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Monastery students send pictures of Hitler via Whatsapp

2020-02-27T13:51:25.073Z


The police are investigating incitement against two students from the Schäftlarn monastery high school. The two 14-year-olds are said to have shared sexually offensive and hateful content with classmates via WhatsApp.


The police are investigating incitement against two students from the Schäftlarn monastery high school. The two 14-year-olds are said to have shared sexually offensive and hateful content with classmates via WhatsApp.

Schäftlarn - At the beginning of February, the guidelines for teachers recently published by the Bavarian Ministry of Culture on how to behave when disseminating extremist content in class and group chats landed on Wolfgang Sagmeister's desk. At that time, he certainly hadn't thought that the director of the Schaftlarn monastery high school would be forced to follow the instructions so quickly.

Swastikas and porn were spread on the way back from the ski camp

But everything has changed since the middle of the month. Since the eighth graders, as Sagmeister confirmed on request, shared “racist and inhuman images and Nazi symbols” on the return trip from the ski camp in South Tyrol via class chat. During the bus ride, a teacher saw what was shared by Whatsapp group and informed the school management. “Then we turned on the police,” says Sagmeister. Now the criminal police are investigating - for incitement, use of signs of unconstitutional organizations and distribution of pornography.

A 14-year-old has now been suspended

Specifically, as a police spokesman confirmed, two 14-year-old classmates in the chat distributed Hitler pictures, swastikas, anti-Semitic comics and porn videos. This already had consequences for one of the students. According to the headmaster, he has been suspended.

The investigation is far from over. The police are in the process of questioning each and every one of the approximately 40 to 50 students who received the prohibited content on their cell phones. In the course of the extraordinarily extensive investigation, it must also be clarified whether the two perpetrators were punishable for the offense, it is said.

School responds with letter to parents

Headmaster Sagmeister has also turned to the parents because of the incident. "We will not tolerate contempt for human beings in any form at our school," emphasizes the director in the letter to the parents, referring to the many friendly relationships that the Benedictine grammar school has maintained with several schools around the world for years. Teachers in the individual classes are currently working on the topic with the support of a youth official.

"The dignity of the human being is at the core of the Christian image of man, which forms the basis of our school," says Sagmeister. The headmaster closes with the request "that we, as a school and parents, continue to form a strong educational partnership with this central topic".

Sagmeister hopes that the further investigations by the police will primarily provide clarification as to whether the dissemination of the content in question was just a "thoughtless" use of students by smartphone or whether there are actually students who also have a right or have racist sentiments. He does not believe that it is a special problem at his high school. After all, it is no coincidence that the Ministry of Culture only published the guidelines in question a few weeks ago.

Other incidents in Grafing and Dachau

In fact, more and more such incidents have recently become public. So there was a lot of excitement at the Grafing high school (Ebersberg district) because in the fall of last year, students there probably spread swastikas and gas chamber sayings via a class chat. There is also an incident like this at the Ignaz-Taschner-Gymnasium in Dachau. Here, too, students sent pictures with racist and anti-Jewish agitation via Whatsapp.

Source: merkur

All news articles on 2020-02-27

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