George Alexander:
There are several members of the jury who want to make comments or ask questions. On the other hand, we interrupted the witness with the promise that she could finish. May I ask you now, considering that, would you be willing to wait, if not, please raise your hand and I will recognize you now. 

Esther Hertzog:
Well I would just like to comment on the comments made by that man that came here – I don’t know his name. So if I may just comment now before we continue. I disagree with that comment, it is not a matter of sadists, good people, bad people. If it would have been the problem, I think it would have been easier. Because if it is only individuals that are bad people, evil people, then ok, we have to treat them, we have to take them to court and maybe put them in prison or whatever. The biggest problem is that people in these structured situations do behave as they behave and it can be anyone of us here and is working, functioning within this structured situation we become the same person – not “the same”, it is not the right word – but we are functioning as it is basically expected of us, otherwise we are not going to stay in the system. 

Richard Vatz:
Just so that you understand that this coin has several sides, in the United States one of the primary functions of psychiatry is exculpatory and  I don’t think we should talk about the legal system without at least discussing that. You have endless diversionary programs, you have endless mitigation of sentences, you have terrible people who are not serving their time because of this exculpatory function of psychiatry in America. 

George Alexander:
Now, with the jury’s permission, we will let the witness briefly finish her statement.

Lawyer Christa Peter (translation from German):
Naturally for me it is a little bit difficult – I had a clear concept and a clear structure to my statement but I am going to try and get back into where I was. 

So I would like to add on to the question of what could the motivation be? Or there is the word “sadism” that we heard. Perhaps there’s an explanation of the way the doctors proceed - I don’t want to explain anything here, I would just like to present something. 

A patient on my initiative wrote: “My path of suffering in psychiatry”. He started in 1981 with “a report by Dr. Ingeburg, who wrote a report about me without ever having had a conversation with me, just based on my files. I was strongly alcohol dependent at this time and committed a number of crimes because of this. I tried to have a long-term therapy for this but I never managed to get one even though one of the social workers was trying to get one for me. In 1982 I had an appointment in Flensburg and Dr. Ingeburg said to the judge at this time: ‘You have to imagine this man as a nut without a core. He has to go, he just has to go!’ This was something he said verbally. And I was committed to the forensic psychiatry in Neuland. No-one wants to know anything about this anymore now, they’re all denying it. Isn’t it funny that a normal person can become an imbecile but an imbecile can never become normal? 

I was completely isolated for 90 days here. I wasn’t allowed to write anything, I wasn’t allowed to read the paper, to use the telephone, to smoke, not allowed to speak to any of my co-patients. I spent my hour outside alone. Then all of my windows were shut so that I couldn’t speak to anyone. The heating was turned on, and this for weeks and weeks and weeks until my circulation collapsed. I finally came to myself again when somebody saw me, that I was lying on the floor like that. I was given an injection and then I returned to myself again, I had consciousness again. I wasn’t allowed any phone calls or visitors and letters were not given to me. In these 90 days I went through hell. I didn’t have a bed, I laid on the floor with a mat and two blankets and they were 1,30 m long and 80 cm wide. 

Also there were charges pressed against myself and my mother by Dr. Wienicker and Dr. Distel, who has since died and who claimed that we wanted to raise a criminal here. This is the full truth. My mother was so upset by this, that these lies from the directors led to her having a heart attack, which she died from. I charged these doctors that they had my mother’s death on their hands and I was told that the doctors had no guilt whatsoever. The charges that were pressed against us were dropped for no apparent reason, as if nothing had happened at all. Then my client told me that he spoke to this Dr. Wienicker and accused him of this and said he was to blame for the death of his mother and then Dr. Wienicker said: “If you say this one more time, then I am going to give you a diagnosis!” I asked my client how he explained the way the doctors treated him and he said: “They wanted to break me.” Now this is a man who is very clear and expresses his opinions in very strong terms, in no uncertain terms and therefore he has always been a thorn in the eye of the doctors. I am someone, who , when I am treated unjustly, I tell the person what I think of them and they can’t stand that here. They have their own machinations, the doctors write “lie reports” to the courts and then you have to stay there for a few years longer. […] should have been moved 2 years ago to an open clinic. I was supposed to be moved there several times and then Dr. Schneider came to me and said: “What did you do? You wanted to force two patients to write about this ward otherwise you were going to beat them up.” This isn’t true, I said to him. But he said that they are afraid of you and that’s why they turn to me. Then I left because I just couldn’t stand these kind of lies. I didn’t want to hear it any longer. A few weeks later I spoke to Dr. Schneider about this again and he said to me that they didn’t say that to him but rather complained to Dr. Wienicker and at the next visit I spoke to him again and he said to me: “Who knows if that’s even true?”

So this is how you have constant lies and there is psychoterror that they are doing with people who have their own opinions here. It’s deadly! Dr. Dubbe, who is now the head doctor, proceeds – I don’t need to read you the details here perhaps – the doctors should use their intelligence to help people but they don’t. For this reason these are “intelligence criminals”. Dr. Wienicker is someone I pressed charges against, 1992-3 because he embezzled letters and there I landed right away back in the padded cell. I wrote every letter twice because I was bored and the public prosecutor wrote me an open letter at that time in which it said that the case against an anonymous person was dropped, even though it wasn’t against an anonymous person – I had named his name. So they worked together with the penal execution chamber of Luebeck. 

