Dusseldorf For 20 years Angela Dussmann was a model daughter. The only child of the big businessman Peter Dussmann did an excellent Abitur, was interested in music and literature and studied at Harvard. For her father’s sake, she even did an apprenticeship as a bookseller in his culture department store on Friedrichstrasse in Berlin. Then she met a man who plunged the family into a deep conflict.
A quarrel ensued that could not even be ended by the death of Peter Dussmann. The large businessman, who earned his money mainly with building cleaning, nursing services and other assistance for people and real estate, decided when his daughter was born that she and his wife should inherit equally. That was in 1981.
In 2006, Angela Dussmann finally married Ronald Göthert. Not an A-level graduate like his daughter, but equipped with a secondary school certificate. This was followed by an apprenticeship as a carpenter, later periods of unemployment again and again. Göthert also failed with the attempt to become self-employed as a financial advisor. Then he found his vocation: esotericism.
When Göthert met Angela Dussmann, who was 16 years his junior, he ran a practice for the “Göthert method”. He believed to be able to recognize so-called fine substances – a phenomenon that he claimed to have discovered himself. Göthert also claimed to be able to heal people by making disordered subtleties right again.
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Peter Dussmann was so repelled by his daughter’s love for this man that he didn’t even appear at her wedding. In 2008 he suffered a stroke. In 2010, Dussmann’s will suddenly changed. Instead of 50 percent, his daughter was only to receive 25 percent of her father’s inheritance. Due to his illness, Dussmann was unable to sign the will at the time. His doctor took care of that.
Angela Göthert only found out about the change of will in 2013 – after her father’s death. Since then, she has been arguing bitterly with her mother about the many, many millions that Peter Dussmann amassed in the course of his entrepreneurship. In this podcast, our editors lay out the battle lines.
Handelsblatt Crime appears every 14 days and can be heard wherever there are podcasts.
More: You can hear the previous episode of Handelsblatt Crime here.