The top police dog-handling academy in Germany was mired in scandal yesterday after claims that female cadets had been forced to wear electric collars, crawl on all fours and bark on command.

“We are taking this very seriously indeed,” said Joachim Hermann, the Bavarian interior minister. An official investigation has been opened and several officers were suspended.

The dog-handling academy, based at Herzogau in Bavaria, trains teams to sniff out drugs, explosives and corpses. It has an international reputation for excellence.

If an insider is to be believed, though, drunken beatings of cadets and dogs, physical and verbal abuse and a groundswell of neo-Nazi sympathy were part of the daily routine.

Some cadets were forced to drink beer mugs full of steaming urine. “Trainees also had to drink a cocktail made up of rubbish fished out of bins and rotting food,” said the anonymous eight-page letter sent to the Nürnberger Nachrichten newspaper.

“First indications are that these allegations do come from a member of the police,” said Günther Ruckdäschel, of the Regensburg prosecutor’s office, which is investigating the academy. The point of the bullying seems to have been to reduce cadets, and in particular the young women, to the level of the dogs that they were training.

Collars used in dog training, intended to give short sharp electric shocks in case of bad behaviour, were strapped to the necks of the women. They were then ordered to crawl through the canteen and drink beer from bowls jammed between the thighs of the instructors. Throughout this humiliation, the women cadets were shouted at and insulted.

The Herzogau affair is only the latest in a pattern of bullying in German barracks. An army captain and 17 non-commissioned officers were in the dock this year for pumping water into the nostrils of recruits, spraying them with water and subjecting them to light electric shocks. The military instructors claimed that this was an effort to harden young soldiers.

One of the accused was given an 18-month suspended jail sentence on assault charges, others were fined.

The relatively mild sentences handed down to army trainers has been the norm in cases affecting women police recruits. When one 22-year-old Bavarian police officer shot herself with her service revolver after months of bullying, other policewomen came forward and accused a colleague of serious harassment. Few people were willing to testify and the man was subjected merely to a disciplinary hearing for insulting behaviour.

In Hagen, western Germany, five male police officers were cleared of handcuffing a woman colleague and hanging her up on a clothes hook. The men stayed silent, there were no witnesses, the woman was referred for psychiatric treatment and transferred.

The stress of breaking ranks to lodge an official complaint is often so high that the women prefer to leave the service. It was unclear yesterday whether the denunciatory letter had been written by a male or a female officer. Bullying police and army instructors are often found, when incidents become public, to have far-right sympathies. That appears to have been the case at Herzogau. According to the accusing letter, recruits were greeted with the information that the academy had been used by the Nazi SS as a recreation and educational centre. “You will be sleeping in beds once used by real men!” they were told by an instructor.

The police dogs, meanwhile, seem to have been beaten and neglected. Some had collars made of razor-sharp metal, others had a noose instead of a proper lead and collar. The dogs were regularly kicked and injuries were left untended.

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