SOS Children's Villages Scandal: The Revealer and the Concealers

When Heidi Fuchs started her job at SOS Children's Villages, she found files with shocking accounts in the archive and launched an investigation. But her bosses ensured the results stayed secret

Heidi Fuchs has run against walls. Many times. Today she walks through the Augarten in Graz. Autumn is already visible on the chestnut trees. And Fuchs shows a trace of relief. She read about the SOS Children's Villages scandal that has occupied Austria for weeks in the newspaper. She saw the television reports and scrolled through online articles. The news did not surprise her.

In mid-September, Falter reported on inappropriate treatment in the Children's Villages Moosburg (Carinthia) and Imst (Tyrol), documented in two secret studies. The managing directors had the studies vanish into a drawer. Falter received the documents via an anonymous leak.

They did not come from Heidi Fuchs — but without Fuchs, previously a footnote in the case, the country would still know nothing about the transgressions today. There would be no commission investigating the incidents and no public prosecutor's office investigating those responsible. Politics would not be watching the authorities, and Christian Moser, long-time managing director, would still be sitting in the boss's chair — and carrying on as before: covering up, concealing, remaining silent, just as the organization had always done.

But Heidi Fuchs did not want that. She had broken with company tradition, wanted to reveal instead of conceal, reform the dangerously dusty structures for the good of the children. But the organization stonewalled until Fuchs could no longer share responsibility for her employer's ducking away — and resigned. What remained is the gnawing feeling of not having completed her work. And now, after the matter has finally come to light, a spark of hope.

It was the best job I was allowed to do

Heidi Fuchs

Everything began on a grey autumn day six years ago. On November 4, 2019, Fuchs sat on the train to Innsbruck. That is where SOS Children's Villages's headquarters are. It was her first day of work. Earlier, Fuchs had worked as a manager in the private sector. At some point, she wanted to do something with more meaning and joined the "Center for Sexual Education," a small NGO in Graz. It was meant to be a stopover. When she saw the job advertisement for the business management of SOS Children's Villages, she applied — and got the job.

"It was the best job I had been allowed to do until then," Fuchs says today.

There were three business managers in Austria back then; they divided up the regions South, West, and East. Fuchs took over Region South. From Graz, she was responsible for all Children's Villages in Carinthia, Styria, and Burgenland. Dozens of houses and hundreds of children.

On the evening of November 4, 2019, management pressed a stack of documents into her hand as a farewell, including a book by historian Horst Schreiber: "Committed to Silence." On the return trip to Graz, she leafed through the 250-page study.

Commissioned by SOS Children's Villages, Schreiber had documented the inappropriate treatment in Children's Villages between 1950 and 1990 in 2014. After reading it, Fuchs understood: her new employer struggles with its past.

She did not suspect that the inappropriate treatment reached into the present.

That was to change quickly. Five months after she started, in March 2020, a former Children's Village child raised serious allegations against the director of the Moosburg Children's Village in Carinthia. The young man claimed to have been subjected to inappropriate treatment by the village director.

Fuchs sounded the alarm with management, with Christian Moser and Elisabeth Hauser. "They were annoyed," Fuchs says. She became aware that the organization had no standardized rules for such a case.

Fuchs informed the Carinthian child and youth welfare office, legal guardian of the Children's Village children and supervisory authority for private facilities like SOS Children's Villages. Then she drove to Carinthia. From the bar of a Klagenfurt hotel, she organized an interim solution that same evening; another leader from Carinthia was to take over. The next morning, she confronted the accused director and removed him from his duties.

The allegations quickly spread. The Kleine Zeitung contacted SOS Children's Villages. The journalists also asked about another case from 2016. It concerned inappropriate images of children on the private laptop of the pedagogical director of Moosburg. The images were an open secret, but no one had reported them.

