest and religion teacher? That, too, will tell me something about what might have happened to Dad. And I will have a task to distract me from my powerlessness.

I turn to the abuse commissioner of the Freiburg diocese, the lawyer Angelika Musella. Previously, Father Zerrer had told me what Ms Musella had told him about what she had heard from Mainz. But it is no longer enough for me to hear things third-hand. I ask Musella to send me the documents relating to my case. She wants to, but the diocese of Mainz forbids her to email me information about Leon, “for data protection reasons”. They say they understand my interest in obtaining clarity about my father’s suicide but consider “the post-mortem privacy rights of the priest concerned to be more important”. I reread the sentence several times to make sure I didn’t misunderstand.

Bad luck for Mainz: Freiburg does not quite share this view. They, too, won’t send me anything on paper or electronically but they are prepared to read the materials to me on the phone. As slowly as I like.

The name Hermann Leon is already known to the diocese of Mainz “in the relevant context”, they say. Leon must have behaved rather inconspicuously in his everyday professional life. For decades, however, he organised holiday camps at his mill in the northern Black Forest, and the diocese received several “letters of complaint from parents about the questionable educational methods practised there”. In 2010, there had been two complaints demanding  what is known as “recognition of harm” – the church’s standardised procedure for accusations of abuse – relating to the 1960s. In one of the applications, Leon was accused of “boundary violations and corporal punishments that may have had a sexual undertone”. However, the bishops’ conference did not classify these as sexual abuse.

The other accusation concerned a rape at the mill. It was confirmed that rape had been committed by a priest, but “the identity of the perpetrator could not be established; it was clearly not Father Leon himself”. The victim was paid a compensation.

Regarding the account provided by Pastor Zerrer and the suspicion he expressed that my father might have been sexually abused by Leon, the assessment reads: “What Pastor Zerrer writes is in keeping with the information available to us.” The statement from Mainz continues: “So far, we have not been able to prove if Pastor Leon himself sexually abused any children. It is highly likely, however, that the holiday camps at the mill had more victims – if not of sexual abuse, then at least of physical assault given his rigid educational methods.”

I also receive an email informing me that, in 2010, the diocese itself filed criminal charges against Leon on suspicion of intentional bodily harm, mistreatment of protected persons and sexual abuse of minors. However,  no investigation was ever pursued, due to both the statute of limitations and Leon’s death in June 2010.

So the diocese itself has reported Leon to the public prosecutor’s office and assumes further victims. What did they want to protect by refusing to pass on the email to me? “The post-mortem privacy rights of the priest concerned” – or rather the vital interest of the diocese in its own reputation? Now I really feel like putting up a fight.

For weeks, my attempts to speak to someone in Mainz about Hermann Leon are unsuccessful. This only changes when a journalist takes an interest in the case. Suddenly, the diocese’s in-house legal counsel is practically knocking down my door, contacting me by phone and email of his own accord and inviting me to a meeting in Mainz – with himself and the vicar general.

I go to Mainz in March 2019. The unequal line-up makes me nervous. I would have liked some company on my side, too, but whom? No one was really a good fit for this task. So I face the two church bigwigs all alone. I recount my father’s story, tell them about the postcard find, the collage, my suspicions and my findings so far. I want to know everything there is against Leon because it can give me clues as to how precisely my father fared in his care.

At the meeting, the vicar general, Udo Bentz, and the legal advisor, Andreas van der Broeck, divvy up their roles. Bentz conducts the conversation. He does so personably and professionally, listening attentively and radiating a warm charisma. Van der Broeck holds back and takes notes. He stands by to make the unpleasant statements. Bentz leaves it to him to reiterate that they could not have passed on the email or granted access to the files “for data protection reasons”.

Both assure me that Leon’s personnel file has been thoroughly rechecked, and that there are no allegations other than those known to me. Bentz calls Leon’s organisation of the mill camps “paramilitary” and probably even “influenced by fascist ideas”. However, there is no sexual assault by Leon on the record.

