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1982 was shaping up to be a good year for Andrzej Bomberski.
The 44-year-old accountant lived in Peschbusch, a small village just outside Toulouse in the southwest of France. A bitter divorce seven years prior had resulted in André losing custody of his two children, Kalinka and Nicholas, who had gone to live with their mother and her new husband in the German town of Lindau.
This put a distance of over 1,000 kilometers between André and his children, which was an ongoing source of pain for the doting father as he continued to simultaneously grapple with the harsh reality that his wife had left him for another man. André missed his children terribly and he was therefore relieved when it was decided that 14-year-old Kalinka and 11-year-old Nicolas would return to France to live with him at the end of the summer of 1982.
Kalinka had always been a very intelligent girl, but she'd been struggling academically at the boarding school she attended in Germany, and she was missing her old life back in France. It was agreed that the children would spend the summer vacation with their mother and stepfather in Lendau before moving back to Peschbusch with André that September. This was welcome news for André, who had recently started a new relationship for the first time since his divorce.
After a difficult few years, everything seemed to be falling into place for a fresh start. That all changed on the morning of Saturday July 10 1982, just two months before Kalinka and Nicholas were set to return to France. That day, the phone rang at Andrei's house. It was his ex-wife, Danielle Kronbach. She was beside herself. "Kalinka's dead!" She sobbed.
Andre Bomberski listened in shock as Danielle explained that Kalinka had spent the previous day of Friday July 9 windsurfing on Lake Constance, the crystal clear bay located behind the Kronbach's home in Lindau.
Danielle, Kalinka and Nicholas lived there with Danielle's husband, a respected cardiologist named Dieter Kronbach, as well as Dr. Kronbach's two older children from a previous marriage. Danielle said that Kalinka had returned home at around 5pm. She remarked that she was feeling tired and a little unwell, but other than that, she'd been her typical happy self.
The family ate dinner together around 7.30pm, after which Dr. Kronbach's children went out and the others soon retired to bed for the night as normal. Danielle explained that the next morning Dr. Kronbach went to wake Kalinka up so they could go horseback riding together, only to find her lying in her bed, unconscious.
He administered various injections in an attempt to revive her, but it was too late. She was already dead. With no physical explanation as to how Kalinka had died, Dr. Kronbach suspected that she'd most likely suffered from heatstroke after overexposure to the sun the previous day and had gone into shock as a result. Paramedics were called, but there was nothing they could do.
Kalinka's body was taken straight to the funeral home. Andrei Bomberski couldn't believe what he was hearing. Kalinka was a healthy, athletic teenager who lived an incredibly active lifestyle and had no underlying medical conditions. How could she have possibly died in her sleep, and from heatstroke no less?
Furthermore, it had only been around 29 degrees Celsius in Lindau, yet Kalinka was used to much hotter temperatures than that in France. To Andrei, it simply didn't make sense. His head still spinning, Andrei immediately travelled to Lindau.
He hoped that his son Nicholas could shed some further light on the situation, but the 11-year-old said there was nothing out of the ordinary about the way Kalinka had behaved on the night that she died. She didn't exhibit any of the major signs of heatstroke such as dizziness, confusion, slurred speech, or profuse sweating. Nicholas didn't even recall Kalinka mentioning she was tired.
In Germany, it was protocol that police be notified and an autopsy be conducted for any death that wasn't directly attributed to natural causes. Two days after Kalinka's death, two pathologists performed an autopsy on the teenager's body. Given the summer heat, her body was already in an advanced state of decomposition, yet they noted Kalinka's overall good health and hygiene.
An examination of Kalinka's airways and lungs revealed the presence of aspirated stomach contents, which indicated that she'd likely vomited in her sleep and subsequently choked to death. The pathologists estimated Kalinka had died around 7-8 hours after eating dinner, putting her time of death sometime between 3 and 4am on Saturday July 10, 1982.
On the same day that the autopsy was conducted, a police officer questioned Dr. Dieter Kronbach about the events leading up to Kalinka's death. Kronbach explained that when Kalinka returned home from Lake Constance on Friday, she complained that she hadn't gotten much of a suntan.
Just before the family sat down for dinner at around 7:30, Cronbach said he gave her an injection of cobalt falacet, an iron supplement that he claimed would help her tan more easily. Dr. Cronbach recalled that Kalinka went to bed early, but then got up to get a glass of water at approximately 10:30 pm. Around midnight, he noticed that Kalinka's bedroom light was still on. He peered in and saw that she was reading in bed.
Kronbach asked her to turn the light off before going to bed himself. The next time he saw Kalinka was when he went into her room at around 9.30am, only to discover that she was unconscious in her bed. In a desperate attempt to revive her, Dr. Kronbach grabbed his doctor's kit and injected her with a narcotic as well as a neurotransmitter.
Realising it was hopeless and that she was already dead, he phoned emergency services who came to the house and removed Kalinka's body. They noted no signs of violence apart from the injection marks on her thorax and right arm. A local prosecutor reviewed the case and determined that no foul play had occurred.
They closed Kalinka Bomberski's file, leaving her family to grieve as they came to terms with this unforeseen tragedy. Back in France, Andrzej Bomberski tried to accept that his daughter was gone, but he couldn't shake the feeling that something wasn't right. At Kalinka's funeral, he'd overheard whispers that she had died as a result of the iron injection that Dieter Krombach had given to help her tan.
This was the first Andre had heard about any such injection. His ex-wife Danielle had made no mention of it. Danielle had also promised to send Andre a copy of the autopsy report. Yet, one week passed, and then another, and still there was no sign of it. Andre called Danielle and demanded to know what was going on.
It was a difficult situation to navigate given that the pair already had a complex history between them. The two had met in the Moroccan city of Casablanca in the early 1960s, where André was overseeing a large accounting company that specialised in international taxation. They got married and had Kalinka shortly after, followed by Nicolas a few years after that. Life was good for the family of four.
That was until Dieter Kronbach came along. At the time, Kronbach worked as a doctor for the German consulate in Casablanca and lived just a few doors down from the Bomberskis. Widowed with two young children who attended the same international school as Kalinka and Nicholas, the two families would occasionally cross paths. But over time, Andrei noticed that Dr. Kronbach seemed to show up wherever they went.
When the Bomberski family had a serious car accident in 1974, he was the first person to arrive on the scene. Andrei started to suspect that something was going on between his wife and Dr. Kronbach. Eventually, Danielle admitted that the two were having an affair. Andrei confronted Dr. Kronbach, who refused to end the relationship with Danielle. Desperate to save his marriage, Andrei moved his family back to France.
