Where the Pennsylvania grand jury and the Massachusetts Attorney General built their findings from subpoenaed records, the German Bishops' Conference took a different route to the same kind of evidence: in 2014 it commissioned researchers at the universities of Mannheim, Heidelberg and Giessen to review the church's own personnel files directly, with archival access the bishops themselves authorized.
The consortium, whose initials gave the project its short name, the MHG Study, examined 38,156 personnel files covering every German diocese from 1946 to 2014. Released in September 2018, the study identified at least 1,670 clergy implicated in the abuse of at least 3,677 minors, roughly 4.4 percent of every cleric whose file was reviewed. Nearly two thirds of the documented victims were under fourteen at the time of the abuse, and most were boys.
The researchers were explicit that their own number was a floor, not a full accounting. Some personnel files had themselves been incomplete, altered or destroyed before the review began, meaning the true number of cases was, by the study's own estimate, likely several thousand higher than what the surviving files could document. German bishops publicly apologized on the study's release, and the finding helped drive the church's adoption of a stricter, church-wide prevention framework in the years that followed.