MANUEL SCHADWALD: The boy whose death was filmed on an elite yacht and appeared on the Zandvoort CD-ROMs.
On July 24, 1993, Manuel Schadwald, a twelve-year-old German boy, left his home in Berlin. He was alone. He never returned.
The police opened an investigation, which they closed in 1998 without results. No body. No perpetrators. No answers.
Meanwhile, in Belgium and the Netherlands, activists discovered that the leads pointed toward a much darker network.
Manuel was abducted and taken to child brothels in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. But the most terrifying testimony points to a yacht called Apollo.
According to testimony and Dutch intelligence, the boy was abused and murdered on that sailboat while being filmed: a real-life snuff film. His body was thrown into the sea, and the yacht was cleaned at a military port.
The yacht was linked to Gerrit Ulrich, who was implicated in the Zandvoort scandal (1998). After his death, the police discovered thousands of images and videos showing extreme abuse of children —including babies— along with client lists from several countries.
One of the people who investigated this connection was Gina Pardaens-Bernaer, a Belgian social worker. Her work led her to the Zandvoort material. She sent copies to Interpol and later received threats. Her son was run over by a vehicle. In November 1998, she stated: “Given what I have discovered, either Belgium will explode, or I will be murdered.”
The next day, her car was found wrecked against a bridge, with no skid marks. The police classified it as an accident. Hours later, they raided her lawyer’s office. Gina died.
Her case is one of the many suspicious deaths linked to these investigations.
Manuel’s case is directly connected to the Dutroux affair. The same networks. The same allegations of institutional protection. The same suspicions that influential people were involved, and that the investigations were halted every time they got too close to the top.
The authorities never thoroughly investigated the connections to the yacht Apollo or to Zandvoort. The Dutch police claimed they found nothing. The German police closed the case without putting the pieces together. And yet, the documents exist.
Dutch intelligence files mention a German boy murdered on a boat: a case that was covered up because “there were influential people on board.” The testimony provides specific details and names. Gina Pardaens claimed to have a copy of a snuff film; that copy disappeared after her death.
Thirty-two years later, Manuel Schadwald is still missing. There is no justice.
This case is not just the story of a boy who disappeared.
It is the story of how a child abuse network operated for years across Europe with total impunity. It is the story of how investigations were closed every time they got too close to the powerful. It is the story of how a twelve-year-old boy could be abducted, abused and murdered —all while being filmed— and of how the system decided it was better to look the other way.
One summer day, Manuel simply went out to play.
He ended up on an elite yacht, where he was raped and murdered while his death was being recorded. Thirty-two years later, we still do not know who was on that boat.
The truth is out there: in the documents, in the testimony and in the links to Zandvoort and Dutroux.
The question is no longer what happened to Manuel Schadwald.
The question is: how much longer will we allow these cases to remain buried in the files, while those responsible continue to be protected?
The killers of Manuel Schadwald! Lothar Glandolf.
In 1994, a special police team was set up within the Rotterdam police to track down the missing German boy Manuel Schadwald, who had probably entered the Rotterdam prostitution circuit from Germany.
Since 1993, the then 12-year-old Manuel Schadwald had been wanted internationally and in the same year, the Rotterdam police received a report from Germany that a certain Lothar G., living in Rotterdam, was smuggling underage boys from Poland for his escort clubs.
The Berlin police also reported that Manuel Schadwald had been spotted by two German boys in the vicinity of Lothar G. The Rotterdam police ignored these signals of child prostitution and only after a German aid organisation had contacted the Dutch authorities, the so-called HIK team (Trafficking-In-Children team) was set up.
Within half a year, the HIK team rolled up Lothar G.'s clubs. Although the Rotterdam police claim that police journals from the HIK team were accidentally destroyed, there are written police statements that observers spotted Manuel Schadwald in the company of Lothar G.
