Scorched Earth: What the Drach Trial Showed Me

An expert witness draws the line he will no longer cross after almost 2 decades of loyal service to the German criminal courts. A personal balance written from memory of Cologne, of a letter that went unanswered, and of a bribery accusation that could never have stood in law.

At night on 18 May

I am starting this text on a night when I cannot sleep. It is 18 May, shortly after midnight, I have spent 12 hours at my desk going through the bookkeeping of my wife’s medical practice, invoice by invoice, reminder by reminder, because the payment morale in Germany in the year 2026 has reached a condition in which hardly any patient pays a bill without at least one reminder, and the pressure on a small practice is composed of a thousand such small details, each of them harmless in isolation, that in sum push the owner to the edge. I was still sitting there, wired and exhausted at the same time, and out of that double condition something rose up from a drawer of memory which I had not felt this clearly for years, the memory of a trial that accompanied me and my family for months and which my close family and friends place to this day as an experienced trauma, even though I have long tended to play down the word.

I am writing these lines because I believe it is time to put this matter on paper from my side. Not out of any need for revenge, not in order to take apart anyone who will not be named here, but because I have learnt that an event which strikes a person at this depth does not gather dust in a notebook, it has to find a form that serves other expert witnesses and trial participants. The fact that I am finding this form tonight has a banal reason that is at the same time not banal: the open invoices of a medical practice and the open invoice of a criminal trial that in the end had me repay almost 7,000 Euros of already received fees and expenses meet in my head on this 18 May, and they form a picture that I no longer want to leave untouched.

A rest stop on the way home

There are trials you still have to pull over for on a motorway rest stop on the way home to Bavaria years later, because your hands are trembling, your stomach has cramped up, and the road home that night is simply too long to drive without a break. The proceedings against Thomas Drach before the 21st large criminal chamber of the Cologne Regional Court were such a trial, and I am not describing this rest stop as a literary image, but as a recurring real scene that played out after several of the later hearing days in exactly this way. Whoever has left the courtroom does not simply drive home. He drives out of a room in which he was, for hours, the subject of a treatment he would not accept in any other professional field, and he takes those hours with him onto an autobahn that does not end in the darkness.

I had been appointed in the proceedings with the case file number 321 Ks 10/21 as a court-ordered expert witness. My task was the forensic analysis of surveillance video material, in which I had identified the defendant with high probability as the perpetrator of several robberies on armoured cash-in-transit vehicles, a chain of circumstantial evidence that carried the weight the chamber expects from a forensic expert. Anyone who has followed the reporting since February 2022 knows the outer contours of this case: a marathon trial with more than 100 hearing days, considerable security expenditure, heavy police protection around the Luxemburger Straße, a defendant who denied the charges, and a courtroom atmosphere that grew heavier with each passing month, because what was being negotiated here could no longer be held within any familiar framework.

A trial under no good star

There is more bizarre material documented about the Drach trial than about any other proceeding I have been involved with as an expert witness in my entire career. Already on the opening day, the reading of the indictment was delayed for hours, because the police security measures did not permit a smooth start. Heavily armed police units secured the courthouse complex, streets were closed, the defendant was regularly flown by helicopter from the Cologne-Ossendorf detention facility to the court, because a road transport was considered not sufficiently secure. Anyone who has seen this with his own eyes does not forget it. An expert witness who, at the same time, drives up from southern Germany in his private car, pays for a hotel room, brings along his own software licence for the video analysis, and finds his own way through the security cordon, stands in a relation to that apparatus which becomes more visible with every helicopter approach.

In March 2022, only weeks after the trial began, the first of the many mishaps occurred that would later run through the proceedings. Drach’s Dutch co-defendant complained about very severe shoulder pains. His defence lawyer applied for the suspension of the proceedings on grounds of unfitness to stand trial. A painkiller brought no relief, the court retired for 45 minutes of deliberation, and in the end the proceedings were adjourned to the day after next, because an X-ray was first to be taken in the prison before the trial could continue. Such suspensions are not exceptional in proceedings of this size, but they accumulated in the Drach trial at a frequency that could no longer be explained by medical necessity alone. Hearing days fell out in sequence, because trial participants repeatedly contracted Covid, because motions of bias filed by the defence against the presiding judge and against the entire criminal chamber slowed the proceedings, and because the climate between court and defence grew step by step more hostile, a term that the 2023 reporting used explicitly.

