In the summer of 2005 the remains of nine newborn babies were found in the garden of a house in Brieskow-Finkenheerd, a village in Brandenburg near the Polish border. They had been wrapped in plastic and buried in flowerpots, buckets and an old fish tank, some of which had stood for years on the balcony of an apartment before being moved to the garden of the owners, an elderly couple. Their daughter, Sabine Hilschenz, a forty-year-old unemployed dental assistant from Frankfurt an der Oder, was arrested within days. DNA tests showed that all nine were her children by her former husband, Oliver Hilschenz: seven girls and two boys.
The day after her arrest she told investigators of a vicious circle that began with her fourth pregnancy, in 1988. She already had three children, her husband did not want more, and she hid the pregnancy from him and gave birth over the toilet while he slept in the next room, holding the baby's head under the water. She said she began drinking heavily to blot out the sight of its blue face. In 1992 she gave birth alone in a small hotel in Goslar while on a business trip, left the baby under a blanket and ignored its whimpering until it stopped. For the births that followed, she said, she got drunk as labor began and could not remember whether the babies were born alive; she wrapped them in plastic and put them in the flowerpots. She said she never went to a gynecologist, even to be sterilized, for fear that a doctor would see the signs of the births. "I always hoped my husband would notice the pregnancies of his own accord," she said. Her husband told police he had thought she had a weight problem, and denied knowing about the pregnancies.
The case was described as postwar Germany's worst series of child killings. The court dropped the murder charges before trial for lack of evidence that she had acted to conceal a crime, and the death in 1988 was barred by the statute of limitations, so she was tried for eight counts of manslaughter. At the trial before the regional court in Frankfurt an der Oder, presided over by Judge Matthias Fuchs, her lawyer, Matthias Schöneburg, said she would not testify, and the judge read out her earlier statements instead. In 2006 she was convicted on all eight counts and given fifteen years, the maximum for the offense.
The Federal Court of Justice set the sentence aside in 2007, ruling that the lower court had not adequately considered whether her alcoholism diminished her responsibility, and sent the case back. At the rehearing in 2008 she spoke for the first time. "I did not have friendship," she told the court, describing her isolation, her drinking and a family in which contraception was never discussed; she said she had been pregnant thirteen times. Her lawyer asked for less than ten years. The court found no grounds for diminished responsibility and imposed fifteen years again.
The case set off a long argument in Germany over how thirteen pregnancies could pass unnoticed by a husband, parents and neighbors. Brandenburg's interior minister, Jörg Schönbohm, suggested that decades of communist rule had coarsened society in the former East, citing the higher number of dead babies found there, and was widely criticized for it. Friends described her as a good mother to her four surviving children, three born before 1988 and a daughter born later by another partner.