Posted on Jan 16, 2026, 12:38 pm
#1
Betzbone
Limb Lengthening:
Bone Job
A doctor saws people’s legs apart and inserts nails so they can grow taller. Now the miracle healer is standing trial.
By Anne Kunze
From DIE ZEIT, No. 47/2018
November 14, 2018
Richard Krüger* had a problem that was difficult to explain to other people. He had always been healthy, worked as an engineer in Germany, France, and China, and enjoyed his job. Was he missing anything? In 2013, it didn’t seem so. Krüger had been happily married for 20 years and spoke five languages fluently. Twice a week he practiced a martial art he loved.
But there was something that tormented him. He noticed it early in the morning when he got out of bed in a coastal city in China. His legs were too short; he was too small. At least, that was how Richard Krüger felt.
Ten centimeters for success
He was convinced that his problem would only become smaller if he himself became bigger. At first, he tried special shoes, but having to take them off at the front door—for example when visiting Japanese friends—quickly became embarrassing. That’s why Krüger began looking for a doctor who could make him taller.
Krüger paid nearly €50,000. His thigh bones were sawn apart and telescopic nails were inserted, which he was supposed to extend by one millimeter per day by turning his lower leg. The gap was meant to fill with new bone. That was how Krüger intended to grow—millimeter by millimeter—until he was no longer 1.69 meters tall, but 1.79 meters. That was the plan.
Ten centimeters that were meant to help him no longer be overlooked for promotions at work and no longer be ignored in conferences. Ten centimeters that were supposed to make him more attractive and more successful in his martial art, kendo, in which the winner is the one who strikes the opponent’s head with a bamboo sword. In sports, at work, and in love, the taller man is more successful—Krüger believed that.
Ten centimeters. Do happiness and unhappiness really depend on that? The ten-centimeter question has become a social issue that hardly anyone notices, yet it occupies thousands of Germans and hundreds of thousands of people worldwide—especially men. They move through life with a panoramic view: Is there a man who is even shorter than I am? They look at the world from below and ask themselves: Do others look down on me? Do I always have to make extra effort to be seen?
Others get laser eye surgery—why not lengthen your legs?
Many of them travel from all over Germany, from the United States, Asian and Arab countries, to a doctor in Saarland: Augustin Betz. Online, he advertises that he has 20 years of experience in limb lengthening and performs an average of 75 operations per year, mostly on foreign patients. He has apparently helped many of them. Medical problems are said to occur rarely; according to his website, there has never been a major complication. Betz wrote that ultimately there was “no patient who did not reach his goal.”
However, Betz told DIE ZEIT that he never claimed “that every patient has so far reached his goal.”
Richard Krüger—now in his late forties—was also operated on by him.
“For me, what Dr. Betz promised sounded like a vacation,” Krüger says. “Two weeks in a comfort clinic, and just one day after surgery I would already be able to walk again on crutches thanks to the stable nails. After four weeks, I was supposed to be able to work again in China.”
In 2013, the description of the operation sounded to Krüger like a harmless procedure. Comparable to braces that are turned a little bit at a time until the teeth are perfect. Many people get laser eye surgery or hair transplants, have their lips injected or breasts enlarged—why shouldn’t they also lengthen their legs?
The only thing that grew was his anger at the world
Ten centimeters—that was Krüger’s hope. Nothing remains of it. Four weeks after the operation, the nail in his left thigh broke. He spent almost a year in a wheelchair, then months moving only with a walking frame. He was a prisoner in his own apartment. Only after the nails were removed in another operation did he slowly learn to walk again. Even today, five years later, his gait is stiff.
He had to give up his job. He will never practice his martial art again. Only his wife stayed with him. She cries for hours because of him.
“The doctor ruined us,” she says, a slender woman with trembling hands.
Richard Krüger also appears exhausted. The radiant, confident people in the photos on the living room wall no longer resemble the Krügers at all.
“I’ve become a different person,” Richard Krüger says. The only thing that grew was his anger at the world.
Richard Krüger sued Dr. Betz for damages and compensation for pain and suffering. Krüger claims Betz treated him incorrectly and failed to adequately inform him about the risks of the operation. Betz denies this. The case of Krüger versus Betz was heard on a Friday at the end of October before the Saarbrücken Regional Court.