On 22 February 2023, this climate reached a point at which the matter tipped over into the openly comic. It was an Ash Wednesday like any other. The courthouse was again secured by a police task force, all trial participants were present, only the defendant was missing, because the police had forgotten to transport him from the prison to the court. The presiding judge commented on the incident with the dry remark that carnival was not quite over yet, a formulation that ran through the reporting and that summed up the level of the proceedings on that day in a way no expert witness and no defence lawyer could have done better. The explanation was also revealing: the police did not have sufficient forces, because in parallel another large criminal trial was running against an alleged member of the Pink Panther jewellery gang, for which heightened security measures also applied. The 55th hearing day of the Drach trial only started that Wednesday at 2 pm, because the colleagues in the parallel case first had to return their defendant to prison.

Spring and summer 2023 were shaped by an increasingly hostile climate between court and defence. A defence lawyer of the co-defendant in particular came into repeated personal conflicts with the presiding judge, and not infrequently the exchange turned personal. Eventually the chamber separated the Dutchman’s case from the main proceedings, a measure which under the German Code of Criminal Procedure is not a routine act, but a reaction to a procedural situation no longer considered manageable. In June 2023, a former fellow inmate testified that Drach had admitted to him 3 of the alleged robberies. At that moment, Drach for the first time appeared visibly affected, and he insulted the witness, a process the reporting documents. A security guard, who had been a cash courier in 2 of the robberies, said on the witness stand that he dreamt every night about it, a sentence that still echoes for me today, because it makes visible the human substance behind the abstract charges.

Anyone who has to find his footing as an expert witness in this kind of procedural condition is not working under the normal operation of the German criminal justice system, but in an exceptional situation in which every usual safety valve has lost some of its grip. There were hearing days on which I got into the car at 6 in the morning, went through the security gate at the courthouse around noon, sat in the courtroom in the afternoon and did not know where to go next, because yet another motion had been filed which had nothing to do with the taking of evidence, but only delayed the procedure. I am not saying this as a reproach to the strategic conduct of a client’s defence, which has every right to file every admissible motion. I am saying it as a description of what an expert witness in such a proceeding spends as lifetime on the motorway.

The courtroom and the letter

What the reporting showed less of was the atmosphere an expert witness had to work in. I was the target of remarks, of small jabs during my testimony, of personal characterisations that had nothing to do with the matter at hand and that would never have been tolerated in any other courtroom I had worked in until then. This is not about robust cross-examination, which I know and respect from my practical work, but about a register and style that, in my perception, went far beyond the legitimate defence of a client. I noted these incidents down, because I am not the kind of person who swallows such things in silence. I also noted them down because I know from years of forensic practice that one’s own written documentation is the only thing that remains at the end, when oral memory fades.

At a certain point I drafted a letter to the President of the Regional Court. I set out, factually, what had happened from my point of view, and asked for an assessment, because I believed that a main proceeding in Germany must have a boundary beyond which even an expert witness can no longer be exposed to an unprotected corridor of insults. I had no concrete sanctioning request in mind. I wanted the leadership of the courthouse to take notice of what was going on in one of its rooms, and I naturally assumed that such a notice would be treated with appropriate care. What came back was not a formal reply, but a phone call from a female criminal investigator who said she had a message to deliver from the responsible public prosecutor. Yes, ran the substance of that message, the incidents would carry criminal relevance, but in view of the costs to be expected from a parallel proceeding, this would all be better dealt with at the end of the main trial. I was sitting at my desk in southern Germany, holding the receiver, and in that moment I understood that the dignity of a court-appointed expert was, in this case, simply a negotiable item, billable against an expected expense, dependent on a cost calculation that had nothing to do with my person and over which I had no influence.

There is a sentence in that letter to the President which I still know by heart today, because I read it several times before sending it, in order to make sure it stayed factual. I wrote that at some point the limit would be reached. I meant that at the time as a notification, not as a threat, because I believed the apparatus would be interested in such a notification. Today I read the same sentence as a foresight that I gave to myself back then, without knowing how precisely this limit would be reached over the following months.

