Atman Foundation / Heide Fittkau-Garthe (historical)

Heide Fittkau-Garthe, born in Berlin in 1941, trained as a psychologist and earned her doctorate at 26; she married psychology professor Bernd Fittkau, joined the Brahma Kumaris in 1980, rose to become a senior official of the movement in Germany, and later divorced. On August 15, 1994, she sold her assets, moved to Tenerife, and founded the Atman Foundation (also called the Isis Holistic Center) as a schism from the Brahma Kumaris, drawing a following from her former seminar circles in Germany. A former member, Angela Gabriela, later told reporters that the group's rituals centred on what she called a "love ring," which she described as group sexual activity extending even to members of the same family -- an allegation attributed to a single ex-member's account rather than to any court finding.

On January 8, 1998, Spanish police raided the group's premises in Santa Cruz de Tenerife after Fittkau-Garthe was alleged to have attempted a group suicide with followers in Teide National Park. Coverage at the time reported that the 32 or 33 members present (accounts differ) believed they would be collected by a spacecraft and, failing that, would take their own lives; officers seized juice they suspected was poisoned. Laboratory analysis subsequently found no poison in the juice -- it was flower essences and homeopathic remedies -- and what had been described as a "last supper" was, on later accounts, a picnic and meditation session. International media, echoing early Spanish police statements, initially linked the group to the Order of the Solar Temple, whose members had died in mass murder-suicides through the 1990s; this connection was later retracted as having no basis.

The legal record that followed is more equivocal than the initial reporting suggested. German investigators found no evidence that the group had planned a mass suicide. In Spain, the accusation against Fittkau-Garthe remained open without a scheduled trial for years, and all charges were eventually dropped for lack of evidence; her acquittal received, by contrast with the original story, almost no press coverage. Later pieces in Tenerife News and Diario de Avisos explicitly disputed the original suicide-plot narrative, and Fittkau-Garthe herself told a local newspaper that the group was not a cult and that a daughter of a member had alerted Interpol after a family dispute; separately, some accounts trace the mass-suicide rumour to Fittkau-Garthe's own estranged brother. Scholarly assessments split on how to read the episode: sociologist Susan J. Palmer treated it as an example of rumor driving a miscarriage of justice against a new religious movement, while researchers Georg Schmid and Oswald Eggenberger argued the police's alarm was understandable given the group's small size and its surface similarities to movements that had previously ended in mass death. This profile follows that split record: a closed, revelation-led communal cell whose leader's cosmology escalated toward an imminent planetary rescue narrative, intervened on by police over an allegation that was never proven in court and was later disputed by local reporting and the group's own German investigation.