As he and Danielle worked to mend things between them, Danielle got a job in real estate that required her to travel frequently to the city of Nice, which was on the other side of the country. She decided it was easiest if she rented an apartment there during the week and then returned home on the weekends. Andre was a little suspicious of this. One day, he followed Danielle as she left for work and found that she drove straight to a nearby apartment.
It turned out that Dr. Dieter Kronbach had moved to France so he could continue his affair with Danielle. Andre filed for divorce and Danielle married Kronbach shortly after. Things had been bitter between the exes ever since, with Kalinka's death marking yet another source of contention. When Andre called Danielle demanding to know what was going on with their daughter's autopsy, Danielle thought he was overreacting.
She encouraged André to make peace with the tragedy as best as he could by accepting that Kalinka's time had simply come. But André wasn't ready to let it go. After numerous requests, three months after Kalinka's death, he finally got his hands on her autopsy findings. The 16-page report was written in German, so he immediately had it translated into French.
When Andre finally sat down to read the findings, he couldn't believe his eyes. The first thing Andre noticed was that the pathologists had concluded that the exact cause of Kalinka's death couldn't be determined. While she had choked on her own vomit, they didn't know what had caused her to throw up in the first place.
They had studied the multiple injection sites on Kalinka's body and although they found no sign of poisoning, they noted it as odd that Dr. Kronbach had attempted to revive Kalinka with various injections. Her body had already been in a clear state of rigor mortis when these drugs were administered, which meant she was already dead at the time. As a medical doctor, it should have been obvious to Kronbach that any attempt to resuscitate her would be futile.
More alarmingly, the pathologists noted the presence of fresh blood around Kalinka's genitals, as well as a superficial tear in her labia and a white substance inside her vagina. Yet, they hadn't conducted any tests to identify what the substance was, nor had they done any analysis to determine whether sexual intercourse had taken place before Kalinka's death.
In fact, they hadn't conducted any toxicology tests at all, seemingly taking Dr. Kronbach's word for the various medications she'd been given. Andre was gobsmacked. In his view, it didn't sound like Kalinka had died of natural causes at all. It sounded like she'd been drugged, raped, and possibly murdered. If this was true, there was only one person who could be responsible.
the last person to have seen her alive, Dr. Dieter Kronbach. In the autopsy report, Dr. Kronbach was quoted making medical observations. To Andre, it seemed as though he was there during the examination, which went entirely against protocol as family members were not allowed to be present.
In Andre's view, it sounded like Krombach was providing his version of events and the pathologists were simply writing their report to suit. Krombach was a well-known and revered doctor in Lindau and Andre suspected this could explain why further testing wasn't done and why the pathologists had been willing to overlook the suspicious findings.
He knew these were big allegations to make, but for his daughter, it was a risk he was willing to take. Three months after Kalinka's death, Andrzej Bomberski contacted the German prosecutor who had closed her file and demanded that the case be reopened. He requested that proper forensic and toxicology testing be conducted on the samples that had been taken from Kalinka's body. The prosecutor denied the request.
The German authorities said that Dr Dieter Kronbach hadn't been present during the autopsy but had simply entered the room momentarily to officially identify Kalinka's body. They trusted the pathologists and saw no reason to reinvestigate the matter. Andrei called his ex-wife to voice his suspicions. Danielle claimed she hadn't even looked at Kalinka's autopsy report.
She said she trusted her husband implicitly and had no reason to doubt his medical explanation for her daughter's death. André accused Danielle of covering up for her husband, and in turn, she accused André of seeking revenge against Kronbach for the affair. She also suspected anti-German sentiment had something to do with André's allegations.
Although Andrzej was born in France, his father's family was originally from Poland and Andrzej had been deported to both Poland and Germany by the Nazis during World War II. Danielle told Andrzej as much, saying that his attempts to have Kalinka's case reopened dishonoured her memory. Undeterred, Andrzej Bomberski hired a renowned lawyer who convinced the German prosecutor to order a review of Kalinka's autopsy report.
In November 1982, four months after the teenager's death, three experts from the Munich Forensic Institute were assigned the task. They tested samples from the injection sites on Kalinka Bomberski's body and confirmed there was no evidence of poison. However, like the original pathologists, they agreed that Dr. Kronbach's resuscitation attempts on a body in rigor mortis were crude and outright strange.
The forensic experts also had questions about Cronbach's use of cobalt falacet as a tanning aid, as they'd never known it to be used for such a purpose. They pointed out that the only reason this medication should be administered intravenously is in cases of severe iron deficiency anemia, and only then under close medical supervision.
If not, it had the potential to be dangerous, causing serious side effects such as headaches, dizziness, nausea, loss of consciousness, and even cardiac arrest. They therefore suspected that Kalinka had an adverse reaction to the iron injection, went into shock, and then choked on her own vomit. However, the initial autopsy report estimated that Kalinka had died sometime between 3 and 4 a.m.,
The Munich pathologists noted that an adverse reaction would have happened immediately after the injection was administered, not several hours later. Dr. Kronbach claimed he had given Kalinka the iron infusion before dinner on Friday July 9, sometime around 7 and 7.30pm.
Traces of undigested food in Kalinka's stomach also indicated that she'd died shortly after eating, leading the reviewing pathologists to question the time of death on the original autopsy report. The original autopsy stated that various organs had been removed from Kalinka's body during her post-mortem exam, such as her kidneys, rectum, and genitals.
The reviewing team questioned one of the original pathologists about the tear on Kalinka's labia. He claimed that the damage had occurred post-mortem because of how badly decomposed Kalinka's body had been. The team from the Munich Forensic Institute requested access to these organs for further analysis, but the prosecution's office brushed off their request and the matter wasn't pursued further.
Without all the evidence, the team therefore produced an inconclusive report, stating that while they were unable to determine Kalinka's exact cause of death, they suspected it had something to do with the cobalt-falecid injection. For Andrzej Bomberski, these findings were significant.
If Kalinka had died shortly after receiving the iron shot, then it called into question Dr. Kronbach's claim that he'd seen Kalinka around midnight when he'd asked her to turn off her light. While this wasn't enough to convince German prosecutors to reopen the case, the discrepancy between the two reports only made Andrzej Bomberski more certain that Dr. Kronbach was covering something up. He visited Kalinka's gravesite and made a vow.
He'd discover the truth and get justice for her, no matter what. As word spread about Dieter Kronbach's potential involvement in Kalinka's death, Andrei wasn't the only one whose suspicions were raised. In 1969, Kronbach's first wife, 24-year-old Monika, had been rushed to hospital after suffering from a mysterious illness that had rendered her unable to see, speak, or move.
