What the court ordered

The Hamburg regional court (Landgericht Hamburg) has ordered that interview recordings seized from a Zeit journalist must not be analysed for now. According to the court, the material may currently not be touched while complaints against the seizure are pending. The order does not decide whether the recordings can be used as evidence, a question that falls to the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court (Hanseatisches Oberlandesgericht). The court considers the recordings to have potential evidentiary value, since they can help test whether witnesses are credible. NDR reported that the material amounts to about 80 hours of conversations. The court's press office gave Wednesday as the date of the order in one account, while other reports describe it as a Thursday decision.

How the recordings were obtained

According to NDR, prosecutors and officers of the state criminal investigation office (Landeskriminalamt) stood at a Zeit reporter's door on 12 October and demanded the audio of several interviews. The conversations were recorded in January 2024, about two weeks after the alleged abduction, and included talks with the children and with the family of their father. WELT reported that the court had ordered a search of the journalist's flat and the Zeit editorial office in the week of 12 October. No search took place, because the court says the reporter handed the recordings over voluntarily, a version Zeit disputes. The journalist said she gave them up so that her laptop, which holds internal documents and further research, would not be seized, WELT reported.

The dispute over the handover

Zeit editor-in-chief Giovanni Di Lorenzo rejected the claim that the handover was voluntary, arguing that the threat of a search left no real choice.

“So voluntary as it is when someone stands at your door and says, let me in or should I kick the door in, that's how voluntary it was.”

Zeit called the court's move an "attack on press freedom" and said it would defend itself legally. WELT wrote that the paper's chances looked good, because German courts have in such cases regularly given press freedom precedence over the investigative interests of courts and prosecutors. Tagesspiegel reported that the seizure caused an outcry in the media world, while noting that no final decision has been made. The complaints by Zeit's publisher and the reporter have halted the evaluation, but the complaints themselves are still undecided.

The podcast and the Block trial

Excerpts from the interviews were published at the end of September in the podcast "Zeit Verbrechen: House of Block". A statement by the daughter of Christina Block, who was 13 at the time of the abduction, angered the defence of the Hamburg entrepreneur. In the podcast the daughter describes being taken from her father's home in Denmark, but she had declined to testify as a witness in court. Christina Block is accused of having commissioned an Israeli security firm to bring her two youngest children to Germany after a custody dispute with her ex-husband Stephan Hensel, and she denies it. The trial has been running before the Hamburg regional court since July 2025, with six co-defendants.