Fuchs and her team wanted to find them. They searched the Children's Village archive. In a basement, they came across shocking file memos from the former village director. The content: inappropriate treatment of children, deprivation of liberty and food. "It was like in a film," Fuchs describes the situation. "Six months earlier I had held Horst Schreiber's book in my hand. Now I was standing right in the middle of this system of inappropriate treatment."

Fuchs filed charges on behalf of SOS Children's Villages. And she did something completely new in the organization's history: she hired external experts to investigate the incidents — not a historian, but the Institute for Men's and Gender Research in Graz. The team around Elli Scambor specializes in uncovering institutional inappropriate treatment. "I was clear that we needed a holistic examination," says Fuchs.

Until then, SOS Children's Villages had handled cases of inappropriate conduct according to a simple schema: separate from the perpetrator, issue them a good reference, financially compensate the affected person. Offenses were dismissed as isolated cases and even covered up from colleagues. The individuals were always to blame, but never the organization.

The study authors dug through hundreds of files, protocols, and interviews. In autumn 2021, they completed their work. The results were sobering: physical, psychological, inappropriate, and institutional inappropriate treatment up to the recent past. But that was not all.

During the work on the Moosburg study, similar allegations surfaced at the Imst Children's Village. The Institute for Men's and Gender Research was commissioned with a second study.

In Moosburg, Fuchs turned the Children's Village upside down. "There was a positive mood in the team. The employees achieved great things; they showed attitude and heart." Together, they reduced the size of the residential groups, took care of quality development, and distributed leadership responsibility — away from the principle of the sole-deciding village director. The measures that SOS Children's Villages now adorns itself with in press releases come almost entirely from precisely this time. But for the organization, Moosburg and Imst remain isolated cases. Fuchs was bothered by this. She wanted everyone to understand: "We have an institutional problem; there is a pattern."

An important recommendation of the study that SOS Children's Villages did not implement: transparency. If the study could not be published, the organization must at least speak openly about the inappropriate treatment in the villages.

Repeatedly, Fuchs pushed management to take this step, an insider tells Falter. Repeatedly, she bounced off. Even internally, barely anyone got their hands on the paper; to this day, only a few employees know it. The study disappeared into a password-protected folder. The order: everything stays under lock and key.

A mistake, study author Elli Scambor believes. "Publication is a central step to break the silence about inappropriate treatment and to show affected persons that their experiences are seen and recognized."

Only once was Scambor allowed to present the Moosburg results to SOS Children's Villages educators. At a two-day seminar near Graz, about 50 employees learned what had happened in Moosburg. They were consternated. They did not receive the study itself.

"We worked with a metaphor," Fuchs says: "The window must now stay open." But the bosses closed the window again. One event on the later Imst study had to be "forced through" by Fuchs, employees describe. Not everyone wanted the abuses from the famous pioneer village to be discussed. "Such allegations must be institutionally addressed," says Fuchs. She carried on, defying resistance from above.

That had consequences: Fuchs was marginalized and cut off from the flow of information. She no longer received invitations to meetings dealing with the studies.

Was Heidi Fuchs drilling too deep in an organization where, as historian Horst Schreiber recently called them, "persisting forces" exist? "She put her finger in the wound," says a former leader. "She didn't make any friends with that."

In the "best job" she had ever had, Fuchs was sidetracked from 2022. Her efforts ran into nothing. In spring 2023, she resigned. She could not shake the feeling of not having finished.

Two years later, her phone rings. Falter is in possession of the Moosburg study and wants to know if it is genuine. Fuchs confirms it. And Falter publishes the investigation.

Fuchs is also caught up in the wake of the crisis that the story triggers. She receives messages on her phone: why didn't she go public? "I looked closely and took responsibility," says Fuchs. "I tried to ensure that the studies would be spoken about, and I failed in doing so. It is hard to stay courageous in a shocking system."

Like all high-ranking employees who leave SOS Children's Villages, Fuchs also had to sign a confidentiality agreement. Internal matters are not discussed.

Fuchs asked her former employer to release her from it. By the editorial deadline, the organization had not done so.