The observation team let Manuel Schadwald go so as not to jeopardize the progress of the investigation into Lothar G.'s clubs. The final report of the HIK team does not mention Manuel Schadwald at all. He is still missing.
Broadcasted on Dutch Television: 21-04-1998 NCRV.
64 babies were victims of rape in daycare centers in Amsterdam.
One of these centers was located near a child pornography distribution point linked to the Zandvoort network, which is connected to the Dutroux case.
64 babies were victims of rape in daycare centers in Amsterdam. One of them was near a Zandvoort child pornography distribution hub connected to the DUTROUX Case.
The Dutch authorities had known about the network dedicated to producing images of babies being raped in daycare centers since Marcel Vervloesem presented his revelations in case file 8257/01, registered on March 14, 2001, with the court in Neufchâteau.
Vervloesem reported information provided to him by Robert Jan Warmerdam, a transgender man who frequented Amsterdam’s sadomasochistic scene and knew Marc Dutroux. On one occasion, Jan Warmerdam met with Dutroux to discuss the abduction of six girls and the murder of four of them. Dutroux mentioned the existence of a daycare center without video surveillance where babies were drugged and sexually exploited.
The Dutch authorities reopened the case of Robert Mikelson, an 18-year-old Latvian who, in September 2002, was transferred to a daycare center in Heidelberg, Germany, through a project funded by the European Union. His contract ended in June 2003 when he was arrested for possession and distribution of child pornography. After being sentenced to a suspended one-year prison term, he moved to Amsterdam.
Mikkelson lived with Richard Van Olffen, a Martijn acquaintance and bus driver who ran thirty websites featuring sadistic child pornography. Between 2004 and 2006, Mikelson worked at the “Community School,” a center that was renamed “Het Hofnarretje” between February 2007 and June 2008.
In August 2008, two mothers accused him of sexually abusing their children, who were two and a half years old, by manipulating their genitals. His lawyer allowed Mikkelson to flee to Kenya, where, starting in the fall of 2008, he worked at an orphanage in Nairobi that housed 17 minors and provided food to 60 children living on the streets.
The Netherlands closed the case based on the opinion of a forensic psychologist, who considered the children’s accounts unreliable. Mikkelson returned to Amsterdam and, between October 2009 and January 2010, worked at the daycare center “Jenno’s Knuffel Paradijs,” located at 74 Admiraal Ruyterweg, a short walk from one of the child pornography studios in Zandvoort. He offered his services as a childminder at very low prices.
However, a U.S. arrest warrant achieved more than the European Union had managed in 22 years. The Dutch authorities ordered Robert Mikelson’s arrest on December 7, 2010, but gave his husband, Richard Van Olffen, four days to delete the data from the computers.
The media call him “The Monster of Riga,” without explaining why it took them 12 years to be outraged by the images of raped babies that were part of the Zandvoort archive.
The real monsters are those who covered up this network of pedophiles, which involved depraved and powerful individuals, as well as child murderers.
Yes. Marcel Vervloesem, the Belgian activist known for publicizing the Zandvoort child porn case, was himself repeatedly accused and convicted of sexual abuse of minors. Early convictions in the 1970s-80s included assault on a minor. In 2008 the Antwerp Court of Appeal sentenced him to four years for abusing four minors (plus related charges). Multiple victims came forward, including relatives. He denied the accusations. He died in 2018.
The French elite protected and covered for this degenerate pedophile for 30 years.
For years, Gabriel Matzneff, a French writer, was long protected by a section of the media and cultural elite.
How was he able to operate so freely, despite his statements and writings that seem unimaginable today? Why were his actions ignored, downplayed or even justified for decades?
This pervert spoke openly about his relationships with teenage girls. On television, in his books, in the media… He never hid. And yet, no one stopped him.
He was one of the figures named in the early 1980s by the underage victims of sexual abuse in the CORAL network, which was silenced and covered up by the French justice system and in which underage victims were found sodomized and murdered, with material involving them appearing on the Zandvoort CD-ROMs.