Christoph Turowski followed his principles. Now he is on trial. About an oath that was never taken and a man who fulfilled a woman’s last wish.
On the table is a homemade plum cake, cream that has been specially whipped, and a pot of tea, the rapid cooling of which is to be prevented by a tea light under the teapot. Christoph Turowski is sitting on a Biedermeier chair, around 70. The thin grey blonde hair combed in accurate strands, the street shoes he has not taken off. „We don’t do that here.“ A mischievous grin runs across his thin lips at the thought of what made him from a normal pensioner to a figurehead of pro euthanasia movement a few months ago. On a piece of plum cake with „Dr. Tod“. Of course Christoph Turowski can’t be placed in line with the people named Dr. Tod so far, such as corpse conservator Gunther van Hagens or concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele. Nevertheless, the press has called him that. According to the indictment of the Berlin public prosecutor’s office, he has the life of a human being on his conscience. More precisely: „The death of a person on demand by omission.“
But the 69-year-old’s conscience is clear, he repeatedly forks up small bites. In a legal dispute lasting two and a half years, he won an acquittal in March 2018. It was one of the most discussed lawsuits in recent years. Christoph Turowski was a family doctor in Berlin for 29 years. „Helping people, that’s what interested me even as a young boy. I’ve always been the paramedic with the plaster case for the Boy Scouts,“ he remembers laughing. Scouting was followed by the classic career of a doctor: in 1970 he graduated from high school, studied medicine in Berlin afterwards. He completes his studies in 1977 with a state examination. After completing his specialist training in internal medicine, he takes over a family doctor’s practice and goes into business for himself. A busy working life follows. Consultation hours, home visits, paperwork, a 50-hour week. Turowski is looking forward to his retirement. Now that the time has come, he is still waiting for this rest. Because the acquittal is not the end of the matter.
For the retired physician, a patient is more than just a name in a file, as can be seen from his manageable patient file. „Medium-sized and easy to manage, leaving enough time for a conversation with the patients,“ he emphasizes. This has become rare in times of an economised healthcare system in which care is becoming increasingly anonymous and contact times ever shorter. He looks after Anja for 13 years. She is one of many for whom he takes this time. Because of her they will call him Dr. Tod. Since she was 17, the 44-year-old has been suffering from a chronic intestinal disease. Turowski therefore always puts her appointments at the end of his office hours. Their conversations revolve around agony and loneliness. Her mother does not live in Berlin, the son does not react to her contact attempts for two years. She has only a few friends. She puts the meagre disability pension and the money from smaller jobs into her therapy attempts. She even travels to India to take an Ayuveda cure. One last attempt. It fails. When Turowski talks about it, he seems thoughtful, takes his time to recall the events.
„As a doctor, you’re just as helpless as the patients. If someone comes who is in great physical and mental distress and no attempt you try to help him or her succeeds, thats very depressing.“
After a one-year stay in a special practice, Anja returns to Turowski. In one of their conversations she tells him that she wants to die. She has already tried it a few times. This time it should work, she has already found the hole in the fence of the Berlin S-Bahn. She wants to become one of the 10,000 who kill themselves every year in Germa
ny. Turowski doesn’t hesitate: „As a doctor, you are challenged. You have to show backbone and courage.“ He sees his help as a commandment of Christian charity and humanity. „She knew my attitude to life and death and I signalled that I would not leave her alone,“ Turowski recalls the decision to accompany Anja on her last journey.
His hands rest in his lap, folded. As a sign of his faith, a cross about the size of his head, made of brown wood, is displayed next to the door to the living and dining room, unadorned, like Christoph Turowski himself. A wedding ring, no watch. Again and again he emphasizes the importance of Christian values such as charity and mercy for the profession of a doctor. But so do his opponents. For Frank Ulrich Montgomery, the president of the German Medical Association, these values mean something different. A merciful doctor should accompany his patient to the end of its life with palliative medicine and good hospice work. Still, others refer to the Hippocratic Oath, an oath that Turowski never swore. Which no other physician swears by. It is a remnant from ancient times, when doctors still called on the gods and women were denied access to this profession. Since 1948 there has been a modern new version in the form of the Geneva Declaration. Updated for the last time in October 2017, it reads: „I will respect the autonomy and dignity of my patient“. For the doctor, this is an unbeatable argument for respecting the will to die of a patient.
