On the morning of April 26, 2002, the last day of the written Abitur examinations at a Gymnasium in Erfurt, sixteen people died in the space of about twenty minutes. Twelve of them were teachers. The others were the school secretary, two pupils and a police officer. The police investigation and, two years later, an independent commission appointed by the government of Thuringia attributed every one of those deaths to Robert Steinhäuser, a 19-year-old who had been put out of the school the previous autumn without any leaving qualification. He died by suicide in Erfurt the same day.
Because he died that morning, he was never arrested, never charged and never tried. No German court has ever weighed the evidence against him or pronounced a verdict. His responsibility was established by the police, by the federal and state criminal investigators who later studied his motives, and by the state commission that reviewed their work. Those findings agree: one person, acting alone, was responsible. What they could not settle was the argument over how it had been allowed to happen, and that argument moved, over the next two years, from the police to the cabinet, from the cabinet to the state parliament, and from Erfurt to the federal lawmakers in Berlin.
Robert Steinhäuser was born in 1983 and grew up in Erfurt, the capital of Thuringia. He began at a primary school in the city. When the time came to choose a secondary school, his marks were not strong enough for a recommendation to the Gymnasium, the academic track that leads to the Abitur, and he was advised instead toward a Regelschule, the Thuringian school that combines the two lower tracks. In 1995 he was enrolled at a Gymnasium in Erfurt all the same.
The years that followed, as the state commission later reconstructed them from the school's files, were a steady decline. On February 23, 1999, at the end of the winter half of tenth grade, he applied to sit the examinations for an external Realschulabschluss, the intermediate certificate that would have given him a qualification to fall back on. The application was granted. He did not sit the final papers. He finished the year with a Gymnasium report carrying marks the commission called worrying, and his eleventh-grade report held five marks of "mangelhaft" and two of "ungenügend", the two lowest grades on the German scale. He was allowed to repeat the eleventh grade.
In August 2001, at the start of the new season, he gave up the handball team he had played on, saying he had too much to do for his Abitur. The repeat year brought a formal hearing over his absences, and then a charge the commission found to be well founded: he had presented a falsified medical certificate to cover them. In October 2001 the head of the school ended the matter. Under paragraph 52, subsection 3, of the Thuringian school regulations, his time at the school was over.
He was 18 and legally an adult, and because he was an adult the school did not inform his parents. He did not tell them either. For almost half a year he let them believe that he was still attending classes and preparing for the Abitur. On the morning of April 26 he told his family he was going to a mathematics examination.
The consequence of being put out was harder in Thuringia than it would have been almost anywhere else in Germany. Under the rules then in force, a Gymnasium pupil who left without the Abitur did not automatically hold the intermediate certificate that pupils elsewhere earned at the end of tenth grade. The arrangement existed only in Thuringia. A pupil in his position left school, after more than ten years in it, with no qualification at all.
The written Abitur examinations were being held that Friday, and the twelfth grade had begun with mathematics. In about twenty minutes, sixteen people died at the school: twelve teachers, the school secretary, two pupils and a police officer. Steinhäuser then died by suicide.
With the person held responsible dead, there could be no criminal trial to test the evidence, and the work of explaining what had happened fell to the police, the prosecutors and the state government. The investigators quickly established his identity and pursued the accounts of a second person.
About eight weeks after the deaths, on June 24, 2002, the Thuringian interior minister, together with the ministers for justice, for social affairs and for education, presented a preliminary final report on the events at the school. It treated the question of a second attacker as settled. It led to no criminal proceedings against anyone.
The question of why was given to specialists. A team drawn from the operative case analysis units of the Federal Criminal Police Office and the Thuringian State Criminal Police Office studied the case, and on November 25, 2002, it delivered its final report on Steinhäuser's personality, on the causes and on his personal motives. The Erfurt police's own internal review summed up the triggers as a bundle of elements rather than a single cause: personal lack of drive, failure at school, his sense that no training alternatives were open to him, deep shame and hurt over his failures, withdrawal, immersion in a world of violent computer games and videos, the falling away of almost every social and educational check on him, the lack of any school qualification and the hopelessness that came with it, and the trap of the structure of lies he had built around himself.
For a large part of the public the preliminary report was not enough. Too many questions had been left open, above all about the response of the police and the rescue services on the day. The dispute ran on for a year and a half, and it was still running when the new year of 2004 began.
On January 13, 2004, the Thuringian cabinet asked the state justice minister to convene an independent commission of inquiry. Its task was to evaluate the results of the investigation and the preliminary report of June 2002, and to identify anything that still needed to be added. The justice minister chaired it himself. Its two other members were the director of the labor court in Eisenach and the vice-president of the Thuringian State Labor Court. The commission had no prosecutorial or criminal-police powers of investigation; it worked from the files it was given and from what the people it approached chose to tell it. Its report is dated April 19, 2004.
On motive, the commission reached the same view as the federal and state analysts, in nearly the same terms: the question of how Steinhäuser came to cause sixteen deaths and then his own could not be answered by any single explanation, only by a combination of factors. It considered it likely that he had been overtaxed at the Gymnasium, and that neither his parents nor the school had responded to that strain with any shared, constructive attempt to solve the problem. It found that school had increasingly lost its meaning for him, that he had moved the center of his life into his free time, where he depended on no one and suffered no hurt, and that he had withdrawn emotionally from his parents, growing silent and closed toward them.