Kronbach, who had recently graduated with honours from the University of Frankfurt, had apparently pushed aside Monika's attending physician and injected her with what he claimed to be snake venom. A few hours later, Monika suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and passed away.
The doctors had attributed Monica's death to an overdose of the contraceptive pill, but when her parents heard about what happened to Kalinka Bomberski, they suspected that Cronbach could have poisoned Monica too. They claimed that Cronbach had treated Monica terribly when she was still alive, beating her and threatening to kill her.
In 1983, Monika's parents reported their suspicions to the German police and an investigation was launched, but no evidence was found to support their theory. As the one-year anniversary of Kalinka's death approached, Andrei's lawyer finally convinced the Lindau Police Commissioner to interview the other family members who were present at the Kronbach home on the night Kalinka died.
Danielle Kronbach told the police that the household had eaten dinner at around 8.30pm, not 7.30 like her husband had originally reported. According to Danielle, it was actually after dinner that Dr. Kronbach gave Kalinka the iron infusion, and it wasn't to help her suntan, but to treat her anemia.
Danielle explained that both she and Kalinka received these iron injections regularly and had never had an adverse reaction before. On the contrary, Danielle found them to be restorative. While she hadn't been present when the injection was administered, Danielle said she remembered it because Kalinka had a band-aid on her arm and mentioned that she'd just had her iron shot.
Danielle recalled that she and Dr. Kronbach then took their dog out for a walk, after which Kronbach did some work in his office while Danielle went to bed. She didn't recall what time her husband came to bed that night. He woke her up the next morning, his hands shaking and eyes bulging as he told Danielle something had happened to Kalinka.
Danielle rushed to her daughter's bedroom, finding her lying in the fetal position, her face blue and her body cold to the touch. Dr. Kronbach's daughter, Diana, claimed that over dinner Kalinka had complained of being sunburnt but seemed otherwise fine. Diana recalled having seen her father prepare the cobalt folicid injection for Kalinka afterwards, which she said was a standard procedure in their household.
Diana went out with friends and returned home around midnight, at which point she didn't notice anything out of the ordinary. The next morning, she found her father trembling in Kalinka's room, shouting to Diana to fetch his medicine bag. Kalinka's younger brother Nicholas said his sister showed no signs of poor health on the night that she died. He didn't remember Kalinka having her iron infusion, nor did he recall seeing a band-aid on her arm.
All Nicholas remembered was that he and Kalinka squabbled over something trivial while their parents were out walking the dog. The siblings went to bed and the next thing Nicholas knew, he woke up to the sounds of ambulance sirens and his mother crying. When the police commissioner tried to question Dr. Dieter Kronbach, he insisted he was too busy. The commissioner therefore agreed to give him a list of five questions that he could answer at his own leisure.
Krumbach eventually responded to the questions via post. In contrast to his original statement, he claimed to have given Kalinka the iron injection after dinner at around 8:30pm and not for tanning purposes, but to treat anaemia. He also added a new detail for the first time. He claimed that after his wife and children went to bed, he did some work before going into the kitchen.
Kalinka was there, complaining that she was unable to get to sleep, so he gave her a sleeping pill. When Andrzej Bomberski caught wind of these witness statements, he was convinced that Dr. Kronbach had changed his version of events to fit with the results of the autopsy review. The detail about the sleeping pill was no doubt his attempt to cover for the fact that he'd intentionally drugged and raped Kalinka.
Krombach's answers matched Danielle's to a T, and Andre was certain that the two had corroborated their responses. It was the first that Andre had ever heard of Kalinka being anaemic, and no blood tests had been done to confirm such a diagnosis.
Andre and his lawyer requested that Kalinka's case be officially reopened, but once again, their request was denied on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence to warrant a new investigation. Andre was at a loss. He felt like he'd exhausted all possible avenues and feared that Kronbach was going to get away with what he'd done to Kalinka and go on living his life like nothing had ever happened.
Refusing to let that happen, André had to think outside the box. On Friday September 30 1983, almost 15 months after Kalinka's death, André travelled to Lindau during Oktoberfest, an annual beer festival that attracted upwards of 30,000 people. André walked the crowded streets and stopped into the bustling cafes and restaurants, handing out a two-page leaflet that began:
"You should know that a criminal lives in Lindau. It is Dr. Kronbach who practices at 23A Bragenza Street. On the evening of Friday July 9 1982, he killed my splendid daughter Kalinka at his own home by injecting her with cobalt filacet." The flyer went on to detail all of Andrei's allegations against Kronbach and his perceived flaws in the investigation.
He provided the Kronbachs' home address, listed the names of the police commissioner, prosecutor, and the pathologists involved, and claimed that a rapist was being protected by powerful locals. Someone told Dr. Kronbach's daughter Diana about the leaflet, and she immediately called the police.
Two hours later, officers found Andre handing them out and placed him under arrest for disturbing public order, defaming Cronbach, and injuring the reputation of the prosecutor. After sharing his side of the story, Andre was free to go, but Cronbach sued him for defamation of character.
Kronbach's lawyer denied the allegations against him, arguing that so-called signs of sexual assault on Kalinka's body had occurred when the pathologists were redressing her fragile and badly decomposed body after their examination.
Kronbach won the lawsuit, with a German judge ordering that Andrei Bomberski pay him 500,000 German marks in compensation, the equivalent of around 255,000 euros in today's money. Andrei was also warned that if he did such a thing again, he'd face up to six months in jail. Andrei was completely undeterred.
Not only did he refuse to pay the money, he also got a copy of the Lindau phonebook and started mailing the leaflet to as many people as he could, including 250 Bavarian officials. The reaction was lacklustre, with less than a dozen of those officials agreeing that the case warranted further attention. However, it was enough to get the Bavarian Minister of Justice involved, and finally, a new investigation was ordered.
A fresh team of German forensic experts reviewed Kalinka's autopsy report and agreed that her death had likely been caused as a result of the iron injection Dieter Kronbach had given her. They determined that Kronbach's crude resuscitation attempts had happened about 10 hours after Kalinka had died, indicating that he had either tried to cover up his medical error or foul play.
However, the investigation hit a standstill after German officials told André they wouldn't be able to re-examine or forensically test Kalinka's genitals for evidence of sexual assault, as these and the other organs had been returned to France with her body. Given that Kalinka was a French citizen, André discovered that he was also able to lodge a criminal complaint against Dieter Krombach with the French courts.
If magistrates uncovered enough evidence to press murder charges, Cronbach could also be tried under French law. A French investigation was simultaneously launched, but German officials refused the French magistrate from investigating on German territory. This prevented them from interviewing Cronbach or the witnesses who were home on the night Kalinka died.