The conversation ends with three promises: I am to receive the diocese’s official obituary of Leon. Bentz and van der Broeck promise to pass on my contact information to the two victims mentioned in the email, telling them that I’d like to get in touch. Finally, Bentz and van der Broeck assure me that they will once again analyse everything and try to clarify the matter.

High functionaries in Mainz gave me two and a half hours of their time – even though their diocese has no connection with my father. I see this as a serious commitment and appreciate it. On the other hand, I reproach myself for letting Bentz’s friendly manner, the promises and assurances lull me into compliance. Shouldn’t I have been much more persistent? Will they really do all they can? Suddenly, I doubt that anything will actually happen.

So I do my own research and track down the new owner of the mill. He, too, is a priest. I ask him for an appointment, telling him I’d prefer to reveal my concern in a personal conversation. It works. Tense, I set off for the meeting, which takes place a few kilometres from the mill. Having inherited it, he could be a die-hard Leon disciple. How will he react when I express my suspicions?

My fear initially proves unfounded. The priest appears open-minded and gives me a lot of his time. But this changes when, months later, I ask him for permission to use his information for my article. As a journalist, I am not permitted to share what he had told me when I approached him privately.

Over the months, I talk on the phone with some of the men who knew Leon. Among them are some who met him in Karlsruhe in their youth, others who took part in his later mill camps and pastors who got to know his congregations. Pastor Zerrer, too, continues to gather information and look for witnesses from those times. Most of my interviewees have one thing in common: they don’t want to read their names in the newspaper – often for good reasons. They have learned things in confidence and need to protect their informants. Moreover, there still seems to be a great fear of the supporters Leon had gathered around him over the decades.

Some bits of information keep re-emerging. From the very first conversations about Hermann Leon, I learned: throughout his life, he strove to win young men for the priesthood. For his Karlsruhe drama trips, for instance, he chose schoolboys who went to a grammar school, as only these could potentially go on to study at a seminary. The reason he picked a pastorate in Wald-Michelbach was probably also the local grammar school, where he taught many religion classes. He liked to boast about raising dozens of young priests.

Again, the memories of my father are rekindled; again, it is impossible to find out the truth today. Was Leon about to make a priest out of my father, too? When my mother fell in love with him at a dance class in 1958, an acquaintance told her: put him out of your mind, he’s going to be a priest. My mother also knows about a visit my father made to the seminary in Mainz. But he explained the trip to her as a visit to a friend, and there was no more talk of priesthood.

Witnesses from Karlsruhe describe Leon’s strict regimen and his harsh punishments such as walking barefoot across a field of prickly stubble and praying the rosary for hours – and shrug their shoulders, accepting this as typical of the post-war period. But while the times changed, Leon apparently did not. My contacts from later eras also describe Leon’s heavy hand. Just about everyone I talk to about Leon’s mill retreats uses the word “paramilitary”, there is even talk of a “fascist style”. For all that, apparently no one ever did anything about it. Even a person who was present at many camps as an adult assistant confines himself to stating that he did not agree with his pedagogical methods – which did not stop him from participating in the trips.

Remarkably, the camps were almost free of charge for the participants for decades. On the drama trips, the boys were allowed to pitch their tents on the grounds of the parishes and were fed by host families. In the post-war period, this was the only opportunity for many young people to go on a trip. My grandmother, a war widow with two children, would hardly have been able to afford to travel. Even later, when Leon fed and housed the children at his mill, the costs remained symbolic: my contacts report ten, at most twenty marks for a fortnight. Did Leon cover the remaining costs from his private funds? What control did the diocese of Mainz exercise over the camps? Were the camps and trips nearly free of charge in order to  make the children and parents  more reluctant to press charges?

Even after his retirement, Leon went on to receive groups at the mill. He wanted youth camps to be hosted there after his death, too. But no one supported his plan, and the groups came less and less often. Perhaps Leon failed to notice how very much behind the times he was with his militaristic mill, where the children slept in dormitories on gym mats.

