Andreas Dippold
Andreas Dippold was a German law student who in 1903 was found guilty of beating one of his pupils (a 14-year-old boy) to death, out of presumed sadistic and/or homosexual motives and a psychopathic disease. His name was later used to coin the term dippoldism.
The tutorship and maltreatment of the Koch sons
In 1902, the wife of the director of Deutsche Bank, Mrs Koch, hired a Berlin law student as a tutor for her two sons, aged 12 and 14. She was greatly troubled by the development of the boys, which was characterized by poor performance at school, lying, stealing, and excessive masturbation (which was then regarded a great and dangerous evil). The parents felt they had lost control over the boys. The tutor, Andreas Dippold, applied the pedagogic methods that were common in those days: he put the boys under strict discipline and a regime of physical and mental exercises, in which he also used corporal punishment and other forms of punishment. The family was impressed with the successes of the tutor and agreed to his suggestion to leave Berlin to continue the education of the boys in the countryside which offered less negative influences on their character. The Kochs made their manor in the Hartz mountains available for this purpose.
Soon after, they received complaints from the boys and from the staff of the manor that Dippold treated the boys with excessive harshness and also maltreated them. The parents, slightly worried, sent a physician, the famous neurologist Oskar Vogt, to visit the manor and examine the situation. Vogt did so, talked to Dippold and returned to Berlin saying that everything was all right. He praised Dippold as a good tutor.
The death of Heinz Koch
Soon after Vogt's return -- six weeks after Dippold and the boys had moved to the Hartz -- the elder of the boys, Heinz Koch, was found dead. The pathologic examination gave no clear cause of death, but the boy's dead body was covered with swellings from excessive beatings, and it was considered certain that he had been beaten to death by Andreas Dippold. The younger brother also bore marks of excessive corporal punishment on his body and reported innumerable maltreatments, such as being tied to a bed to be whipped.
The lawsuit
Dippold was arrested at once. Shortly after, a local newspaper published stories of immoral conduct of Dippold as a young student in Würzburg, and the presumption arose that such abusive cruelty might be caused by a perverted sexual drive. Dippold disclaimed such theories vehemently. A psychiatrist was asked for his analysis. His judgement was that Dippold was a sadist, but certifiably sane and therefore fully responsible for his actions. The case sparked great media interest and various experts voiced their beliefs that Dippold was a true innate sadist, a homosexual and a psychopath.
Mrs Koch, possibly in an attempt to protect the family's repute, said her boys had never masturbated; that was just a fantasy of Dippold who used it as a pretext for punishing them. Oskar Vogt, who was criticised by the press for his failure to recognize the abuse, denied responsibility and said he had been deceived by Mrs Koch who had set him on a wrong track.
Dippold was tried in the autumn of 1903 in a sensational lawsuit. On the 15th of October the trial came to an end: Dippold was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to eight years imprisonment -- a judgement that many people felt was scandalously mild.
Dippold himself has always strictly denied any sexual motives, and said he believed the boy had not died from the chastisements but from his overall extremely weak constitution. He believed the beatings couldn't be the cause of death because in the weeks prior to the boy's death he had actually beaten the boy's younger brother much harder than him, and he lived and was in good health.
Analysis by sexual science
In 1905, the case of Dippold entered sexual science when the Swiss psychiatrist and sexologist Auguste Forel described it in his famous book Die sexuelle Frage. His diagnosis, too, was that Dippold was a homosexual and a sadist. Consequently the case was considered an archetype of a more general phenomenon, educatory sadism, which was then named dippoldism after him.
See also [ People who made it into the news as a spanker or spankee ]
- More information is available at [ Wikipedia:Andreas_Dippold ]
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