The freelance journalist Juan Moreno fetches a cardboard box from the cupboard. It is handwritten with the words "The giant", in it all the documents that first brought Moreno a lot of trouble and then made him famous. "Spiegel" editor-in-chief Steffen Klusmann prefers the term "clusterfuck". They are auxiliary terms to describe one of Germany's biggest media scandals, which also made waves internationally.

Andrea Diener

Correspondent in the Main-Taunus-Kreis

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The rise of child prodigy Claas Relotius began with the text "The Murderer as Nurse," a story about prisoners suffering from Alzheimer's disease in the United States. He suddenly became famous, received many awards and was widely courted in the media industry. It was said at the time that this was actually literature, it had something cinematic about it. In retrospect, there is a certain irony in the fact that these terms were chosen, which were intended to lift his reports on mere journalism into the sphere of art.

Then, after two months of trial work, came the employment at the "Spiegel". "And then he delivered," says Steffen Klusmann. "Stories that were so great that you couldn't believe they were out there."

In Daniel Andreas Sager's documentary "Invented Truth – The Relotius Affair", these two have their say, the freelancer and the editor-in-chief, who were close to the scandal and its discovery. Many others who were involved did not want to be interviewed, the film lists their names at the end. This is a pity, of course, but on the other hand it prevents rumination of what you have read so many times. Instead, the documentary looks around at the locations of the reports and juxtaposes Relotius' descriptions with images on site. In the reportage "The Last Witness" there is talk of graves of executed people, on which the names can hardly be read. The camera moves over grave crosses, on them only numbers. So he really wasn't even there.

Early suspicions

There were also always inconsistencies that stood out, but which bounced off the editorial staff and the boundless trust in their golden boy. There was, for example, Syara Kareb, a Kurdish cameraman who, on behalf of Spiegel TV, goes on the trail of the underage suicide bomber described in the Relotius report "Lion Cubs". During the interview with Kareb, the boy explains that he has never spoken to Relotius. The cameraman reports this to Spiegel TV, but he was not believed, he says. Relotius is very famous, he has received many prizes.

Or the freelance journalist Asia Haidar, who helped Relotius research the story "Ein Kinderspiel" about the causes of the Syrian war on behalf of Der Spiegel. She herself came to Germany as a refugee in 2015 and has a great personal interest in the topic. After a year of searching for facts, Relotius suddenly broke off contact and did the rest on his own. He overwrote the painstakingly researched facts with his lies and received the Reporter Prize for it. He did not even inform Haidar of the nomination. She is angry and disappointed, she says, "this article is now considered fake". He had done this not only to her, but to this whole extremely sensitive political narrative of how the revolution in Syria began.

Or, of course, Fergus Falls, the small American town that serves as a typical Trump stronghold. Relotius was there, residents report. But he did not talk to them. And finally, "Jaeger's Border," the robber gun over the vigilante that allegedly shoots Mexican refugees – the text he wrote with Juan Moreno. Tim Foley of the "Arizona Border Recon" also has his say in the documentary, the man whom Relotius allegedly accompanied on patrol in the mountains at night. Who is confronted by Moreno with the article about him and laughs about what is written about him. "The guy probably sat in the hotel and took LSD," is his first reaction.

Until the "Spiegel" is finally convinced by Moreno and his friend, the photographer Mirco Taliercio, weeks pass. Why, is still not entirely clear. Bit by bit it came out, something new every day, reports editor-in-chief Steffen Klusmann. His biggest concern was "that we get a blow to the neck from which we do not recover".

What probably won't recover anytime soon is the genre of all-explanatory reportage, which stages Larger-than-Life scenes and in which even the song, which just happens to be playing on the radio, seems to comment on the events. "What these lyrics did is, they made you feel like the world wasn't very complicated," says Juan Moreno. "They hugged you and confirmed what you thought."

One person who also has his say is Dennis Betzholz. In 2013 he was invited to work together with Relotius for two months at the "Spiegel" as a rehearsal. He gives everything, but in the end he is not offered a job, Relotius is. Betzholz has now happily landed in the local section of the "Kieler Nachrichten" and is no longer looking for big stories that explain the world, but the small ones that are close to the reality of people's lives.

Invented Truth – The Relotius Affair airs at 20.15 pm on Sky Documentaries.