7 October 2022

Anyone who has followed the trial in the press knows the date. On 7 October 2022, the fortieth day of the hearing, the incident occurred which would later carry my name into the tabloid press. According to the publicly stated account, a journalist who was covering the trial had told the public prosecutor’s office that I had pressed a 100-Euro note into his hand in the cafeteria of the Cologne courthouse, in return for which I had demanded favourable reporting about my person. The journalist, by his own account, threw the money back and drafted a written record of the encounter, which the public prosecutor’s office then placed on the record of the proceedings. That is the version which the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, the Kölnische Rundschau, the Bild, and several online outlets distributed nationwide that weekend.

I contested this account in a written statement to the chamber and called it absurd, and I stand by that assessment today. I worked for almost 2 decades as a court-appointed expert witness without a single incident of this kind, I know the professional distance one keeps to representatives of the press, and I cannot imagine why I would have abandoned that distance on a regular hearing day in the Drach proceedings, of all places, in front of a reporter whose coverage could not change anything about the substance of my report. I leave the assessment to the reader, because I have learnt that my own indignation does not make the matter any clearer at this point. One thing, however, I do want to put down: an expert witness who tries to buy a reporter with 100 Euros into writing favourably about him would have to be an extraordinarily naive man and at the same time an extraordinarily desperate one, and I was on that day neither the one nor the other.

What the preliminary suspicion was worth

The public prosecutor went before the cameras with the statement that a preliminary suspicion was being examined. Anyone with legal training knows what fails to hold up about that formulation from the very start. Section 334 of the German Criminal Code, the offence of bribery, requires under Section 11(1) No. 2 a public official as the recipient of the advantage, in other words a civil servant, a judge, or a person who holds a public-law office or has been entrusted with public administrative duties. The Federal Court of Justice has indeed ruled that editors of public-law broadcasting corporations are to be treated as public officials (BGHSt 54, 202 et seq.), but this expressly does not apply to journalists of private daily newspapers or tabloid outlets. A freelance press representative is not a public official within the meaning of the law, and the alleged incident therefore lacks the very element of the offence without which Section 334 cannot apply at all.

Section 299 of the Criminal Code, bribery in commercial dealings, also offers no shortcut here. That provision requires an employee or agent of a commercial enterprise who is supposed to act in favour of an unfair preference in competition, a constellation which under any reasonable reading does not fit the alleged facts, because press reporting is not a competitive service in the sense of that provision. This is material from the first semester of criminal law studies. Every law student is familiar with the distinction, and every experienced prosecutor knows it in any case. To put it briefly, I was publicly attributed with a preliminary suspicion for an offence whose statutory elements the German Criminal Code does not recognise in this constellation. Anyone who wishes to doubt this may read Sections 11, 299, and 334 of the Criminal Code together, and the matter is settled.

I insist on this legal clarification, because it is not academic pedantry, it touches the core of what happened to me in those days. When a prosecuting authority steps in front of the cameras with the reference to a preliminary suspicion, then it places the effect of that announcement into an asymmetry which can no longer be caught up with. The preliminary suspicion is the lowest threshold of the German Code of Criminal Procedure, it requires under Section 152(2) only sufficient factual indications, and precisely this threshold should, on any serious legal reading, have collapsed against a wall here, because the statutory subject of the offence was missing. In my perception, the prosecuting authority thereby chose the public word about me which it was not entitled to under the light of the law.

What a press wave does

What followed in public was barely bearable for me and my family. Reporters stood outside my office, calls and emails came in, including from agencies that had known me for many years as a reliable forensic contact and that now reached for the same headline, because the headline sold. A trial participant was suddenly transformed into a public figure whose name appeared in the tabloid press under terms he could practically no longer defend against, because the legal reach of an expert witness is simply not sufficient to keep pace with media acceleration. I understood in those days that the unprotected position of an expert witness, who enters the courtroom without a gown, without a lobby, and without legal counsel of his own, is not an oversight but a structural feature of the proceedings.

My answer to the chamber was short, and it was unambiguous. I declared that the account was absurd and that I had no further statement to make. Minutes later I drafted a second letter, which had become necessary in the same matter, because I recognised, soberly, what the weeks before had done to me. I declared my own bias before the chamber. Not because I had any doubts about my report, but because I could no longer rule out that the accumulation of incidents had impaired my inner neutrality towards the defence, and because an expert witness who continues to work in a criminal proceeding under that kind of load ends up making himself a risk to the defendant. I asked to be relieved of my duty. That was my decision, taken at my desk, without external pressure. I am stating this so explicitly because out of this decision a quite different headline was made later.