Kronbach and Daniel had since separated, yet they remained on good terms and Daniel was disgusted by André's ongoing accusations. André's lawyer attempted to summon Kronbach to France, but he declined in a letter, which read, "...the files of the German authorities are certainly at your disposal. I see no reason for me to go to Paris for an interview."
Such a journey would be a considerable burden for me in every respect. Things progressed at a snail's pace and it took three and a half years after Kalinka's death before Germany agreed that the French investigators could exhume Kalinka's body for additional examination. In December 1985, André gathered at Peschbusch Cemetery with a team of French police officers and forensic experts as Kalinka's coffin was pulled from its gravesite.
It turned out that the teenager's body had been incredibly well preserved. But to the dismay of those gathered, the organs that had been removed during Kalinka's autopsy, including her genitals, weren't in the coffin as German officials had claimed. The German forensic lab who had handled Kalinka's remains could provide no trace of them. It appeared they were gone forever.
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Thank you for listening to this episode's ads. By supporting our sponsors, you support Casefile to continue to deliver quality content. Without access to the sex organs that had been removed from Kalinka's body, the German court ruled there was insufficient evidence to press any charges against Dieter Kronbach, and German officials made it clear they would not be investigating the case any further.
Andre Bomburski was horrified by the way Kalinka's body had been treated during the autopsy. He later remarked: "Kalinka got carved up like a pig in a slaughterhouse, but nobody wanted to know how and why she died." The only hope Andre had left was with the French investigation, but German officials refused to extradite Kronbach to France on the grounds that he'd essentially already been acquitted by the German courts.
The Germans claimed that undergoing prosecution in France would go against the European Union's double jeopardy principle, which prevented individuals from being tried for the same offence after they had already been acquitted. With no new evidence to examine, the French magistrates requested access to the original samples taken from Kalinka's body. They had to be manually retrieved from Munich, a process two years in the making.
In 1988, a team of three French forensic experts were finally able to examine the available evidence for themselves. They were given skin, lung, heart and tissue samples from Kalinka's body, yet test tubes filled with her blood had been inexplicably discarded by the first reviewing team at the Munich Forensic Institute.
The lack of blood meant they were unable to find a definitive link between any intravenous substance and Kalinka's death. However, the trio highlighted various gaps in the previous autopsy reports, concluding that Kalinka Bomberski had died as a direct result of the iron injection Dr. Kronbach had given her.
With nothing in her medical records to indicate that Kalinka was anaemic, the injection would have put her body into shock, in turn causing her to lose consciousness and choke on her own vomit. She would have died shortly after receiving the injection, once again calling into question Cronbach's timeline of events.
The drugs Kronbach had injected her with hours later weren't known to be used for resuscitation purposes, and given together, they formed a dangerous combination. Therefore, the experts concluded the only reason Kronbach would have administered these drugs was to make it look like he'd made a genuine attempt to revive Kalinka, or to cover up another drug that he'd given her earlier on, possibly to enable a sexual assault.
It took another few years until the French magistrates believed they'd built up a solid case against Cronbach. While they didn't have enough evidence to proceed with any sexual assault charges, the courts decided that Kalinka's death was caused by a direct result of an intravenous injection or a solution that might or might not have been cobalt folicet.
It wasn't enough to uphold a murder charge, but it was enough to indicate voluntary assault resulting in unintentional death. In April 1993, Andrzej Bomberski received the news he'd been waiting for for almost 11 years. The Paris Court of Assize had just charged Dr Dieter Kronbach with killing Kalinka.
An indictment for Cronbach's arrest stated that in order to justify the injection he gave Kalinka, Cronbach furnished conflicting and untrue accounts. It further stated that he, quote, "...also lied about the chronology of the events when he affirmed that the injection had taken place several hours before the death."
Lastly, the faked attempt to revive her and the use of mutually incompatible products on a living being can only be explained by an intention to conceal the cause of death. These factors taken as a whole constitute sufficient grounds for suspecting that Dieter Krombach gave the fatal injection not as a cure, but with the intention of causing death.
Given Kalinka's age, the maximum penalty Kronbach faced was 30 years in prison. The trial was set to take place in Paris, but Kronbach successfully postponed it several times. When the date was finally set for early March 1995, Kronbach was protected by a law that prevented German citizens from being prosecuted outside of their own country.
He therefore wasn't legally required to attend his own trial, and it went ahead without him in what's known as a trial in absentia. There were no defense attorneys present, nor were there any witnesses or jury members.
Instead, a judge reviewed the available evidence, which excluded the sexual assault allegations, and concluded that Dieter Kronbach was guilty of willful violence leading to death without intent, or in other words, manslaughter. Without the sexual assault motive, the court concluded that Kronbach was responsible for Kalinka's death because he'd given her the injection without then monitoring her for possible adverse reactions.
Cronbach was sentenced to 15 years in a French prison, the maximum sentence for manslaughter at the time. Despite this conviction and sentence, Germany remained under no legal obligation to extradite Cronbach. He was ultimately a convicted killer allowed to walk free, provided he steer clear of France. Andrzej Bomberski wasn't the only one outraged by this technical loophole.
After an article about the case appeared in a major French newspaper the following year, pressure was placed on the Paris public prosecutor and eventually Interpol issued an international arrest warrant for Cronbach. This meant that if he attempted to leave Germany, he'd no longer be protected by German laws and would be extradited to France to see out his sentence.
In March 1997, two years after the trial, Andrzej Bomberski's phone rang. A German journalist was on the other line with some information they thought might be of interest to him. 61-year-old Dieter Kronbach had just been arrested. Andrzej's immediate thought was that Kronbach was finally being held accountable for Kalinka's death, but what the journalist told him next was even more astonishing.
16-year-old Laura Stihler was a Russian immigrant living in Lindau. On the morning of Tuesday, February 11, 1997, she attended Dr. Kronbach's practice to undergo a gastroscopy, a diagnostic procedure that involves an endoscope being passed through the mouth and into the esophagus, stomach, and bowel. As per standard practice, Laura was given an anesthetic and a sedative to make the procedure more comfortable.
The gastroscopy was completed without incident, but when Laura woke up, she took longer than usual to recover from the anesthetic. Dr. Kronbach and his assistant left Laura to recover on the couch in their post-treatment room. As Laura lay there, barely able to move or speak, Dr. Kronbach returned. He began kissing her and touching her breasts.
Laura tried to push him away, but her body felt completely paralyzed from the anesthetic and she could barely lift her arms. Dr. Kronbach locked the door from the inside and removed his pants. He took Laura's clothes off and proceeded to rape her. After he was done, he wiped them both down with a paper towel, helped Laura get dressed, and then drove her home.