Twice now I have not been allowed to go for a walk in the city because suddenly there have been some serious, major crimes that can be expected of me. I am allowed to walk around in the grounds but that’s it! Since August 11, I have been allowed to go out on my own and I haven’t done anything. I haven’t even drunk alcohol. It’s complete arbitrariness. I feel we are completely at the mercy of these doctors. Please help us! You are our last hope! Thank you very much. Egon D. “ So again, this is the voice of one of my clients.

About Mr. Rainer Boeder, I would like to say that we talked about him a little bit. He had worked in Hamburg in 1997. His temporary contract ended in Hamburg on January 31. He had passed this fact on to the […] court and it was in the minutes. But at the same time in January he had holiday one more time from the clinic and wanted to use this holiday that went into February, to look for a new job and to look for some kind of accompanying therapy in Hamburg in the hope that he would be released under these conditions.

On February 4, he rang the clinic and said that his job was finished and they immediately called him straight back and made very terrible complaints to him that he wasn’t telling the truth, that he couldn’t work in a trustworthy way with the doctors and they changed his whole leave regulation, put him back into a closed penitentiary and then put him in a semi-open penitentiary again but no longer allowed him the opportunity of going to Hamburg or to look for work again. And then he was allowed to have a few little trips to Luebeck to his fiancée and then in Summer 1998 he took some alcohol back for some patients who had asked him to do that and took money for that and was put straight back into the closed penitentiary for a whole year. Once that year was over they put him back in a semi-open penitentiary again and he was allowed to go out. 

There was a very rich patient, he was a millionaire but he was a little bit slow and he wanted to buy my client’s old typewriter. Now you have to imagine, these people have 160 DM pocket-money and if they work they get about 2 DM a day and they get another 60 DM on top of their pocket-money. 
And then this rich patient said: “Oh, come on, give me your old typewriter. Here, you can have 500 DM.” And he couldn’t resist the temptation and completed this transaction even though the house rules forbid that patients enter into this kind of transaction among themselves.

This was seen as exploiting a weaker person and proof of a dissocial basic attitude. His personal identity card and his bank cards for an account that was in minus anyway. It was just the same as the lighter that we heard before and the pen-knife and so he was told that because of this he was planning to leave and trying to escape and he was put back in a closed penitentiary in 1999 and he’s been in there ever since. I have asked a court again that he be put back into a semi-open penitentiary but they said again that he was not telling the truth […] alcohol on the wards and doing deals with people and that these were symptoms of a serious dissocial personality disorder and that the man was so dangerous that if he was now put into the semi-open area that means that he could occasionally go in the grounds and occasionally go out into the city. The fear is that he would commit such serious crimes that he might even have to be in full-time i. e. murder, for life. 

You heard Mr. Boeder, I used his language again, then you get an impression of this very mature, intelligent, artistic man who is kept incarcerated in a closed penitentiary for this reason. That’s Mr. Boeder.

 Wilfrid Sabasch at age 16 was committed into a psychiatric hospital because he was supposedly an imbecile. The crime that he committed would have left him with 1 ½ years in juvenile detention perhaps but in 1981 he escaped and committed another offence with the clear justification that he says again and again: “I did it because I wanted a new court case. I had been in the clinic for 10 years and I saw no progress and I knew that my initial report of imbecility was wrong and I wanted to have a new expert report.” And he got a new expert report but he had no success because the next expert probably didn’t want to annoy his colleague and said he was an imbecile again and Mr. Sabasch stayed in the clinic. 

He was allowed a few more privileges and in 1987 he was due for release. In 1986 in the basement of a building in this clinic a nurse was attacked. Mr. Sabasch said when I met him: “I had nothing to do with this and all the same they’ve locked me up for it.” And he told me that Dr. Distel, whose name you will have heard earlier on, confirmed to him that the doctors had written a story in his medical papers blaming him for this but he, Mr. Sabasch was not allowed to tell anyone about this and he had to keep complete silence about it. I saw his medical history and it really is the case that a nurse was hit in the face by someone. She didn’t see who did it and the doctor told Mr. Sabasch who was in the semi-open and they suspected him simply because they didn’t have anyone. It says: in the face of a lack of any plausible alternative – the nurse didn’t see anyone and there were no witnesses – the doctor wrote a whole story, completely fiction, about how Mr. Sabasch attacked this nurse and since then – that is November 1986 – he has been in a closed penitentiary and he will be kept there with this diagnosis of abnormal personality development and imbecility. 

And whatever the explanation the doctors may give - I don’t know what it is – but I think it is really the epitome of violation of human rights. There was an investigation against Mr. Sabasch – a criminal investigation – where the charges were dropped. Nonetheless, the doctors insisted this is the case and they told the journalist from Stern magazine. But if we have this suspicion, what are we supposed to do? We can’t help him. 

Good, right. So I have to say, this is the thing where I really thought: “This has to be said”.