The Reiner Protsch forgery case is generally presented correctly on Wikipedia.
However, the current status of the disciplinary procedure is missing. The University of Frankfurt am Main announced in November 2024:
“Mr Protsch was sentenced on June 19, 2009 by the Frankfurt Regional Court to a total prison sentence of one year and six months on probation. Due to the sentence to a prison sentence of more than one year, Mr. Protsch has lost his rights as a retired civil servant, including his pension entitlements, by operation of law in accordance with Section 21 No. 4 BeamtStG in conjunction with Section 59 BeamtVG. The disciplinary proceedings had to be discontinued accordingly in accordance with Section 36 Paragraph 2 No. 3 HDG.”
As a reminder:
“Impostor” Protsch ruined the “reputation of anthropology at Frankfurt University” (Frankfurter Neue Presse).
He had predated various skull finds from human prehistory by tens of thousands of years.
Protsch had “apparently falsified measurement results for 30 years, brazenly copied them from colleagues and tried to steal university property” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)
„In the anthropological scientific world, Protsch von Zieten had already been stripped of all dignity in 2005, when a commission to deal with scientific misconduct at Goethe University ruled that the institute director had been convicted of falsifying measurement results, plagiarism and simply incompetence.“
As we now know, the convict lives without any pension.
OpenEdition suggests you quote this post as follows:
jzenthoefer (November 4, 2024). University of Frankfurt am Main provides information about the Reiner Protsch (self-proclaimed “von Zieten”) counterfeiting case. Archival material. Retrieved November 4, 2024 from
