Helmut Boos was a student at the episcopal boarding school “Albertinium” in the Eifel region of Germany from 1964 to 1972. He had long been convinced that one of his supervisors, Johannes Arendt, was hiding something. He decided to investigate and came across publications about war crimes in Albania.
An Albanian scholar had tracked down Arendt while she was searching for those responsible for the 1944 execution of a 20-year-old man in the small town of Koplik in northern Albania. In her old age, Arendt admitted to the scholar during a visit to her home in Kassel near Trier that she had ordered the execution of the completely innocent Albanian.
Arendt is also suspected of having been involved in Nazi reprisals in Albania, during which women and children were killed.
This was also published in a newspaper article quoting Albanian scholar Gëzim Uruçi. Arendt is said to have regretted the executions, but defended her actions by citing the orders she had been given.
He is said to have said: "I killed in the war, but I committed no crimes." Johannes Arendt can no longer be held responsible for this. He died 30 years ago in Kassel. Uruç is also now dead.
For former boarding school pupil Helmut Boos, the memory of Johannes Arendt is still very much alive: He will never forget how the so-called head prefect beat the children until they bled. How he forced them to eat until they vomited. "You can only call that sadism, what else?" says Boos.
Arendt was a sadist. This is how other former students of the Albertinum boarding school described her in a scientific study commissioned by the Diocese of Trier. The study also claims that Arendt sexually abused children.
Marcellus Boos – who is not related to Helmut Boos – had researched Johannes Arendt years earlier and published a book about her time at the Albertinum. Since then, he suspected that Arendt was a staunch Nazi who was hiding her past and hiding in the Albertinum.
A joint investigation by SWR and the "Trierischer Volksfreund" confirms that Johannes Arendt had concealed his identity. Arendt was born Johannes Schersinski in 1906. When he was 20 years old he took his mother's maiden name and was known as Johannes Arendt from then on. SWR has a copy of the document.
However, in Gerolstein and later in Kassel, Arendt spread the legend that he was born a nobleman in Poland and later persecuted. Therefore, he claimed that he had to take on a new identity. However, his official curriculum vitae does not support this. It contains blatantly false information and contradictions - especially regarding his time as a soldier in the German Wehrmacht.
For Helmut Boos, it is clear: "He had to hide. After all, he was a war criminal. He feared the revenge of the Albanians." Arendt assumed he was safe in the Eifel region. It is surprising that there is no evidence that Johannes Arendt underwent any political vetting or denazification after the war. This is also not apparent in his personal files from his later time as a teacher at the high school in Gerolstein.
Marcellus Boos believes that everyone deliberately looked the other way at the time: "That was the bishop's job. There was a boarding school somewhere in the Eifel region and no one was interested. Apparently, no one was interested.
Helmut Boos told his former classmates about his research. A 70-year-old man started crying and said: "Now I finally know why I was treated so brutally. I could never explain it to myself."
The diocese of Trier claims to have been unaware of Arendt's past. They say they have been unable to find any documents relating to her. Whether Arendt was in fact a war criminal has never been legally clarified. ©LAPSI.al
