Official finding Christian institutions & contexts Catholic Hildesheim, Lower Saxony, Germany · 2021

Germany: Hildesheim diocese report finds bishop and personnel director transferred a known-accused priest rather than act

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Record class

Institutional event

Evidence status

Official finding

Authority role

Catholic priest of the Diocese of Hildesheim; diocesan bishop and personnel director

Organization

Diocese of Hildesheim

Archive classification

This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.

The five victims were children entrusted to the priest's pastoral care within the diocese's own parish structure; the diocese's own commissioned report finds its leadership responded to a credible report by relocating him to a new parish of unwarned children rather than acting to stop him.

Pastoral or clerical authority

Evidence structure

Proceedings

2021-06-17 · official-finding

Independent investigation report commissioned by the Diocese of Hildesheim, Germany. An independent investigation report (Rosenbusch), published 17 June 2021, found that a diocesan priest identified as Georg M. sexually abused five children entrusted to his pastoral care. The report found that Bishop Dr Josef Homeyer and personnel director Werner Holst, on being informed by the Salzgitter youth welfare office of abuse allegations against the priest, transferred him in 1992 from the Christ König parish in Salzgitter-Bad to St Marien parish in Cuxhaven rather than removing him from ministry. The priest died in 2019 without ever facing criminal prosecution.

Documented coercion mechanisms

clerical office within diocesan parishes; institutional decision to relocate the accused rather than remove him from ministry

Cited record

Sources

official inquiry report commissioned review Bistum Hildesheim: Untersuchungsbericht (Rosenbusch), 17 June 2021.: The commissioned investigation report documenting the Georg M. case and the diocese's 1992 transfer decision.

Source provenance

Source access and integrity log

This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.

Source and tier basis: https://www.bistum-hildesheim.de/fileadmin/dateien/PDFs/missbrauch/Untersuchungsbericht-Endfassung-anonymisiert_20210617_01.pdf Corpus classification: official-inquiry-report; evidentiary role: commissioned-review. SHA-256 b479d740f88a00cdfb2e3f8f48c0db525456324762070fa8ad07e7afff99285e
Retrieval: 2026-07-20 · Preserved; Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger

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