My line, their headline

What stood in the newspapers the following morning was a different story. The expert had been fired, removed, dismissed, depending on the outlet, and not a single headline that weekend mentioned that I had been the first participant to draw the consequences from the situation. The fact that the public prosecutor’s office and the defence at the same time, or shortly afterwards, drew up their own motions of bias is documented in several reports. That changes nothing about the fact that my own step had been on the chamber’s table first. Anyone who has ever watched a voluntary withdrawal reinterpreted in a headline as a dismissal understands why experienced expert witnesses in delicate proceedings tend to remain silent, and why this silence in turn protects the very apparatus that profits from this asymmetry.

In the days that followed, I learnt that a public correction in Germany has a speed which cannot keep pace with the speed of the first report. Whoever ends up on the front page of the Bild does not return to the same front page when he turns out to have been right afterwards. This insight was not new to me. I had observed it from a distance several times before, but to experience it for the first time under my own name is a different experience from the theoretical knowledge of its mechanics. Whoever wants to defend himself against the media wave faces the choice between forcing a counter-statement that no one will read, or refusing the entire back-and-forth, because he knows that every additional line in a tabloid column extends the half-life of the story. I chose the second path back then, and I still consider it the right one today, even if the price for that was that the one-sided reading remained in the world.

What the JVEG cannot replace

Anyone who works under the German Judicial Remuneration and Compensation Act knows its gaps. Over countless hearing days I drove several thousand kilometres in my private vehicle, I booked overnight accommodation in Cologne, I deployed software licences for the analysis of the surveillance footage, and I invested working hours on a scale that I could have invoiced 3 times over in a free assignment. After my voluntary withdrawal, the majority of these expenses were not reimbursed to me in the end. Worse than that, I had to repay nearly 7,000 Euros of fees and expenses that had already been paid out to me, because the cost-determination decision went against me. My appeal against this decision was rejected by the Cologne Higher Regional Court. Anyone who knows that the judiciary in North Rhine-Westphalia is, in its structures, a closely interwoven system, and that a higher appellate instance does not gladly publicly break the line of its sister chamber, will not seriously wonder about the outcome. A mischievous mind thinks ill of it.

I experience this financial process as the economic exhaustion of a loyal service provider who carried the system until the system no longer needed him. Anyone who asks me today whether it was worth it receives the same answer: in substance perhaps, in the balance not. I was, at the end, the person who had to add up the fuel receipts, the hotel bills, the software licence costs, and the working hours given up, and pay them back to the judicial cashier, and I was the person to whom no one explained the word compensation in a tone that took the meaning of compensation seriously. It is not only a financial loss, it is a message. The message is that an expert witness who steps out of a proceeding in which he is trying to relieve himself ends up, financially as well, a losing transaction. This message, directed at me personally and at the same time at everyone who in comparable proceedings looks at my example, is the real effect of what happened.

Anyone who would dismiss this bookkeeping result as a triviality should be reminded that a clawback of this size is not an abstract problem for a freelance expert witness. It means that months of pre-financed work slip into the red, that ongoing licence costs have to be cross-financed from elsewhere, that the family budget feels it noticeably, and that the question of whether one even still accepts the next inquiry from a public prosecutor takes on a quite different sharpness all of a sudden. The German system of court-appointed experts lives off the fact that competent practitioners voluntarily invest themselves in a field where the fee level is regularly below the free market rate. When the state, on top of such a relationship of trust, also draws a clawback of this size, then it erodes the very trust off which it lives.

What a trial does to people

I want to add a point here that still affects me, and I do so without pathos, because it affects me without pathos. I was not the only participant in those weeks who reached the limits of what he could bear. There were moments in the course of the trial in which other participants too visibly came up against their breaking point, and there was a day on which I myself fled into a toilet inside the courthouse, because my body could no longer keep up. What happened there was not a classical outburst of tears, but a massive stress reaction, with a racing heart, with breath cutting out, with a physical jolt that I do not know from any other moment of my professional life. I sat leaning against a closed cubicle door, waited until my heartbeat returned to normal, and then went back into the courtroom, because I still had testimony to give that day. I write that down here because I am not ashamed of that hour, and because an expert witness who has to control his own physical reaction in such a situation is still the same expert witness who prepared his report with care.

