Background
A great-grandson of the German composer Robert Schumann, he was living in England at the onset of the Second World War.
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Gerd Sommerhoff
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As a foreign national, he spent at least two years in an internment camp in Canada before returning to England where he took up a post teaching science at the Dragon School in Oxford. While there, he developed what was really an early form of Cognitive behavioral therapy without computers, using boxes of numbered cards, containing questions, answers, tutorial material, or descriptions of experiments, on a variety of different subjects. Sommerhoff later became a Research Fellow in Systems Theory at University College, London.
In parallel with this position, he taught technology at Sevenoaks School.
In 1984, he retired from teaching and moved to Trinity College, Cambridge. Some of his students were Tim Hunt, and Richard Veryard.
Gerd Sommerhoff studied engineering at Zurich Polytechnic and philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University. Upon release from internment, Gerd Sommerhoff taught science at the Dragon School and presented science programmes for the British Broadcasting Corporation from 1960–1962 before being recruited to Sevenoaks School in 1963 by headmaster Kim Taylor.
Alice Hemmings reported allegations of sexual abuse dating from 1976 in The Sevenoaks Chronicle.
The assault was reported to the Kent Police force by Stuart Neilson in 2012. Gerd Sommerhoff was also alleged to have displayed pornography to pupils and to have made obscene remarks including boasts of bestiality. Sevenoaks School agreed to settle a compensation claim by another pupil alleging sexual abuse by Gerd Sommerhoff at Sevenoaks School when he was 12 years old.
According to the plaintiff"s lawyer, Tracey Emmett, "Sommerhoff’s abuse may have been suspected by those who worked with him." Several further witnesses and victims have subsequently been identified, indicating that Gerd Sommerhoff was a preferential paedophile attracted to pubescent boys.
