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Psychologist Stemmler
Photo:
Sonja Och / DER SPIEGEL
It was one morning in late January when psychology professor Mark Stemmler was first forced to break a promise and later began to doubt freedom of research.
Two officers from the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office stood in front of his office that morning and showed him a search warrant.
Stemmler is a professor at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, one of his focuses is forensic psychology.
The officials were interested in his project "Islamist radicalization in the penal system".
It is about prisoners who are seen as threatening Islamists or who are suspected of being radicalized.
Stemmler and an employee interviewed 31 prisoners.
They want to find out why a person becomes radicalized - and whether imprisonment intensifies this development.
The researchers let the test subjects talk about their lives, talk about family, school, faith and politics.
They don't talk about crime.
Stemmler knew that it was a sensitive field of research.
The recordings are on a secure server, the files have been encrypted and anonymized.
Nobody could have drawn any conclusions about the respondents from the study.
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