Lauro reported the incident to the police straight away and an examination confirmed the presence of semen. Dieter Kronbach was subsequently charged with the sexual abuse of an individual unable to resist. He denied the allegation and was jailed pending trial, but he changed his plea after learning that the semen had tested positive for his DNA. Andrzej Bomberski travelled to Germany to be present for Kronbach's sentencing hearing.
His presence clearly rattled Cronbach, who began yelling that the Frenchman was there to kill him. Once order was restored in the court, Cronbach claimed that he'd been under the impression that Laura had consented to sex, even if she hadn't explicitly said so. Many present were taken aback by the casual way in which he spoke about what he'd done.
He seemed to have no remorse, instead testifying with what some viewed as a kind of amused cynicism. A psychiatrist testified that Cronbach was a narcissist who considered himself above the law, a description many found apt after he was handed a two-year suspended sentence. The citizens of Lindau were outraged.
Hundreds gathered to protest against the leniency of the sentence, while a petition circulated demanding that Cronbach's medical license be revoked. Wanting to voice his side of the story, Cronbach agreed to an exclusive interview with Barbara Furlkerl, a journalist for the German TV broadcaster ZDF.
Answering pre-vetted questions in the presence of his lawyer, Cronbach sat back comfortably in his chair as he explained that he didn't view his actions as sexual assault. He claimed that he'd simply been expressing his fondness for Laura, going so far as to call his actions lovemaking. While Cronbach admitted that Laura hadn't been enthusiastic, he explained,
I believed she was consenting. She didn't say yes, but she didn't say no either. When I kissed her, she kissed back." Kronbach recalled there was a moment during the assault that he told Laura "I love you" in Russian. He chuckled as he remembered this, prompting Barbara Furkel to exclaim, "But you drugged her." Kronbach sighed, remarking,
Like they said in ancient Rome, those who remained silent seemed to agree. A woman named Svegna Mäuer-Gunta was watching the interview and couldn't believe what she was seeing. Not only was she sickened by the way that Cronbach seemed to mock his victim, Svegna remembered Dr. Cronbach well.
As a teenager living in Lindau in the early 1980s, she had visited his medical office regularly as her mother had been sick at the time. Svenja and her sister Jana were also diagnosed as anaemic and required regular iron infusions. 1985 had been a hard time for the Mauer sisters. Their parents had been going through a brutal divorce and their mother struggled with health problems.
Dr. Kronbach became a much-needed source of support, providing positive distractions for Svenja and Jana by taking them horse riding and out to fancy dinners. Then, when the girls were around 14 and 16, Dr. Kronbach invited them to join him on a long weekend to the south of France, without their mother. Svenja and Jana were thrilled.
After the turmoil they'd been witnessing at home, a few days away with the charming and sophisticated doctor seemed like a dream. They'd come to view Cronbach as a type of substitute father figure and were excited to travel to a beautiful location. The trip started off well, until it came time to check into their motel.
The trio arrived late at night, only to find they would all be sharing a room which contained only one double bed with a single fold-up bed alongside it. Dr. Kronbach told the sisters he was too big to take the fold-up bed. He said he would sleep in the double bed and the girls could choose which one of them would join him. Jana begged Svenja to take the double bed.
She had only packed a small nightgown and she was too self-conscious to sleep alongside the 50-year-old man. Svenja agreed and as they climbed into bed, Dr. Kronbach told the sisters they were due for their iron infusions. Given that he had his doctor's kit with him, he figured this was as good a time as any. He retrieved his doctor's bag and proceeded to give them both their injections. Svenja dozed off almost immediately.
She woke up sometime later only to find Dr. Kronbach sexually assaulting her. Terrified, she didn't dare move or speak. As the assault continued, she played dead, to the point that Kronbach started shaking her to make sure she was still alive. Svenja found the only way she could get through it was to disassociate entirely, telling herself, ''This isn't happening.''
The next day, Svenja felt as though the whole thing had been a horrible nightmare. She knew how highly respected Dr. Kronbach was in Lindau and felt that nobody would believe her if she spoke up about what happened. She told her sister Jana, who had nodded off as soon as Kronbach injected her and slept through everything. Jana didn't know whether the doctor had assaulted her too, but if he had, she felt it was best that she didn't know.
The girls eventually told their mother, who scolded them for making such an allegation against the good man. Following the interview about Laura Stierler with Barbara Furkel, the public backlash against Dieter Kronbach was immense. By the end of 1997, his medical license was revoked and he had to sell his practice.
In addition to the Mauer sisters, at least two other patients came forward claiming they too had been sexually assaulted by the doctor in the past. None of the alleged survivors were able to press charges due to the lack of evidence, but the public condemnation reignited discussion about Kalinka Bomberski's death and the case started getting media attention outside of Germany.
Andre Bomberski quit his job so that he could devote all of his time to pursuing Dieter Kronbach. Knowing that he frequently travelled to Austria and Switzerland, Andre visited police and customs posts throughout both countries, handing out dossiers containing photos of Kronbach, newspaper articles detailing the allegations against him, and judicial warrants for his arrest. The reactions were mixed.
Some treated André as though he was crazy, while others were willing to listen to his story. Either way, his efforts paid off in early January 2000 when a police officer in Western Austria recognised Dieter Kronbach from one of André's photos and placed him under arrest. He was detained as per the terms of the European Convention on Extradition that was in place at the time.
German officials called for his release, arguing that Cronbach had been cleared of any wrongdoing in his home country and that the French arrest warrant was therefore a violation of his rights. French officials didn't argue against this and Cronbach was subsequently released and free to return to Germany.
Cronbach and his legal team had been arguing against his manslaughter conviction in France ever since the sentence was handed down back in 1995. They petitioned to the European Court of Human Rights, asserting that France was wrong to conduct a trial without Cronbach or a legal representative there to defend him.
In 2001, the court concluded that by trying Cronbach in absentee, France had violated several stipulations set out in the European Convention on Human Rights. They found that he'd been denied a fair hearing and his right to appeal, and that the sentence could therefore no longer be enforced.
The court voided the conviction and ordered that the French government compensate Cronbach with 100,000 francs for costs incurred, which was around 15,000 euros at the time. This was a major blow for Andrzej Bomberski, whose allegations against Cronbach were finally being taken seriously after years of denial.
He implored French officials to appeal the decision to the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights, but his request was denied. They also refused his request to re-examine Cronbach's 1995 trial. The entire legal process had been incredibly gruelling for André both emotionally and financially, but still he refused to give up.
