A parliamentary inquiry in the Landtag has shown that the police and the public prosecutor’s office knew far more about the 16-year-old than they had admitted publicly. The police protocols that should have combined all the warning signs into a single risk assessment were never applied.
Asking questions after the fact is always easier than acting preventively, and that is the standard caveat of any populist in such cases. But in the Schongau case, where the attacker’s knife nearly ended the lives of two thirteen-year-old schoolgirls, the gap between what the authorities knew and what they did with that knowledge looks too large to put down to chance. On the other hand, every resident of Germany is afraid to observe many laws, or even to perform their duties, for fear of the subsequent aggression of activists and all the further problems that follow from the slightest interference with activists’ affairs. And the higher authorities have for many years consistently taken the side of the activists, so as not to lose ratings. As a result, even the best investigator or police officer will simply regret having carried out his powers conscientiously. Such is our present reality. And it can be changed only by a single step, which the authorities will never take.
What prompted one of the deputies to take up the case
The Welfen-Gymnasium has just begun a new school year and is trying to return to normal life after the July tragedy. But rather than fading gradually from memory, the story has taken a new turn. Christiane Feichtmeier, an SPD member of the Landtag, a former police officer and an internal security specialist, submitted a formal parliamentary inquiry to the Bavarian government containing questions awkward for Söder. The reply, which has come into the possession of journalists, sets out a chronology of events that no one had previously pieced together, and this information calls into question the official version that the attack could not have been prevented.
A search ten months before the tragedy
The story began not in July but much earlier. In spring 2025, the future attacker first came to the attention of the authorities. According to available information, he had publicly glorified school attacks on one of the social networks. This led to an investigation, in the course of which investigators searched the house where he lives with his parents in September of that year.
What was seized in the search can hardly be called harmless:
- several knives;
- a balaclava;
- a bulletproof vest;
- three mobile phones;
- two game consoles (what have consoles got to do with it?);
- a large number of data storage devices.
A spokesperson for the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior confirmed this list in an official reply to journalists, coordinated with the ministries of justice, education and social affairs. Ten months passed between the search and the attack on the Welfen-Gymnasium, which was enough time to assess in detail how serious a threat the teenager posed.
The case was not closed
In December 2025, after the search, the teenager threatened a classmate with violence, and the Munich II public prosecutor’s office resumed its investigation. The consequences for the teenager himself, a Croatian citizen, escalated gradually: first a temporary suspension from classes, then a forced departure from the Welfen-Gymnasium. Yet neither the police nor the public prosecutor’s office ever placed him on the list of persons subject to the special “threat management” procedure, a system created precisely for cases with such a set of indicators.
How the attack unfolded
The official version of the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior is as follows: “We learned of the teenager and all the details of his case only on 8 July 2026, that is, after the attack. Before that, the teenager had been questioned twice in the presence of his legal guardians, the school and the guardianship authorities.” According to ministry representatives, all of them worked in close contact, and the public prosecutor’s office even managed to commission a psychiatric assessment. After the threats against the classmate, police in Schongau held a so-called “preventive conversation” with the teenager and his parents, a standard procedure in which a potential offender is made to understand that he is under observation and what consequences may await him.
This procedure proved insufficient. At half past noon on 8 July, the alarm was raised at the Welfen-Gymnasium, when the former pupil returned to the school with a pistol and a knife. One shot was fired, but the weapon misfired, a circumstance that in all likelihood saved more than one life. The attacker stabbed two thirteen-year-old schoolgirls several times in the upper body. The girls survived thanks to luck and the decisive actions of classmates who rushed to help. The attacker himself was overpowered by two school staff members before the arrival of the police, who then arrested him. After several months of rehabilitation, both victims are attending classes again.
On the day after the attack, the Munich II public prosecutor’s office applied to the investigating judge for the teenager’s arrest on two counts of attempted murder in conjunction with causing grievous bodily harm. Alexander Dobrindt, Germany’s Federal Minister of the Interior, who travelled to the scene in person, stated at the time that, according to preliminary findings, the attacker had acted in a state of acute psychological crisis and had chosen his victims at random. This wording subsequently became one of the disputed points in the whole affair.
