A pediatrician who worked at two clinics in the German federal state of Brandenburg has been charged by the German prosecution with 130 counts of child sexual abuse, including cases of rape, many of them committed during his work shift.
The pediatrician has been in pretrial detention since November last year, after a mother suspected that her son had been assaulted and reported it to the authorities, but until now the extent of the facts that have shocked an entire region was unknown, which wonders why the established protocols to prevent these cases failed. According to the Potsdam Prosecutor’s Office this week, the pediatrician from the Havelland Kliniken hospital group is charged with “sexual self-determination offenses in a total of 130 cases. Among others, they include charges of serious sexual abuse of minors and rape.”
According to the indictment, the 46-year-old doctor committed the crimes between December 1, 2013, and November 5, 2025. “The accused allegedly committed most of the acts in the exercise of his professional activity at the Rathenow and Nauen hospital centers,” the Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement about a case that will be tried at the Potsdam Regional Court, after charges were filed on May 6, and from which it has not yet been disclosed how many children have been victims of these abuses.
The case came to light in January this year when it became known that the doctor allegedly sexually abused a child last November while on duty at the Rathenow hospital, a small town of 25,000 inhabitants on the banks of the Havel River, about 90 kilometers west of Berlin. After the child’s mother reported it, the police carried out a series of searches. Investigators seized a large amount of data storage devices and the Prosecutor’s Office quickly checked if there were more possible victims. It was then that pretrial detention was ordered against the accused, who was arrested last November 24, due to “risk of reoffending.”
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“Our condolences to all patients who may have been harmed, as well as to their families,” wrote the Havelland Kliniken group in a statement issued Thursday night. They also informed that they will “fully” support the work of the Prosecutor’s Office and provide all necessary information to clarify everything that happened.
The Havelland clinics had already announced in January, when the case came to light, that they would review their protection mechanisms and analyze the case with the help of experts. During the child’s examination, the current double control principle, according to which two people must be present, was violated, the Havelland clinics group declared at the time, announcing the start of a thorough internal investigation. “The accusations shake the trust of patients and their families,” said the medical director, Mike Lehsnau, at that time.
According to their managers, all pediatricians work both in Rathenow and in the nearby town of Nauen. However, they did not want to provide more information about the possible affected children. The chief physician of the children’s clinics in the two towns, Torsten Kautzky, explained that he himself had developed the clinics’ child protection plan in 2023. This includes, for example, a firmly established child protection team, made up of sensitized professionals from different areas. The plan also applies to the emergency service and, in principle, provides for the double control principle. According to this, examinations of children should never be carried out alone, but only in the presence of a second professional and a family companion, such as the parents, Kautzky detailed. This also aims to protect the employees.
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