The harrowing discovery of the bodies of nine newborn babies in a garden in Brandenburg, eastern Germany has shocked the country to the core. The babies, born between 1988 and 2004 were killed and buried in flower pots and buckets in the back garden. A 39-year old woman -- currently known only as Sabine H. in the German press and thought to be the mother of the children -- was arrested after someone clearing a garage at the house in Brieskow-Finkenheerd discovered human bones in a fish tank.

People have of course begun to ask: How could such a thing happen in Germany? And why was such an apparently normal woman driven to do something like that?

Brandenburg's Interior Minister, conservative politician Jörg Schönbohm, thought he had a sensible explanation. On August 3 the minister declared that the killings were proof that "coerced proletarianization" in the former German Democratic Republic had led to degradation and neglect and that this was to be blamed for a decline in moral values and a propensity to violence among the population. Hardly tactful words coming from a well-known politician who grew up in the west and is regional government in the east.

His comments seem particularly rash in view of the fact that he is seeking re-election in eastern Germany and serves in the conservative party of Angela Merkel -- herself from the east. Seems more like an act of political suicide than anything else. Schönbohm effectively branded the people of eastern Germany morally degenerate, This has led to expressions of outrage from all sides of the political spectrum, not least because it provides an opportunity to bash the conservatives, who have a strong lead in the polls at present.

Schönbohm has since apologized for his remarks, claiming it had not been his intention to imply that East Germans suffer from some kind of illness. He admitted that an election campaign was hardly an appropriate time to raise such an issue and attempted to repair some of the damage by praising East Germans for their achievements before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The German papers take Schönbohm to task for his remarks today, but there are also hints that the minister may not have been so far off the mark. After all, one criminologist has revealed that in the last ten years, three times as many children have been murdered in eastern Germany than have been killed in the west. Questions need to be asked, but was Schönbohm asking the right ones and is he guilty of slander, prejudice and discrimination?

Die Tageszeitung certainly thinks so, and today calls for Schönbohm's resignation. The daily is the most left wing of the major German newspapers, founded in Berlin in 1978 and therefore unsurprisingly sympathetic towards the condition of eastern Germany. The reason Schönbohm has to go, says the paper's commentator, is not because of his stupidity but because of his abhorrent opinion "that the people he governs are morally less stable than others." This goes against a basic tenet of the German civil society, namely, the ban on discrimination.

"What exactly was Schönbohm trying to say with allusions to the history of the GDR?" It's not as if the mass murder of babies in Bavaria would have been any more surprising, the commentator suggests. "If we're going to blame communism for these crimes, what about the wrongs done in the name of capitalism? A politician can be a democrat, or he can despise the people, but he can't do both at once." The paper won't accept his apologies. His explanations only make the matter worse.

But while the Tageszeitung may have you believing this is an open-and-shut case of gross ministerial misconduct, conservative Die Welt leaps to the minister's defense in starkly provocative terms. Attempts to twist Schönbohm's words into a pejorative and salacious simplification in the mold of "GDR communism devours children" just won't wash with the paper. "Clusters of brutalization and indifference in parts of the east are the consequential damage of decades of dictatorship," the paper boldly proclaims, and psychological traces still linger today. "To name [the effects of the GDR] as the main cause of social derailment is important and correct, instead of just blaming the evil, capitalist West for everything." Ouch.

The paper thinks left-wing baying for conservative political blood should come to a rapid end. "He [Schönbohm] has now apologized for the misunderstanding. He didn't want to insult former citizens of the GDR, but rather give them a wake-up call. He is right," the commentator rather brusquely concludes .

The slightly more balanced Süddeutsche Zeitung would rather tread the center ground on this issue. Its commentary reasons that though Schönbohm was rather naïve, his remarks contained an element of unsettling truth. "Schönbohm has been criticised, as one would have expected, and now he seems to have realized that he is totally off the mark. An expropriated farmer is not automatically going to kill children." But Schönbohm's more recent emphasis on a dearth of societal values in the GDR is much closer to the point the paper says. Fundamentally: "Civil courage was not encouraged in the GDR - on the contrary - it was frowned upon. Anyone who stood out, protested or showed real emotion was considered suspicious by the collective society."

The paper then goes on to cite research by Lower Saxony criminologist Christian Pfeiffer who has published a study comparing the risk of a baby being killed at birth in different parts of Germany. Shockingly, three times as many babies have been found dead in eastern Germany as in the west during the last decade. Despite this startling statistic, one must be careful in extrapolating from this a lack of feeling on the part of parents socialized in a communist system, the commentator emphasizes. Even so, "the unsettling fact remains that East German society, according to Pfeiffer's analysis, suffered a form of brutalization, which only comes to light in these extreme cases."

The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung agrees with this analysis to a large extent. "De-civilization and de-Christianisation were hallmark programs of the 'Worker and Farmer State,'" and this cannot be devoid of consequences, the paper says. "A shift in values can still be seen today, not least in the way people vote in the east." A proper debate is required, the commentator insists, and it is certainly counterproductive to begin a comparative exercise in "who killed the most children." What is clear, though, is that Schönbohm's clumsy gaffe will be felt by his party in the coming election and was a gift to opposition parties. "This will cost the CDU percentage points in the east."

The business daily Handelsblatt takes a more superior tone and asks if it is really necessary to engage in such a ridiculous and tired debate. Its editorial then of course proceeds to engage in the debate anyway, as one might expect. The commentator is cynical about experts who are happy to talk about structural weaknesses of the GDR and their impact on the problems of eastern Germany today, but who then go on TV to criticize Schönbohm. The figures don't add up in any case.

The paper cites a recent crime survey which showed western states like Bremen and Hamburg have more criminal activity than Berlin, for example. And one shouldn't forget all those citizens of the former GDR who used the fall of the wall as a springboard for new careers in the German Federal Republic and saw an opportunity for change.