André was convinced that the French authorities were prioritising their relationship with Germany over justice for Kalinka. This suspicion only grew after he became aware of a report from Cronbach's legal team that claimed public prosecutors in Paris had assured them that Cronbach's sentence wouldn't be enforced.
In André's view, the French had failed in their duty to catch Cronbach, who was now living freely as a convicted rapist in his home country. In 2002, he filed a complaint against several French magistrates and prosecutors, alleging corruption and obstruction of justice. As André's newly appointed lawyer explained to the French television show "Bring in the Accused":
It was an attempt to wake up a sleeping machine by the implementation of an explosion. A judge ruled there were no grounds for Andrzej's complaint and that the allegations wouldn't be investigated further. The entire Kalinka-Bomberski case was transferred back to Germany, where a new prosecutor determined yet again that no charges would be pressed against Dieter Kronbach in relation to the teenager's death.
Andre was aware that he'd earned a particular reputation within the French legal circles as an annoyance. As much as this hurt him, it made him all the more determined to continue with the fight. In 2004, the European Union implemented a new system known as the European Arrest Warrant.
This aimed to simplify and streamline the extradition process for suspects within the EU so that they could be transferred from one EU state to another without the need for specific extradition treaties. As a result, French prosecutors issued a fresh European arrest warrant for Dieter Krombach. German officials denied it again on the grounds that the case was closed.
Although Andrei seemed to hit a dead end at every turn, he wasn't alone in his quest for justice. By this point, a concerned citizen had created a group in support of Andrei's cause titled "Justice for Kalinka", which soon amassed over 1,000 members from all walks of life. Members held rallies, wrote letters to people in positions of power, and created a website detailing all the available information about Andrei's legal struggles.
German filmmaker Hilke Zinging was among those following Kalinka's case. In 2006, she released a documentary dedicated to the allegations against Dieter Kronbach titled Kalinka's Last Journey, which featured interviews with the Mauer sisters.
After the documentary aired, Hilke received a letter from Kronbach in which he claimed that the sisters were lying about being drugged and sexually assaulted during their trip to the south of France. Kronbach said he barely knew the girls and had never taken them on a holiday. Yet, the Mauer sisters had provided Hilke with photographs that proved the trip had taken place and these had been broadcast in the documentary.
Speaking about Krombach to The Guardian, Hilke later said: "I have no idea if he has problems with reality." Around the same time that the documentary aired, a German librarian named Petra Steffen sat down at her computer. Petra lived approximately 400 kilometres from Lindau in the German town of Rodenthal. Her regular doctor had recently passed away and she'd been given the name of his replacement.
A curious person by nature, Petra typed the name of the new doctor into Google. One of the first things that popped up was the Justice for Kalinka website followed by Hilke Zinging's documentary. Petra was stunned as she learned about the crimes Dr Dieter Kronbach had been convicted of and discovered that he'd been banned from practicing medicine entirely.
She booked an appointment to see if the new doctor in town was indeed the same Dr. Kronbach she was reading about. After confirming that it was, Petra wasted no time in reporting him. Further investigation revealed that Dieter Kronbach had been working as a locum doctor all over Germany ever since his medical license was revoked after his rape conviction back in 1997.
He'd gotten away with it by producing a photocopy of his old medical license, claiming that the original had been stolen. Kronbach was charged with 28 cases of fraud and 19 cases of illegally practicing medicine. He was placed under arrest just as the authorities suspected he was about to flee overseas.
According to the Netflix documentary My Daughter's Killer, police found him with a suitcase containing clothing, cash, and a penis pump used to treat erectile dysfunction. He was subject to a psychiatric assessment, with two psychiatrists concluding that he was a chronic liar, sexual predator, and a narcissist who believed he was outside the law.
Kronbach was subsequently convicted and sentenced to two years and four months in a German prison. He served 18 months before being released early for good behaviour in June 2008. By this point, 26 years had passed since Kalinka Bomberski's death,
Under French law, a 30-year statute of limitations meant there were only four years left in which legal action could be taken against Adida Kronbach in relation to Kalinka's death. After that, not only would he be free from facing any punishment, but he could also choose to sue Andrzej Bomberski for defamation.
Following Cronbach's early release from prison, the Paris Court of Appeal admitted that his 1995 trial in absentia had been distorted under pressure from Germany. The French warrant for his arrest was still in place, but other than that, in the eyes of the law, Andrzej Bomberski had exhausted all possible options when it came to getting justice for his daughter. It was important to Andrzej that Cronbach knew he hadn't been forgotten,
Andre travelled to Germany and tracked Kronbach down to Scheidegg, a small market town 20 kilometres inland from Lindau near the Austrian border. He visited every once in a while to keep an eye on Kronbach and to make his presence known. Then in September 2009, Andre noticed a for sale sign at the front of Kronbach's apartment.
He spoke to some neighbours who told him that Cronbach had accepted a job in West Africa. With the clock ticking and Cronbach on the move again, Andre knew it was now or never. "I had enough in my head," he later told the Guardian. "I knew that the French government would do nothing. I knew that the German government would do nothing. I decided that I had to do something."
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Thank you for listening to this episode's ads. By supporting our sponsors, you support Casefile to continue to deliver quality content. It was just after 3.15 on the morning of Sunday October 18 2009 when a call came through to police in the French city of Meluse. Go to the Rue D'Ital across from the customs office, an anonymous caller said. You'll find a man tied up.
The police station was only four blocks away. Two squad cars raced to the narrow street near the centre of town. There, in a courtyard nestled between two buildings, they found an elderly man lying on the ground behind an iron gate. It was Dieter Kronbach. He was curled on the pavement, his hands and feet bound together, and his mouth gagged with duct tape.
His face was barely recognizable, battered, bruised, and covered in blood. One of the police officers removed the tape from his mouth. "Bomberski is behind it," he said. Kronbach was rushed to hospital where he received treatment for a fractured skull. He told the police that the previous evening he'd been at his home in Scheidegg when there was a knock on the door. He answered it, only to find an unfamiliar man standing there.
"Are you Kronbach?" the man asked with a thick Russian accent. When Kronbach answered "yes", the man punched him in the face. Two other men appeared and launched a violent attack. They managed to bind and gag Kronbach before throwing him into the backseat of their car. As the men drove along, Kronbach struggled and begged for his life. He offered to pay the trio 50,000 euros if they'd just let him go.
Then, one of the men pulled out a knife and threatened to chop his penis off. Suddenly, the driver pulled over and ordered the knife-wielding man out of the car. He said they had over 300 kilometers to go and couldn't risk doing the drive with a dangerous man with a weapon. The car eventually crossed the border into France and stopped in Meluse, the first town they came upon that had its own police station and courthouse.
