Der Spiegel suspends top editors amid fabrication scandal

Two top editors have been suspended at the German news weekly Der Spiegel in the wake of disclosures that stories filed by one of their reporters turned out to be fiction, the publication said Saturday.

The company said Ullrich Fichtner and Matthias Geyer should have realized that dozens of stories filed by Claas Relotius were fake.

Relotius resigned recently after confessing to making up stories and writing about people who never existed outside his imagination.

In one bizarre case, Relotius spent 38 days on a story about Trump voters in the Minnesota town of Fergus Falls. In some cases, he wrote about real people but gave them different jobs from the ones they held. Other times he invented both people and their careers.

After the scandal became public, Der Spiegel sent another reporter, Christoph Scheuermann, to apologize to the town of 14,000 residents and write a story correcting his former colleague’s inventions.

Scheuermann wrote, “Yes, it may be true that the majority here voted for Donald Trump, but it is also true that the people of Fergus Falls are far more interesting and complex than the caricatures dreamed up by Claas Relotius.”