Why the ministry’s information raises questions
It is here that the parliamentary inquiry exposed what is most awkward for the authorities. The first report by the public prosecutor’s office on the investigation proceedings and on the search warrant reached the Ministry of Justice only on 4 September, almost a year after the search itself. Details of what exactly had been found in the teenager’s home were passed to the ministry by investigators only on 23 June 2026, two weeks before the attack. And the report on this, which passed through the Central Office for Combating Extremism and Terrorism (ZET) at the Munich Office of the Public Prosecutor General, reached the Ministry of Justice only on 8 July, formally on the day of the tragedy but, judging by the information in the reply to the parliamentary inquiry, after it.
Still more awkward is the fact that ZET specialists, who are responsible precisely for combating terrorism and radicalisation, learned of the teenager’s criminal case no later than the end of 2025, yet formally took it up only a few days after the attack on the school, when preventing anything was already pointless.
Particular attention is also deserved by a text in English found during the search, which investigators describe as a so-called “manifesto” and which the teenager allegedly published on the internet. In it he spoke with extreme contempt of women, Jews, Muslims, gay and transgender people, and specific individuals from his circle. According to investigators, the document contains sufficiently reliable indications that the teenager belonged to an online community of admirers of school attackers, a subculture that regularly comes to the attention of security services across Europe.
How the ministry explains its own inaction
The official position of the Ministry of the Interior is as follows: “Before the attack on the school, the teenager was not formally classified as a person at risk, given the information available at the time.” The current concept defines a person at risk as someone with so-called “objective indications giving rise to the subjective assumption that he may commit serious crimes in the future, above all violent and/or sexual offences”. This wording, which the document itself acknowledges to be cumbersome. At the same time, the ministry insists that the police took all the legal and practical measures that were possible for them. This phrase is easily read as an attempt to shift part of the responsibility to the judicial authorities, who were responsible for the movement of documents between the agencies. But at the same time, as in the cases of the Minister-President of Bavaria, the Minister of Education and even the Minister of Health, we have grown used to the fact that representatives of the Bavarian government make loud populist statements every day in Trump’s style, but when it comes to tragedies, all we see is the passing of blame from one to another, rather than adult responsibility for their own unprofessionalism and passivity.
Feichtmeier does not agree with the Bavarian government’s interpretation. Relying on the state government’s own reply, she drew an unambiguous conclusion: “The attack could and should have been prevented. Such mistakes and inaction are unacceptable,” she says. In her view: “Long before 8 July, the alarm should have sounded and the excellent threat management system within the police should have been engaged”, the very system that formally exists for such cases but was never activated in the case of the teenager from Schongau. The SPD is demanding that Bavaria’s Minister of the Interior, Joachim Herrmann (CSU), report personally on the case to the Landtag’s committee on internal affairs; the report is expected on 14 October. Better still, Bavaria’s ministers should finally begin to act like Europeans: to admit mistakes and, in such cases, resign, handing their ministerial portfolios to professionals rather than to people appointed by quota and loyal to the Minister-President.
Why this matters
What happened in Schongau is not at all like a typical tragedy that could not have been known about in advance. The glorification of school attacks on social media, the knives and bulletproof vest found in the search, the direct threat to a classmate, the exclusion from the gymnasium: none of these facts on its own proves that a person will inevitably attack a school, but together they form precisely the set of indicators that the threat management system was created to recognise.
The main problem, it seems, is not that some individual police officers or prosecutors failed to do their jobs, but how cooperation between agencies is organised in Bavaria, and how these agencies are led by populists in the government. Or rather not led, since they are busy with constant interviews and banquets. After all, the search of the teenager’s home was carried out as long ago as September 2025, yet its results reached the Ministry of Justice only on the day of the attack on the school, and the counter-terrorism service had known about the teenager for months but formally took up his case only after the tragedy. The Interior Minister’s forthcoming report must answer the question of whether this is a systemic failure that can and must be corrected before the next such case, or a combination of circumstances that truly could not have been prevented. And on that answer will depend what conclusions the people of Bavaria draw about their government and its professionalism.