The men dumped Kronbach, called the police, and fled. Andrei Bomberski wasn't with them, but Kronbach had no doubt that he'd orchestrated the whole thing. The police looked into Andrei's whereabouts the night before and confirmed he'd been in Toulouse the entire time. However, they soon received word that Andrei had booked a flight to Meluse that was scheduled to arrive that evening.
At 5pm, they drove to the hotel he'd booked in and placed him under arrest. Andre seemed genuinely shocked. He denied having anything to do with Cronbach's abduction and claimed that he'd only travelled to Mulhouse because someone had informed him that Cronbach was there.
However, a search of his hotel room turned up 19,000 euros in cash, leading investigators to suspect that he'd paid someone to carry out the attack on his behalf. Investigators visited Kronbach's home in Scheidegg and found a utility bill near the scene. On it was the address and phone number of an individual named Anton Krasnici, a Kosovan who lived in the Austrian town of Bregenz.
Andrzej Bomberski had recently spent time in Breganz, which was right near the German border, just 20 kilometres from Dieter Kronbach's home. Police looked into Anton Krasnici and discovered that his brother-in-law had worked as a German translator for Andrzej as he spread the word around Breganz about Kronbach's crimes. He wanted the townsfolk there to be aware of Kronbach in case he crossed the border, at which point his international arrest warrant could be enforced.
He'd been putting up posters in cafes, bars and restaurants, appealing for assistance. At the police station in Mulhouse, Andrzej Bomberski admitted to knowing Anton Krasnici, but he continued to deny having anything to do with the kidnapping plot. He said that Krasnici had shown up at his hotel in Braganz and offered to help transport Dieter Kronbach to France.
Krasniqi said he wasn't interested in money but just wanted to do what he believed to be the right thing. As a father himself, he felt compelled to help. Krasniqi explained that there were two Russian mobsters who would help him do the job for 2000 euros apiece. He didn't provide any more details, simply telling Andrei: "The less you know, the better."
Andrei told the police that he insisted on paying for any expenses involved, but asked no further questions. He claimed he didn't know when or how it was going to go down and that he only learned about it when Krasniqi called him from Maluze to let him know that it was over. Anton Krasniqi confirmed Andrei's version of events. Having served prison time before, he said he didn't care about the consequences.
Appearing on My Daughter's Killer, Krasnici said he was moved by the battle fought by Andrei Bomberski. "This is a father who never gave up," Krasnici remarked. "He knew where his daughter's killer was living and I had a plan to help him. Hands on. As a father, I was fascinated by the strength of this man. He's a really great dad."
For their role in the violent kidnapping, Anton Krasniqi and one of his accomplices, Karcha Bablavani, were also arrested.
Andrzej Bomberski was hit with various charges, including kidnapping, criminal conspiracy, and complicity in causing violence. Charges which came with the possibility of 15 years in prison. Andrzej's lawyer argued that his client had acted under moral duress, knowing that if he could just get Dieter Kronbach to France, then the legal saga regarding Kalinka would finally be over.
Andre was free to go but under judicial supervision awaiting trial. When he left the Mulhouse police station, several officers gathered in the lobby and gave him a standing ovation. As he waited for his day in court, he told the Guardian: "If I should have to go to prison, I will go to prison." Most important is that Cronbach is judged, even if he is not found guilty.
"For me, it was necessary to do justice. I think I will find some peace. This is my last fight, and I shall dedicate it to the memory of my daughter." He told La Depeche newspaper: "I can now smile. After 27 years of fighting, I can finally say in my prayers to Kalinka that the promises I made her are beginning to be kept. The biggest part of my fight is finished.
"But I will not be completely at peace until Cronbach is in front of the court to answer for the death of my daughter." Dieter Cronbach recovered from his injuries in hospital under police custody.
Regardless of how he'd ended up in France, the arrest warrant for Kalinka's manslaughter was still valid, and it was announced that Cronbach would face a retrial in Paris, this time with both himself and his legal counsel required to be present. Cronbach's defence team tried to have him repatriated to Germany or to have his trial heard by the European Court of Human Rights, but their requests were denied.
They argued that the case should be thrown out entirely as the rules of the European Union declared that an individual could not be tried twice for the same crime. Cronbach's lawyer told reporters the whole situation was a farce, remarking, "...how can he be cleared in one EU country and then tried in another? And how can he face trial after being illegally kidnapped?"
With France refusing to release Dieter Krombach, the German Department of Justice issued an international arrest warrant for Andrzej Bomberski. The French authorities refused to extradite him, which came as little surprise to those who had been following the case since the beginning.
Many were sympathetic to Andrei's plight and felt he didn't deserve to be punished, while others spoke out against vigilante justice and the extreme violence used during the kidnapping. When it was announced that Andrei intended to release a book about the case and his struggle trying to achieve justice for Kalinka, Kronbach's lawyers tried unsuccessfully to have it banned, saying there was no way their client could receive a fair trial if the publication went ahead.
Cronbach's lawyer blamed anti-German sentiment for the support Andrzej received, telling the BBC: "The way this affair has been covered in France is shocking. Of course it is heartbreaking for Mr. Bomberski, but only one side of the story has been told. Naturally, Mr. Cronbach protests his innocence. But that's not even the point. My client was cleared of guilt in his own country.
He was then kidnapped and taken illegally to another European country where he is now going to be tried for murder. Only in France could that possibly be allowed to happen. Although the lack of physical evidence still meant Dieter Kronbach couldn't be charged for raping Kalinka, a pre-trial review of the evidence led a team of medical professors to determine that the injury to Kalinka's labia could only have happened while she was still alive.
They could find no other explanation for the white substance found in her vagina other than semen. Using advanced technology that didn't exist at the time of the crime, they analysed Kalinka's heart and lung tissue and discovered the presence of a benzodiazepine, a powerful sedative that conclusively proved that Kalinka had been drugged on the night that she died.
In the lead-up to Kronbach's trial, several survivors of his sexual assaults came forward from Germany willing to testify against him. One of these women was a former patient of Kronbach's who, in 1993, had been given a part-time job working as a cleaner for his medical practice. According to her testimony, one day, she arrived at the practice around lunchtime to find nobody there except Dr. Kronbach.
Cronbach said she was due for her iron infusion and he might as well do it there and then to save her coming back later. The woman agreed, at which point Cronbach allegedly drugged and raped her. Knowing he had money and influence in town, the woman had been too afraid to report what he had done.
