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Journalism of Courage
In September, 11-year-old Jakob von Metzler, son of a prominent banker, was kidnapped in Frankfurt while on his way home from school.
Three days later, police watched a man collect a ransom equivalent to about $1 million that had been placed at an arranged drop-off point. They moved in and arrested him. But a serious problem developed: The suspect, law student Magnus Gaefgen, 27, wouldn’t reveal where the boy was. For hours, he toyed with police, sending them down one false trail after another.
Wolfgang Daschner, deputy police chief in Frankfurt, has recounted that he feared the boy was dying in some makeshift cell known only to the suspect. So Daschner told his officers that they could torture the suspect, and he put that order in writing. They could extract information ‘‘by means of the infliction of pain, under medical supervision and subject to prior warning.’’
Daschner’s decision last year has only just become public, and it has plunged Germany into a tormented national debate: Is there ever a circumstance under which torture is permissible? Daschner has said that in this instance, just the mention of torture had the desired affect.
‘‘After Magnus (Gaefgen) was threatened with pain, it only took about 10 minutes for him to tell us where the child was,’’ he said in an interview with the magazine Der Spiegel. But when police went there they found that the boy was already dead. Gaefgen has been charged with murder, and Daschner is under investigation for employing the threat of torture, a crime that carries a 10-year sentence in Germany.
The very mention of the word torture conjures images of the Gestapo here, but the police officer has been defended by some politicians who have invoked the threat of massive terrorist attacks and other extraordinary circumstances to suggest that torture should be part of the police arsenal if there is no other alternative for saving lives.
‘‘Torture is banned in international conventions and in the German Constitution, and that is absolute,’’ Amnesty International said in a statement.
Human rights activists noted, however, that the idea of torture, once reviled, has found a measure of respectability in popular discourse in Germany and elsewhere since the September 11 attacks. A majority of German public opinion supports Daschner’s choice, according to polls in recent days.
He enjoys the highest approval among supporters of the successor party to the old East German Communist party, according to a poll published in Die Welt. (LATWP)
