Guilty of incest, but father cleared of raping his daughter 500 times

Published on 20/12/2011 00:00

A GERMAN who slept with his daughter more than 500 times and fathered three incest children was jailed for less than three years yesterday after a court declared he did not rape her.

A judge in the case of Adolf ‘B’, 69, stunned women’s and child protection rights groups by declaring that his sexual relationship with his daughter, named only as Renate ‘B’, over 30 years was “by agreement” – even though he first molested her when she was 12.

He was accused of brutalising his wife and children, stunning them into a long-term conspiracy of silence. However, the judge threw out the rape charge and sentenced him to two years and eight months in jail for incest.

Prosecutors at the court in Nuremberg had demanded a 14-year sentence for the ordeal he inflicted on his daughter. In the media he was called the “German Fritzl” in reference to the Austrian rapist Josef Fritzl who imprisoned his daughter Elisabeth for 24 years and fathered six children with her.

Adolf ‘B’ was charged with 497 rapes committed over 34 years until his arrest in March this year. His daughter, now 46, had three children by him, two of whom have died.

“She liked it,” he said of his sexual relationship with her although Renate testified otherwise.

She said he threatened to kill her if she told anyone about what happened between them.

She told the court: “He said: ‘Tell a soul and I will kill you. No matter where you go I will find you and kill you’.”

The German woman lived in the family home along with her mother and siblings in Willmersbach, a village near Nuremberg.

She spoke of constant beatings, with all members of the family subjected to a routine of aggression and fear.

A prosecutor told the Nuremberg-Fürth regional court: “She had three sons by her father, one of whom died as a baby, another of whom died recently, while the third survived.”

Authorities only uncovered the case after the woman was convicted of blackmailing the wife of a doctor she blamed for the disability of one of her sons. She was assigned a parole officer who won her trust and eventually heard her story.

The court ruled that it was impossible to prove that the sexual relationship was not consensual, and highlighted inconsistencies in Renate’s testimony.

At the start of the trial, Adolf ‘B’ had admitted having consensual sex with his daughter. He said that his daughter had almost always taken the initiative in their sexual encounters, an account she strongly denied. She went so far as to explain how she once mixed sleeping pills into his meals to escape his unwelcome attentions.

A spokeswoman for a rape crisis centre in Berlin said; “This is a shocking judgment, for the woman, for women everywhere and for justice. What was this judge thinking? That a 12-year-old girl can make these kinds of choices?”