But the most surprising witness was a woman named Isabel, who had been a patient of Dr. Cronbach's during the time he was married to André's ex-wife, Danielle. Isabel, who had been just 16 at the time, claimed that she began an affair with Cronbach, who was around 20 years her senior. According to Isabel, Cronbach would drug an unsuspecting Danielle by slipping drops of sedatives into her drinks.
Once she passed out upstairs, he would call Isabel over and the two would have sex in the downstairs living room. Up until this point, Danielle and Kronbach had remained on good terms following their divorce in the late 1980s. They kept in contact even when Danielle moved back to Toulouse and she continued to support his innocence in Kalinka's death.
If anything, she felt that Andre's campaign against Kronbach had only served to bring the two of them closer together. Danielle had even appeared at a pre-trial hearing in 2010 to attest to Kronbach's good character, telling the court that he would never rape anyone because he had no trouble attracting women on his own.
She explained that she only left him because he was cheating on her, and she'd come to accept that it was part of his personality to be attracted to anything that was forbidden. But when Isabelle's story came to light, a French prosecutor advised Danielle to file a civil claim against Cronbach so she could join the prosecution party and get full access to the case file.
Danielle followed this advice and, for the first time ever, learned about the true extent of the allegations against her ex-husband. It was also the first time she'd read the reports that described cobalt falacet as a dangerous drug. Crumbark had never warned her of any side effects, despite administering it to herself, Kalinka, and hundreds of his patients regularly.
Furthermore, it was only through reading the case file that Danielle heard Isabelle's story about Cronbach sedating her so she wouldn't know he was having sex with the 16-year-old downstairs. Danielle's world came crashing down. She thought back to the night of Kalinka's death and realised she'd slept very deeply. As she began to view everything through a different lens, she wondered whether Cronbach could have drugged her then too.
She later told the courts, When you've done it once, you can do it again. Dieter Kronbach's trial was delayed multiple times as his legal team exhausted all possible avenues attempting to have the case thrown out. It was finally set to go ahead in late March 2011, almost a year and a half after the kidnapping and just shy of 29 years since Kalinka Bomberski's death.
75-year-old Kronbach tried one last time to have the case thrown out, telling the court, "'I did not kill Kalinka. I want to stress that I am not guilty, that I did not kill Kalinka and that I did not rape Kalinka.'" The trial commenced, but five days in, Kronbach's lawyers announced that he'd suffered a heart attack and ordered that the trial be called off indefinitely.
They accused the French legal system of contributing to the stress of the ailing man, who they said was still suffering from the injuries sustained during the kidnapping. The trial was put on hold but resumed again five months later in October 2011. Danielle listened in disgust as various witnesses testified to the sexual abuse they'd suffered at Cronbach's hand.
She couldn't believe this was the same man she'd lived with and defended for so many years. Now convinced he was lying about what happened to Kalinka on the night she died, Danielle told one journalist, "'I would have appreciated it if Dieter Kronbach had told me it was an accident. I panicked and I lied. I would have understood. I may have forgiven him, but now I can't forgive him.'"
A parting gift Cronbach had given her after their separation took on a whole new meaning. Figurines of the three wise monkeys symbolising the proverb "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil." The trial ran for three weeks before the verdict was delivered.
Just like the Paris courts 16 years earlier, Dieter Krumbach was found guilty of wilfully causing violence towards Kalinka that resulted in her unintentional death. Again, he was sentenced to 15 years in a French prison, a sentence that could now be enforced. Andrzej Bomberski's 30-year crusade had finally come to an end. Outside court, he told reporters:
"'Of course, my first thought is for Kalinka. I have achieved what I promised, a complete and fair trial. Justice has been done in her memory, and I will be able to mourn for her.' He visited the cemetery shortly after and placed a bunch of flowers on Kalinka's grave, saying out loud, "'I promised that I would give you justice. Now you can rest in peace.'
But the saga still wasn't over for Andre. Seven months later in May 2014, he faced his own trial in the Malouse Magistrates Court for the role he played in Cronbach's kidnapping. Bomberski's lawyer argued that his client shouldn't be convicted for essentially enforcing a decision that had already been handed down by the French court, stating…
He acted that way to fulfill his duties as a father. He also acted so that justice could fulfill its duty. Andrzej Bomberski was found guilty of criminal conspiracy and complicity in aggravated assault, but cleared of orchestrating the abduction.
He was given a one-year suspended sentence, while the men who carried out the attack, Anton Krasniqi and Karcher Bablovanyi, were both sentenced to one year behind bars. Meanwhile, Dieter Kronbach spent the next few years appealing his sentence on medical grounds. He asked to be transferred to a nursing home, claiming he was suffering from life-threatening cardiovascular disease.
His appeals were rejected until February 2020, when the courts agreed to suspend his sentence due to the state of his health. After serving just six of his 15-year sentence, 84-year-old Kronbach was returned to Germany, a decision that infuriated Andrzej Bomberski. But six months later in September 2020, Dieter Kronbach passed away at the age of 85.
According to an article written by Joshua Hammer for the Atavist magazine, German officials have long denied that anything was done to protect Dieter Krombach. In Hammer's opinion, quote: "What seems more likely is that sloppy forensic work, bureaucratic inertia, and, at some level, a desire to close ranks against foreign interference in a domestic matter, had caused the Germans to resist pursuing the case."
Andre has spoken openly about the mixed feelings he has about his campaign for getting justice for Kalinka. He told a French radio station that many people, his father in particular, always told him to drop the case and live a normal life. He explained: "But personally, if I had dropped it, I don't think I could have lived a normal life." Opinions remain divided about the lengths Andre went to secure Cronbach's conviction.
Some view him as a hero, while others argue that violence should never be condoned and it wasn't Andrei's place to take the law into his own hands. His lawyer told the documentary My Daughter's Killer: "Mr. Bomberski is a moral force. He isn't a vigilante. He isn't the masked Avenger, but a warrior. A warrior monk." Andrei isn't fazed by public opinion.
To him, all that matters is that he fulfilled his promise to his daughter. In 2022, the producers of My Daughter's Killer asked Andre what he would say to a father who found themselves in a similar situation. Andre responded: "I would tell him, as it's been 39 years, 'Don't waste your life.' I fought like Don Quixote de la Marcha, against windmills. I got justice for Kalinka.
But honestly, these battles are extreme. Andre said he no longer trusted anyone, but remarked, I hope that Kalinka is in heaven and that she knows about everything I did for her. I think that she deserved it.
Oh. Okay.
Because you love wasting money as a way to punish yourself because your mother never showed you enough love as a child? Whoa, easy there. Yeah.
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