On a warm July morning in 1982, the quiet lakeside community near Lake Constance in Bavaria woke up to tragedy. Fourteen-year-old Kalinka Bamberski, a lively French teenager spending her summer with her mother and stepfather in Germany, was found dead in her bed.
Her stepfather, retired cardiologist Dieter Krombach, told authorities he had given her an injection the night before — a cobalt-iron preparation he claimed would “help her tan” or treat anemia. He admitted he’d also given her a sleeping pill. He insisted she’d been fine when he turned off her light at midnight, but by the next morning, she was gone.
A Promising Summer That Turned to Horror
Kalinka was in many ways a typical teenager — athletic, social, and full of plans. That summer, she was living with her mother, Danielle, and Krombach, her German stepfather, while attending a French-language boarding school nearby.
When police arrived at the scene that morning in July, they accepted Krombach’s account. He had tried to revive her, he said, using more injections before calling for help. German authorities quickly ruled the death accidental.
But the autopsy told a more disturbing story. Kalinka’s body showed undigested food in her stomach, vomit in her airways, and multiple injection marks. A small vaginal tear, fresh blood around her genitals, and a whitish substance in the vagina — never tested — raised even more suspicion. Most shocking of all, her genitals were removed during examination and later disappeared, according to the Independent.
Still, the official word from German investigators was that there was no crime.
A Father’s Growing Suspicions
Three years passed before Kalinka’s father, André Bamberski, finally got hold of the autopsy report. By then, the initial grief had hardened into suspicion. Reading the report, he became convinced that his daughter had been sexually assaulted and that the injections had played a role in her death.
André began what would become a decades-long personal crusade. He pored over documents, hired lawyers, and confronted authorities in both France and Germany. His belief never wavered: Krombach had drugged Kalinka to facilitate sexual assault, and it had killed her.
In 1995, a French court agreed enough to convict Krombach in absentia of involuntary manslaughter and sentence him to 15 years. But the verdict meant little without the man in custody. Germany refused to extradite him.
Fighting Borders and Bureaucracy
The case highlighted one of the most frustrating aspects of international justice: cooperation between countries is often slow, and in this case, painfully so.
While Germany maintained there wasn’t enough evidence to charge Krombach, France had already sentenced him. André kept pressing, making the case not just a legal battle, but a public one.
He handed out leaflets accusing Krombach of rape and murder. He gave interviews, filed new complaints, and tried to keep Kalinka’s name alive in the media. His frustration boiled over in one blunt statement: “Kalinka got carved up like a pig in a slaughterhouse, but nobody wanted to know how and why she died.”
The years ticked by. André’s campaign was relentless, but nothing seemed to move the needle in Germany.
A Desperate Gamble
By 2009, more than a quarter-century after Kalinka’s death, time was running out. The statute of limitations was closing in. André feared that soon, even the possibility of prosecution would vanish.
That’s when he made a fateful decision. He arranged for a group of men to kidnap Krombach from his home in Bavaria, the BBC reports.
It was as risky as it was bold. Krombach was tied up, beaten, and driven across the border to France. He was dumped outside a courthouse in Mulhouse, bleeding and bound.
The move set off a storm. French police arrested André and charged him with kidnapping. Germany demanded Krombach be sent back — and also wanted André and the men who carried out the abduction extradited. France refused.
Krombach stayed in French custody. After nearly 30 years, he would finally face a trial in person.
The Trial That Changed Everything
In 2011, the case returned to court. This time, new voices joined the record. Several women testified about Krombach’s past — and it was ugly.
One described being in a sexual relationship with him at 16, explaining how he would drug his wife to keep her from interfering. Others spoke of a disturbing pattern: Krombach using cobalt-iron injections to incapacitate young girls.
Prosecutors painted a clear picture — Kalinka had been drugged so Krombach could assault her, and it had cost her life.
The court convicted him of “wilful violence leading to death without intent” and sentenced him to 15 years. It was a landmark moment in a case that had seemed impossible to resolve.
For André, the relief was real, though not complete. Standing outside the courtroom, he told reporters: “It is a great relief he is here because right up to last night his lawyers were telling us he might not appear and he would not be saying anything, so we are just happy he is here.”
Still, he wished the sentence had been harsher.
“For someone to effectively kill someone through poisoning, the minimum sentence should be either a life sentence or 30 years. So it saddens me that he wasn’t given the sentence that he deserved.”
Final Chapter
In 2012, Krombach’s conviction was upheld on appeal. His attempt to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights failed in 2018.
By 2020, his health had declined sharply. According to Wikipedia, He was released from prison in February of that year and died months later in a German nursing home.
The legal battles had ended, but André’s actions — especially the kidnapping — ignited debate over whether breaking the law can ever be justified in the pursuit of justice. In Germany, officials condemned the move, with a Bavarian justice official emphasizing ‘the monopoly of the state regarding enforcement’ and labeling the abduction unacceptable.
But for André, the answer was simple: decades had passed, and every official channel had failed. In his eyes, there was no other choice.