My body responded in the weeks around the eruption with extrasystoles, with sleep disturbances, with an irritability that I had not known in myself before. Anyone who in his sleep dreams repeatedly of a trial in which he is, as a person and not as a question of substance, the object of the dispute, knows that the separation between the professional and the private no longer functions in such a state. My wife, who has been running a medical practice for years and who in her own professional life knows how to handle pressure, saw at close range during those months what this situation had done to me. Others reach for sedatives in such situations. I drew a line, and that line was my answer, which I still consider to this day the most honest and the most healthy reaction to a situation that had become untenable. The cardiac symptoms subsided a few weeks later. The memory of the symptoms lasted longer than the symptoms themselves.

In the wrong film

There is an observation which for a long time I did not want to put into these words for myself, because I considered it too drastic. I am putting it into these words now, because it matches my perception on several hearing days precisely, and because I have learnt that softening one’s own experience serves no one. In my perception, I was, in this proceeding, in a German courtroom, psychologically violated and used, and I state this explicitly as a description of my own feeling, not as a legal characterisation. On several hearing days I believed I was sitting in the wrong film. I had come from a professional life in which I considered the German criminal justice system a serious institution, whose participants adhered to common rules, and I suddenly found myself in a courtroom in which nothing seemed to remain of that seriousness.

That is and remains a deeply personal perception. It is not intended as a diagnosis of any specific person. It is a description of what the sum of remarks, of media waves, of ignored letters, of cost clawbacks, and of helicopter escorts can do to a person who was placed into this proceeding without a gown and without any protective layer. To anyone who would hold against me that my language at this point is hard, I respond that my language is allowed to be hard here because it describes my own experience, and because a softer language at this point would be a second lie. The harshness of the words psychologically violated matches the harshness of the days I spent in Cologne. I ask readers to read it in that function, not as a blanket attack on an institution.

It is important to me to separate 2 things cleanly at this point. The one is the observation that the German criminal justice system as a whole functions, that many proceedings are conducted with dignity and care, and that what I experienced in Cologne is not, in this form, the standard case. The other is the observation that even a functioning system has points at which it can derail, and that an expert witness who stands at such a point does not have to be consoled by reference to the otherwise good condition of the system. My subject in this text is the derailed point, not the overall balance.

After the line

The trial simply continued on without me. The chamber engaged new expert witnesses, my earlier report in its original form was no longer used, the proceedings were delayed by months. The defendant was sentenced on 4 January 2024 to 15 years of imprisonment with subsequent preventive detention for attempted murder and serious robbery, and the Federal Court of Justice dismissed his appeal in 2025, so that the judgement is now final. Anyone hearing this outcome might conclude that everything had taken its proper course in the end. From my point of view, the balance is not that simple.

What still occupies me most is the observation that the expert witnesses who succeeded me in the proceedings were, according to what was reported to me, protected in a way that had never been afforded to me at any point. In my perception, questions from the defence to the later-appointed experts were no longer admitted directly, but first submitted to the court, which examined their admissibility and only forwarded a curated portion to the expert. It is not for me to draw legal conclusions from this that go beyond my personal experience, but as a person who had previously been exposed to the same corridor of insults without any protection, I read this as a late acknowledgement that the original situation had not been bearable for an expert witness. When an apparatus visibly changes its procedural conduct after the withdrawal of an expert, then this apparatus has thereby also made a statement about the procedural conduct before, whether it wanted to or not.

I have, in the months after my voluntary withdrawal, received calls and messages from colleagues in the forensic field who told me without circumlocution that after the reports from Cologne, they would never again take on a criminal case in which a comparable situation could develop. This is a silent effect of the Drach trial that does not appear in any case file. It lies in the heads of the expert witnesses who today think twice before answering a court inquiry. Anyone who really wants to understand the system has to factor this silent effect into their balance. The German criminal justice system did not only lose a single expert witness in the Drach trial, it lost a measure of trust in a field that cannot function without it.

What remained

I am still, several years later, an embittered man whenever I think back on this trial. I cannot put it any other way, because every softer formulation would feel to me like a second lie. When the conversation turns to Cologne, I feel a physical resistance that I do not know from any other chapter of my professional life, up to a slight nausea that rises in me as soon as I have to hold the name of the trial in my head for any length of time. This reaction is my private balance of a situation in which an expert witness first loyally places himself at the service of an important proceeding, then finds himself under a public suspicion whose statutory basis would have been excluded in the first semester of criminal law studies, is then left to carry his economic losses as well, and at the end sees that his successors receive the very protection that was denied to him.

