Manuel Schadwald

Manuel Schadwald, (abbreviation of Emmanuel), boy aged twelve who disappeared in Berlin in July 1993.

At first Berlin police listed him as a runaway. By 1997, however, Dutch journalists reported sightings which suggested he had been put to work in a brothel in Rotterdam, run by a German, Lothar Glandorf, now 36. After ignoring complaints for 18 months, Rotterdam police targeted Glandorf and found he had been selling hundreds of boys. Of those they could trace, nearly half were under 16. Rotterdam police reported "Even if Glandorf knew the perversions of a customer, he would still send a boy to a customer who had a preference for sado-masochism."

Rotterdam police discovered that three boys had run away from Glandorf and reported seeing Manuel Schadwald. One night in 1997 three Rotterdam surveillance officers saw Glandorf with a boy all three believed to be Manuel Schadwald but they failed to rescue him: they were reluctant to break cover for fear of jeopardising their operation. He was never found alive. His name has been linked to the snuff videos manufactured by the pimping gang of Alan Williams the so-called "Welsh Witch".

A specialist social worker, Wolfgang Werner, said there were some 700 east European boys, aged from 11 to 17, who had ended up in the sex industry in Berlin by 1998. Hundreds of others had been taken to Zurich, Hamburg and Frankfurt, and, most of all, to Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Romanian boys had been sold by their parents to a wandering Polish criminal, who had paid cash for some and a bottle of vodka for another, before putting them on to the streets of Berlin.

Peter Goetjes and Lutz Edelman, identified as traffickers in the Berlin press, sold approximately 150 boys between them, before Goetjes was caught on the Polish border in the summer of 1992 with a boy in his boot. Goetjes was charged with smuggling, released on bail and then drove away and never came back for his trial.