Introducing the Jens Soering Case Substack

Hello everyone. This is Andrew Hammel. I’m an American lawyer and journalist who now lives in Düsseldorf, the Jewel on the Rhine. I am also a licensed translator, and speak fluent German.

For the past 3 years I’ve been blogging about the case of Jens Söring (English spelling “Soering”), the German national who was convicted of murder in Virginia in 1990 and deported back to Germany in late 2019. Since his return to Germany, Söring has launched a well-funded professional image and media campaign. You can get a taste of it at his German website.

I’ve been blogging mainly in English, for my own convenience, but I do post in German occasionally. Söring’s case is probably the most famous — and certainly the most fascinating — German-American criminal case since World War II, and has been the subject of countless books, films, and documentaries. If you don’t know who Jens Söring is, just visit Wikipedia. But be warned: the Wikipedia entry is still a fierce battleground — anything you see there today may be gone tomorrow.

I’ve acquired a large archive of materials about the case and developed contacts to many case insiders. I’ve also been interviewed or written for by many news organizations about the case, including Deutschlandfunk, Argon Labs, Übermedien, the FAZ, Quillette, and the Berliner Zeitung.

What I plan to do here is to share updates about Jens Söring’s ongoing media campaign in Germany, to provide analysis of the major issues in the case, and to share information from my archive that sheds light on Söring’s innocence claims, media campaign, and other public activities. Although I’m a lawyer, I’ll try to keep things as non-technical as possible.

I’ve decided to move to Substack because I enjoy reading many authors here and I wouldn’t mind getting paid at some point for the thousands of hours I’ve spent researching and writing about the case. Of course, I’ll start this Substack for free, to give you an idea of what you’re in for.

Thanks for reading this. Please subscribe and share!