I understood in those weeks that a system which exposes one of its long-serving and loyal expert witnesses to such treatment is not a system one ought to serve unconditionally, and that the self-evidence with which I had followed instructions from public prosecutors and courts for almost 2 decades was a trust whose foundation I could in the end no longer see standing. I closed my forensic practice in the aftermath. I write today, I teach, I advise, I no longer prepare expert reports in criminal proceedings. To anyone who asks me about this, I say that I am no longer a tool that is taken out of a drawer and tossed back in at the end without anyone caring about the condition of the tool. This decision is the most honest one I have ever made in my professional life. It does come at a substantial personal price. I would rather pay that price myself than leave it for the next trial to pay.

It is now almost 3 o’clock in this night of 18 May. The open reminders for my wife’s practice lie in order beside me, the memory of Cologne has settled, sleep will probably not arrive in the next few hours either. But I have written this text, and that is a different way of dealing with the matter than another attempt with sleeping pills or another evening with picture books in which I try to summon up an alternative mood. I am therefore writing one last paragraph, addressed to all who read these lines because they are themselves expert witnesses, or because they want to become one.

If, in the course of a proceeding, you feel that the line has been crossed beyond which a human being is no longer allowed to be a human being, then draw your own line before someone else draws it for you. File your own motion of bias before others do. Ask yourself for your own formal release from the appointment. Do not let yourself be persuaded that you have to keep going, because the proceeding is so large and so important. No proceeding is large enough to destroy you. And if you end up with a clawback of fees, with a tabloid quotation that will follow you for a lifetime, and with an apparatus that on an Ash Wednesday makes fun of itself, you are still better off than the version of your life in which you did not leave. The Drach trial cost me this lesson. I gladly pass it on, so that one day it spares someone else a few hearing days.

References

• Federal Court of Justice, judgement of 9 May 2006, 5 StR 453/05, BGHSt 54, 202 (status of editors of public-law broadcasting corporations as public officials).
• Federal Court of Justice (2025). Decision on the appeal in the proceedings against Thomas Drach, dismissed as unfounded, published in November 2025. Reporting by Aachener Zeitung, hessenschau.de, and dpa.
• Cologne Regional Court (2022). Main proceedings against Thomas Drach, press release case file 321 Ks 10/21, 13 January 2022. Retrieved 19 May 2026 from https://www.lg-koeln.nrw.de.
• Cologne Regional Court, judgement of 4 January 2024, 321 Ks 10/21 (15 years of imprisonment and preventive detention for, inter alia, attempted murder and serious robbery).
• German Criminal Code (Strafgesetzbuch), Section 11(1) No. 2 (definition of public official), Section 299 (bribery and corruption in commercial dealings), Section 334 (bribery of public officials).
• German Code of Criminal Procedure (Strafprozessordnung), Section 74 (challenge of an expert witness for bias), Section 76 (duty to deliver the expert report, release from the appointment), Section 152(2) (preliminary suspicion and the principle of mandatory prosecution).
• German Judicial Remuneration and Compensation Act (Justizvergütungs- und -entschädigungsgesetz, JVEG), in particular Sections 5 to 12 (travel, accommodation, material expenses, and remuneration of court-appointed expert witnesses).
• Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger (2022, 6 October). Outburst in the Drach trial: “They are wearing me down”. Reporting on the release of the expert witness from the appointment.
• Kölnische Rundschau (2022, 6 October). Bombshell in the Drach trial: Cologne expert asks to be released.
• Stuttgarter Nachrichten (2022, 7 October). Drach trial, possible bias: Court removes expert.
• t-online (2022, 6/7 October). Drach trial in Cologne: Expert wants to step down after bribery attempt. Bribery attempt, expert removed from Drach trial.
• Bild (2022, October). Bribery allegations against Drach expert (quoted in t-online and Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger).
• t-online (2022, 23 March). Drach trial in Cologne adjourned again. Delay due to shoulder pains of the co-defendant.
• Ruhrnachrichten (2023, 22 February). Police forget Reemtsma kidnapper in prison: Carnival is not quite over yet.
• Tagesspiegel (2023, November). Germany’s most notorious serious offender: Verdict in the armed robbery trial against Drach expected. Background piece on the course of the proceedings.
• t-online (2023, November). Will Reemtsma kidnapper Thomas Drach remain behind bars for the rest of his life? Trial near its end.