Paul “Vatti” Baumann gathered hundreds of followers around him with a crude apprenticeship in a village in Bern. The Guru abused the trust of his disciples in a terrible way. A look back.
“Odd character”: Paul Baumann, founder of the Methernitha sect.
“Hang it up, shoot it!” resounds from the hall. But the man in the dock doesn’t seem to notice, he’s floating in another world. Paul “Vatti” Baumann reads the “Nebelsplitter” with a smile during the breaks in the negotiations.
“Vatti”: Rarely has a nickname been worse for a delinquent. Because Paul Baumann did not behave like a caring father. Eight young women accuse him of sexually assaulting them, sometimes horribly, when they were girls. In October 1976, Switzerland therefore looked spellbound to Thun, where the cult leader was on trial.
“Vatti” Baumann looks like a picture book villain with his angular face, piercing eyes and strange hairstyle. He comes from a broken background. The father is a poor tailor and a follower of the Evangelical Brothers Association, a free church with a fundamentalist understanding of the Bible. Because he cannot support the family on his own, the son, born in 1917, is temporarily hired out to a farmer for five francs a month.
Talented tinkerer
Paul is not a good student, but a gifted tinkerer. As an adult, he gets in trouble with the law for planting an explosive device on a windowsill after his childhood home was foreclosed on. A child who has just moved in with his family is injured in the face in the blast. After a few years in clinics and institutions, Baumann set up a general store and workshop in Linden, a small community between the Emmen and Aare valleys.
From the 1950s he appeared as a spiritual leader. He claims that in his youth men appeared to him who came on a ship from Egypt. These wise men from all continents would have taught him. With his bizarre teachings, Baumann found some followers and founded the spiritual center Linden, which he later renamed Methernitha. The community wants to “realize the highest goal of God in man”.
What that means remains unclear. On the other hand, the rules by which the community lives are clear and rigid. The members are isolated from the outside world. They are not allowed to smoke or drink alcohol, they must be sexually abstinent and must deliver income and assets. They may not speak to each other for more than three minutes a day, except in justified exceptions. An in-house TV studio censors films and “Tagesschau” contributions. Dropouts report a crude ritual: Believers, tied to a cross, have to confess their sins. At Christmas, loudspeakers broadcast these confessions all over the Methernitha compound.
Paul Baumann at the Thun trial in 1976.
blind obedience
The members blindly obey their «Dad», who is said to have the gift of transmigration of souls and the ability to conjure up money. The children in particular are at his mercy, and he separates them in a special wing of the building. Her parents are only allowed to see her twice a week for a quarter of an hour. Baumann abused the girls for years. Until a few of them work up the courage to testify against Baumann. The main witness at the 1976 trial was 19-year-old Béatrice D. What she and her fellow sufferers had to say shocked Switzerland.
Béatrice D. had to pose naked at the age of ten, Baumann filmed her. When she was twelve, he deflowered her with a screwdriver. In the process, she describes the brutality of the sect leader: “One day he took me completely – without a word and without explanation. It hurt a lot.” Béatrice later became pregnant. Baumann claimed he wanted to remove a mole on her thigh and gave her several injections, and the pregnancy ended. Baumann only escaped proceedings for an illegal abortion because of the statute of limitations.
“I felt nothing but disgust”
When he molested his victims, Baumann sometimes wore women’s clothing and a long-haired wig. He chattered like a child and called himself the “Buebi” from Egypt. He claimed he took the girls to bed to “clean” them. Or the opposite: that they had to strengthen him, the weak, sick man. “I felt nothing but disgust,” says one of the witnesses. “But I firmly believed that this was part of the spiritual path of Methernitha. It was my greatest goal to be completely pure.” Baumann threatened one of the girls: “If you break the silence, you will hurt an angel of God. If you leave here, the devil will take you immediately.”
During the trial, supporters of «Vatti» try to influence the court and the witnesses. They denigrate Béatrice D. as a “whore” and “girl from the street”. For money, she had gotten herself into the most terrible pipe dreams. Another witness is about to be bribed into withdrawing her testimony. The judge sharply rebukes the cult members.
Two psychiatrists say that Baumann is neither schizophrenic nor mentally ill. However, he was a “character oddball” and socially poorly developed. He also presents himself as dumber than he is. The psychiatrists attest the 59-year-old a slightly reduced sanity. This is because those closest to him in the community have confirmed his belief that sexual activity has a spiritually cleansing character.
Despite the serious allegations, many Methernitha members continue to stand by their “Dad”.
It was only thanks to this assessment that Paul Baumann got away with seven years in prison. The verdict of the Bern-Oberland jury is announced on October 29: He is guilty of aggravated indecency with children, indecency with underage wards and attempted incitement to false testimony. The judge says that Baumann shamefully abused his position as a “demigod” in Methernitha. “It was all about the gratification of instincts.”
Baumann has been exposed as an impostor. As someone who knew very well that his entire apprenticeship was just “frills, gimmicks and swindles”, as the prosecutor put it. Nevertheless, around 100 of his once 300 followers remain loyal to him. When he gets out of prison in 1982, he moves back into the headquarters of Methernitha. As a result, the sect and its founder became quiet. But in 1996 she made the headlines again.
brainwashing in children
Doctors from the Grenoble region who are associated with Methernitha have referred patients to Linden. Parents accuse their children of being brainwashed. The French police then classified the organization as “very dangerous” – an assessment that only five sects received at the time, including the Solar Templars, which were responsible for several mass suicides in the 1990s. One of the reasons for the classification is that the Methernitha is also apocalyptic and expects the end of the world in 1999.
Paul Baumann died in August 2011 at the age of 94. He has never publicly regretted his assaults, and he has never apologized to his victims. The Christian association Methernitha still exists in Linden, largely unnoticed by the public.