Kalinka Bamberski case

The case of Kalinka Bamberski has spanned 30 years and has caused considerable publicity because of the issues of French-German relations and vigilante justice it raised.

Kalinka Bamberski, a French teenager, died in 1982 in the house of her German stepfather, Dieter Krombach, a doctor. Suspicious autopsy results caused the girl's French biological father André Bamberski to pressure German authorities into investigating Krombach's involvement in the death. When the case was closed and extradition to France was denied, Krombach was tried in absentia in France and convicted of involuntary manslaughter in 1995, a verdict later overturned on procedural grounds. In 2009 Bamberski had Krombach abducted to France where he stood trial, was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

André Bamberski was born in France c. 1938; his father's family had come from Poland. During World War II, the Germans took him to Germany and Poland.

In the early 1970s, André Bamberski worked as an accountant. With his wife Danièle Gonnin and their two children they lived in Casablanca, Morocco. There they met Dieter Krombach (born 1935) and his second wife; Krombach's first wife had suddenly died at age 24. Krombach worked at the German consulate as a doctor. Krombach and Gonnin began a secret affair and eventually left their partners; they married in 1977. Bamberski's children eventually went to live with the Krombachs in Lindau, Germany.

Kalinka Bamberski, a healthy and sporty 14-year-old girl, was attending a French-language boarding school in Germany in 1982. She spent the summer vacation at the home of her mother and her stepfather in Lindau. Krombach said that at the evening of 9 July 1982 right after dinner he injected her with Kobalt-Ferrlecit, a cobalt-iron preparation that he liked to use on several family members and friends. Initially he said it was intended to aid in tanning, later he said it was intended to treat anemia. He said that he told her to switch off the light at midnight and found her in her room in the morning, dead, but still administered various injections intended to revive her; then he called emergency services. He later said that he also had given her a sleeping pill that night.

The autopsy, conducted two days later, could not establish a cause of death. Among the findings were: aspirated stomach contents in the airway and lungs, undigested contents in the stomach, several injection marks, a superficial vaginal tear (judged to have occurred after death), fresh bloody stains around the genitals and a whitish substance in the vagina; the substance was not tested. The genitals were removed and have been missing ever since.

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