The case of this sexual offender was the first in German jurisdiction history to include psycho-social factors of the defendant, who came from a violent early surrounding, to set down the sentence.
At 11 months he was adopted by a butcher and his wife in Langenberg (today Velbert-Langenberg), who gave him the name Jürgen Bartsch.
However, in 1971, the Federal Court of Justice of Germany, returned the case to the Landgericht Düsseldorf, which reduced the sentence to 10 years of juvenile detention and had Bartsch placed under psychiatric care in Eickelborn.
Bartsch initially refused any surgery but finally agreed to voluntary castration on April 28, 1976, in order to avoid lifetime incarceration in a mental hospital.
An official autopsy and investigation determined that Bartsch had been intoxicated with a halothane overdose (factor 10) due to a mistake during surgery.
[4] The 2002 film Ein Leben lang kurze Hosen tragen (released in the U.S. in 2004, as The Child I Never Was) depicts Bartsch's life and crimes.