Leon was inclined to think beyond his death not only in regard to the mill. For his funeral, he wrote the obituary himself and recorded it on tape. A preliminary service was held at the mill, where Leon had a small congregation, and the tape was played there. At the official funeral service in Wald-Michelbach, however, this was forbidden by the diocese.

Slowly, the person named Hermann Leon begins to come together in my mind. A man who writes and records his own eulogy. A man who wants to do what he has always done at his mill, failing to see that the times are changing, while resenting the lack of support. A priest whose speeches can be stirring, who has ardent admirers as well as bitter opponents. A despot who expects everyone around him to dance to his tune.

Back when he was just a theology student, without any official position in the Karlsruhe congregation, he took the liberty of rebuking the parents of the children in his youth groups in no uncertain terms. In a letter from that time given to me by a local witness, he expresses his outrage at the low attendance at the school service: “Our leaders [Führers], who sacrifice every free minute and their entire holidays for the boys, have every right to expect that you also do not hesitate to get up half an hour earlier once a week to enable your kids to come to Mass on time. Such small sacrifices will help your boy grow and strengthen the whole Church.”

Leon always had his own thing going, always gathered his special exclusive groups – an approach that is now seen as a deliberate pattern of grooming. Instead of organising tent camps in the usual fashion, he went on drama trips with boys he himself selected. Instead of hosting youth groups at the institutions of his own diocese, he invited them to his private mill on the territory of the neighbouring diocese. Instead of retiring, he held church services at the mill and continued to invite youth groups. But what about concrete evidence of abuse by Hermann Leon?

From his first inquiries into the matter, Pastor Zerrer learned about the “sickroom” at the mill that Leon had mentioned to an acquaintance “with a wink”. This sickroom keeps coming up.

For example, in a phone conversation with a church employee who knows Wald-Michelbach well. On hearing the name “Hermann Leon” and the words “suspicion of abuse”, he gets going faster than I can write. He has no doubt that Leon was sexually assaulting boys. Leon was “addicted to children”, he says; he always surrounded himself with pubescents. At the mill, he treated the sick himself while a “guard” took care that nobody came in. Many children were afraid of the treatments, of being alone with Leon in the room, the church worker says. Suppositories were a standard procedure. At the mill, too, children sometimes had to spend the night in Leon’s room as a punishment. “Utterly disgusting”, he concludes.

And yet: there is a lack of concrete cases, of people who openly filed a complaint against Leon. At school, too, hair-raising things were whispered about Leon, my contact reports, but no one ever did anything about it. In his words, Wald-Michelbach was ruled by an omertà, a law of silence. Leon systematically pressured and intimidated people. My contact is convinced that Leon’s assaults against children were known in Mainz. “I believe Hermann Leon was protected by the silence of the episcopal authorities”, he says. “Things went to Mainz and disappeared.” He wishes  it could all be cleared up one day.

But when and by whom? I hear nothing from Mainz for weeks. In the meanwhile, my phone calls lead me to another church employee. Familiar with one of Leon’s parishes, he talks thoughtfully, haltingly. Over the years, he says, he found himself wondering what had happened under Leon in the past. He remembers how the parish reacted to a tent camp invitation: to his astonishment, there was very little enthusiasm. Only gradually did he realise that the children had clear associations with Hermann Leon’s camps: they were afraid. As he became more familiar with the people in the parish, they began to talk. “I never enquired about it”, he says. There is the unspoken question of what would have come to light if someone did “enquire”.

People told him, for instance, that Leon would examine to see “if the children had washed properly” at the mill, and for this procedure they had to appear before him in their underwear. Gradually, my contact created an image of a person who “enjoyed tormenting children and seeing children naked”.

I find another insider from one of Leon’s parishes. He held Leon in high esteem and had been to the mill with him several times as an adult camp assistant. On the phone, I ask him directly about the suspicion that Hermann Leon might have sexually abused children. He knows the rumour, he says. But he never noticed anything. Well, yes, once Leon personally treated a thirteen-year-old girl by inserting a suppository. But this was the only case of indecency he knew.

