More than 500 boys were abused at German Catholic choir school

At least 547 boys at a German Catholic choir school suffered sexual or physical abuse in what victims have likened to “prison, hell or a concentration camp”, said an investigator releasing a final report Tuesday on one of the country’s worst such scandals.

The Regensburger Domspatzen (“Cathedral Sparrows”), a 1,000-year-old cathedral choir in the southern state of Bavaria, was in 2010 dragged into the massive sexual abuse and paedophilia scandal plaguing the Catholic Church around the world.

Many victims remembered the world-famous choir school in the town of Regensburg as “the worst time of their lives, marked by fear, violence and helplessness”, said lawyer Ulrich Weber, who was commissioned two years ago by the diocese to look into the cases.

Presenting his final report on abuses between 1945 and the early 1990s, Weber said he had uncovered 67 cases of sexual abuse and 500 cases of other physical violence, with some former singers having fallen victim to both.

This more than doubled the 231 reported abuse cases by school clergy and educators Weber had uncovered through interviews by January 2016, when he said victims had spoken of rape, sexual assaults, severe beatings and food deprivation.