Nevertheless, the opponents of euthanasia still today refer to this 2000 year old oath. For Turowski this is incomprehensible. For him, this reference is: „nothing more than an empty slogan, a hollow formula.“ Although the Hippocratic oath is still read by medical students at graduation ceremonies and is certainly appropriate within the framework of such a celebration, „Ultimately it is the questions of medical conscience that one has to ask and answer himself in one’s profession,“ says Turowski. In 2013 he answers this question with „Yes“. For he is guided by the Latin guiding principle Salus aegroti suprema lex, translated: the salvation of the sick is the supreme commandment „and that is what a doctor must follow“.
An early Saturday night in Berlin. As the nightlife slowly awakens, Anja’s last evening also begins. Like the other night owls, she puts on something nice, makes herself up and opens a bottle of red wine. After a few swallows she opens a pack of sleeping pills, then the next, then the next. At the end there are 150 of them.
When Turowski sees the SMS in his message inbox, he knows about it and shortly afterwards gains access to the apartment with the help of the second key. There he regularly checks Anja’s vital functions, she should not suffer in death at all. He returns ten times until the end. After 56 hours Anja is released from her suffering. Christoph Turowski fills out the death certificate himself, his handwriting is narrow, pointed and slightly inclined to the right. He fills it out honestly, as he says. „Natural cause of death through tablet intoxication,“ he writes. This makes the medical officer suspicious of the death certificate before cremating the body. He informs the police. The public prosecutor’s office starts the investigation.
It still has no legal basis for it. Paragraph 217 StGB, which is to regulate the business-like promotion of suicide, will only come into force two years later. Until then, suicide assistance will not be sanctioned. Turowski is accused nevertheless. „Killing on demand by omission“, is written by the public prosecutor’s office. An outrageous formulation, as he finds. Thus above all the word „killing“ gets stuck when reading the accusation, not his actual act, the „omission“. It shows much about the man’s self-image. He sees himself not as a perpetrator, but as one who has helped. According to Turowski, 80 percent of Germans advocate a self-determined death with medical accompaniment and unbearable suffering. As if to support his thesis, he fetches books from his study. The old wooden floor creaks under his comfortable shoes. The book covers read like the small tables of the pro euthanasia literature. Among them Hans Küng, Catholic priest, theologian and Turowski’s confirmation for a compatibility of faith and euthanasia. Also included is the book „Letzte Hilfe“ by Uwe Christian Arnold, Germany’s most prominent representative of the „right to a self-determined end of life“. Turowski is in contact with both.
He only comes across the books during his trial. To get moral support and to confirm that he is not alone with his opinion and his case. Before that, he had never really dealt with euthanasia. „You then grow into the subject,“ says a man who never wanted to go public, but is now. He puts his need for privacy aside. For a higher goal, as he says.
He’ll be acquitted. Enthusiastic applause bursts into the hall of the Moabit Criminal Court. Christoph Turowski receives his acquittal wherever violent crimes are tried. Not only specialist audience is present, but also patients from the former practice. The relief, but also the emotion, are written in his face. When he talks about these scenes he laughs, a sparkle appears in his eyes. He draws the strength for his fight from the positive reactions to this judgement. Even the nuns of the neighbouring church embraced him after his court hearing, and the parish priest congratulated him in the meeting room.
But the joy was short-lived. The public prosecutor’s office has already appealed. The new trial will be heard by the Federal Supreme Court in Leipzig. For Turowski and his supporters, it is reasonable to assume that this is intended to create new conditions in an almost 30-year-old case law. In 1984, the Federal Supreme Court ruled in the case of Dr. Herbert Wittig. According to the file, Wittig had let an unconscious suicide patient die at her express request. The court did not recognize the patient’s explicit will to die, but nevertheless acquitted the physician due to the irreversibility of the situation. With the introduction of the living will in 2009, this ruling is finally out of date. However, the public prosecutor’s office now needs a ruling from the highest court, adapted to today’s circumstances, for its orientation. For this reason it seems to want to whip the case through all instances. Turowski feels he is a pawn victim in an expensive lawsuit but accepts this in order to achieve his goals.
Christoph Turowski does not want much for the future. „For the time being, of course, an acquittal at the Federal Supreme Court „in the service of the cause“ he says and laughs. He will continue to make himself known to the public as a private individual. But naturally there is also still the desire for the deletion of the paragraph 217 StGB. „I could also live with a new wording that would enable doctors to accompany their patients to the end in individual cases”. Just as Turowski himself did.
For now, however, he sits on the Biedermaier chair, in the beautiful Wilhelminian era house, behind the high walls, and the last piece of plum cake with cream disappears into his mouth. It’s hard to believe that a man who is so obviously looking for peace and tranquility is prepared to make himself as public as Christoph Turowski did. But he seems to be ready to follow this path to the end – in court just as consistently as he is as a doctor for his patient Anja.