Yes, he had heard other stories, but never anything concrete. No, he never noticed anything himself. “I can’t say anything about it because I don’t know anything about it”, he concludes. Well, perhaps it was a bit strange that Leon had “certain pictures in his closet”. When asked, he specifies: these were pictures of boys from the community. He was surprised when he noticed them but never asked Leon. He also noticed that Leon had “friendships with boys”. But he never asked about that either. He avoids further questions.

I report all my contacts and information to the diocese of Mainz, which remains silent. After many weeks, they finally sent me Leon’s obituary. Nothing else. The obituary, long as it is, entirely fails to mention his work with youth, though it defined Hermann Leon throughout his professional life. Why? What was really known about Leon to the diocese? Why did he only get a “second-class funeral”, as one of my informants put it?

During my one meeting in Mainz, I had been promised that those who had filed complaints against Leon would receive my contact information. Did they? My attempt to find out is persistently ignored by the diocese representatives. In July, they finally inform me that a lawyer from Regensburg, Ulrich Weber, has been commissioned to clarify the situation. Weber had investigated the events at the Regensburger Domspatzen choir from 2015 to 2017. A few days later, I travel to Regensburg and present my collected findings to him. For the first time, I have the feeling that someone other than Pastor Zerrer and I has the will to look into the Hermann Leon case. For the first time, therefore, I feel a sense of release after such a conversation. I believe I have placed my material in good hands. Now, I await the results of Weber’s work, which should be available in 2021.

 

In François Ozon’s film By the Grace of God, Cardinal Philippe Barbarin says that these offenses are all too long ago to be actionable, “thank God”. Victims of abuse rightly complain about the statute of limitations: because of it, long-repressed, undiscovered crimes often go unpunished. True, the statute was extended a few years ago, but the change does not suffice to offer justice to people who have not been able to talk about their suffering for decades. The effects of the deeds reach far beyond the fixed duration for seeking justice. Even now, after six and a half decades, after the death of all those involved, what happened to my father is still there.

His illness and death have shaped my entire life. They edged their way in over the years, trickling down, forming a sediment at the bottom of my heart. For decades, the heartless mother, the absent father and the harsh post-war years seemed to be reason enough for my father’s severe depression. In the end, suicide had seemed to him to be the only way out; the bitter truth is, it was his only salvation. I had made my peace with his decision, had tried to see it, as Jean Améry puts it in his book on suicide, as “the outstretched hand of reconciliation”. There remained the mystery of why my father was so incurably desperate, so fundamentally out of place in life. The two postcards stirred up that sediment. Suddenly, my acceptance of his suicide as his only way out pains me deeply. Would his depression had been more treatable if abuse had been identified as a possible cause?

Would I have found the right questions to help him open up? I wish so badly for another chance to talk to him. What did he experience in these five weeks in the summer of 1954 under Hermann Leon, forbidden to write home? What happened in 1952, in 1953? Why were people told he’d become a priest? I have to live with the fact that I cannot know for sure.

In the reports of those affected, I keep encountering one realisation: to define a person by their victimhood is yet another form of abuse. The discovery of this highly probable abuse was the missing piece in the puzzle of my father’s life. For months, I held this piece under a magnifying glass, twisting and turning it this way and that. Now it is time to fit it into place and look at the whole picture. My father was so much more than this. He was incredibly intelligent, well-read and educated. He was insightful and subtle; he could be very witty. An old friend described him with the wonderful adjective verschmitzt [clever and playfully mischievous; “impish” comes closest as a translation]. He was unconventional, incorruptible and happy to help; he had a strong sense of justice. Above all, he was a loving father. Perhaps therein lies his greatest achievement: despite all his suffering, despite his cruel mother, there was no trace of any violence in the way he treated me; my upbringing was loving, liberal and progressive. He never demanded blind obedience. Even when I was a small child, he took me seriously and respected me.

I always knew that he loved me more than anything. Even his suicide did not change that. This love is his legacy. It is greater than his illness, stronger than his bitterness.