It concluded that he very probably wanted revenge against an abstract enemy, the teachers, whom he held responsible for the failure of his schooling and for his lack of prospects, and that he chose the symbolic last day of the written Abitur examinations.
On the most persistent rumor, the commission was blunt. Some witnesses had said they saw a second person, and the idea had circulated since the first confused hours. The commission concluded that the assumption of a second perpetrator was, in the end, without foundation.
The state parliament took up the case within a month. On May 23, 2002, the CDU, PDS and SPD groups in the Thuringian Landtag tabled a joint resolution after the deaths in Erfurt, calling for a broad debate, in families, schools, associations, local councils and the Landtag itself, about the values on which society rested and the place of family, upbringing and education.
On August 22, 2002, at its 67th sitting, the Landtag voted to establish an Enquete Commission on Upbringing and Education in Thuringia, citing the deaths in Erfurt alongside the PISA results. Its final report, dated March 19, 2004, was printed as Landtag paper 3/4141; its chapter on the media recorded that since April 26, 2002, close causal links between media violence and real violence had been suspected from many sides.
The Thuringian rule that left Steinhäuser without any certificate at all is the piece of law most directly tied to his case, and it was the piece that changed. Before the reform, the intermediate Realschulabschluss was not awarded automatically to Gymnasium pupils in Thuringia, so a pupil who left the upper school without the Abitur had nothing to show for ten or more years of schooling. A pupil who wanted the intermediate certificate had to apply to sit it as an external candidate, which is what Steinhäuser did in 1999 before he failed to sit the final examinations.
The Thuringian school law was then revised with direct reference to the events at the school. Since 2004 every tenth-grade pupil at a Thuringian Gymnasium has sat a special performance assessment, the besondere Leistungsfeststellung, so that no pupil leaves the Gymnasium without an adequate qualification. Passing it carries a qualification equal to the Realschulabschluss, and under section 7, subsection 6, of the Thuringian school law it is a condition of moving up into the eleventh grade. A Gymnasium pupil can also obtain the lower Hauptschulabschluss at the end of ninth grade. The revised law also changed the rule that had kept Steinhäuser's parents in the dark: schools now inform the parents of pupils who are legally adults about significant events.
A new federal arms law was already going through parliament when the deaths in Erfurt occurred. The Act Reorganizing the Arms Law is dated October 11, 2002, and came into force on April 1, 2003. After Erfurt both the arms law and the federal youth protection law were tightened.
Two provisions of the arms law as it now stands concern young applicants. Section 6, subsection 3, requires anyone under 25 who applies for a first permit to present, at their own expense, a certificate from a physician or a specialist psychologist confirming their mental fitness. Section 14, subsection 1, sets 21 as the minimum age for permits granted for club sport, with narrow exceptions.
The reform was challenged in court before it took effect. An association of sport clubs filed a constitutional complaint against the rules on the recognition of sport associations and the official approval of their sport regulations, and asked the Federal Constitutional Court to block the law's entry into force. On April 1, 2003, a chamber of the court's First Senate declined to accept the complaint for decision. It held that the provisions were, in the end, constitutionally unobjectionable: they pursued the legitimate aim of curbing abuse of a privilege that members of any club had previously enjoyed. The request to stop the law taking effect fell away with that decision.
No court has ruled on any part of this case. The attribution of the sixteen deaths to Steinhäuser rests on the police investigation, the analysis of the federal and state criminal investigators and the findings of the state commission, all of which agree that he acted alone.
The commission rejected the theory of a second perpetrator as unfounded, although some witnesses said they saw another person, and the question stayed open in public argument for years afterward. The commission itself was criticized for lacking investigative powers, and its account of the response on the day did not end the dispute over it.
1983: Robert Steinhäuser is born; he grows up in Erfurt.
1995: He is enrolled at a Gymnasium in Erfurt.
February 23, 1999: At the end of the winter half of tenth grade he applies to sit the external Realschulabschluss; the application is granted, but he does not sit the final examinations.
After eleventh grade: His report carries five "mangelhaft" and two "ungenügend" marks; he repeats the year.
August 2001: He leaves his handball team, citing the work for his Abitur.
October 2001: After a hearing over absences and a falsified medical certificate, the head of the school ends his enrollment under paragraph 52, subsection 3, of the Thuringian school regulations. He conceals this from his parents for almost half a year.
April 26, 2002: Sixteen people die at the school in Erfurt in about twenty minutes; Steinhäuser dies by suicide the same day.
May 23, 2002: The CDU, PDS and SPD groups in the Thuringian Landtag table a joint resolution.
June 24, 2002: The Thuringian interior minister and three cabinet colleagues present a preliminary final report.
August 22, 2002: The Landtag establishes the Enquete Commission on Upbringing and Education in Thuringia.
October 11, 2002: The Act Reorganizing the Arms Law is signed.
November 25, 2002: A team from the federal and Thuringian criminal police offices delivers its report on his personality and motives.
April 1, 2003: The new arms law comes into force; the Federal Constitutional Court declines a constitutional complaint against it.
January 13, 2004: The Thuringian cabinet asks the justice minister to convene an independent commission.
March 19, 2004: The Landtag's Enquete Commission completes its final report.
April 19, 2004: The independent commission's report is dated; it finds a combination of causes and rejects the second-perpetrator theory as unfounded.
2004: The special performance assessment becomes compulsory for every tenth-grade pupil at a Thuringian Gymnasium.