His miracle weapon against the worries of short men
The 68-year-old doctor Augustin Betz is not exactly an imposing figure. Standing outside the courtroom—a nondescript, white-haired man in an ill-fitting suit—he could be mistaken for a retiree killing time in courtrooms. He follows the proceedings in silence, arms crossed, face closed.
But when he begins to speak, his voice fills the room. He gives a detailed account of a groundbreaking invention: a nail—his nail—the “Betzbone,” a unique miracle weapon against the worries of short people. He, Augustin Betz, has developed the best instrument for limb lengthening. That is how he sees it.
He wants to be seen as a benefactor, helping those who are “too short” achieve true greatness and permanent happiness. If there were ever a god in white, the doctor of doctors, then this surgeon from Saarland must have been his model. He also holds a professorial title, but in court he prefers to be called Dr. Betz—emphasis on “doctor”—because he does not perform his miracles in lecture halls, but at the operating table. He presents himself as a creator with a hammer, a nail-driving grand seigneur.
However, on the first day of the trial, the court deals with matters that must seem trivial to such a grand master—such as whether patient Krüger was adequately informed about the risks of limb lengthening.
At first, everything sounded wonderfully easy
Krüger tells the court how he waited seven hours for the agreed consultation and how, when he was finally admitted in the evening, everything sounded wonderfully easy. Essentially, only risks were discussed that could occur with any operation.
Complications specific to limb lengthening—such as bone infections, nail breakage, or the risk that the bones might never grow back together—were mentioned in an information brochure. But Betz had said his Betzbone was so stable it would only break in the event of an accident. Infections had never occurred with him. He did not mention the risk of non-union at all.
Krüger says he asked the doctor while looking at X-rays whether his bones were too round. His bones were completely normal, Betz replied. He praised the excellent mobility of Krüger’s legs—“the legs of an athlete,” he said. Betz spent more time telling stories about patients and giving tips for excursions during the stay in Saarland.
At least, that is how Richard Krüger remembers it.
Krüger was afraid
Svetlana Krüger*, called as a witness, confirms her husband’s account. She describes herself as “a scaredy-cat” and was initially opposed to the strange procedure. But after the doctor’s words, she says, she was convinced.
Betz, however, says that Krüger was already very well informed about the operation and its risks. He claims he explained all risks “unsparingly,” “up to the possibility of crippling.” He never said that there had never been complications. He always conducts consultations this way, he told the court.
Under medical law, there is the so-called “always-the-same rule,” which allows doctors not to recall a specific consultation word for word but to argue that they always provide the same explanations.
The initial consultation cost €400. An operation date was quickly set—just a few months later, in July 2013. Krüger quit his job in China.
“I couldn’t exactly explain it if I suddenly came back ten centimeters taller,” he says.
Krüger transferred nearly €50,000 and flew to Saarland with his wife.
Was there really an informed consent discussion?
The evening before Krüger was to go to the hospital, an unfamiliar woman appeared at the hotel where he was staying. She said he needed to sign a consent form, which had supposedly been announced by phone. The Krügers assumed she was a secretary or a nurse.
In court, the woman—also called as a witness—said she had been an assistant doctor at the time and occasionally conducted consent discussions for Betz. She, too, claims to have provided unsparing information and says she always did so that way.
Richard Krüger signed the documents and went to the hospital the next day.
“You cannot on the one hand advertise your surgical method as problem-free and yourself as infallible, and on the other hand claim to have provided unsparing information about how dangerous the procedure actually is,” says Krüger’s lawyer, Berlin medical law specialist Jörg Heynemann. “That has nothing to do with unsparing disclosure.”
Initially, everything went according to plan. But four weeks after the operation, when Richard Krüger tried to stand up in the changing room of a rehabilitation clinic’s swimming pool, the nail in his left thigh broke. During transport to the hospital, his thigh bone also fractured.
“Just keep clicking!”
Betz operated on Krüger again and inserted the same type of nail. He said it was not a big deal at all. Krüger should simply keep “clicking” his legs; Betz had already done it for him under general anesthesia. “Clicking” is what Betz calls the movement of the lower leg used to extend the telescopic nail millimeter by millimeter.
But Krüger was afraid. On the X-ray, he saw that the nail in his right leg was already bent. He stopped clicking, which—according to Krüger—made Betz very angry.
Krüger’s bones should have grown back together quickly, but they did not. His legs hurt, he sat in a wheelchair, and he despaired of his fate. How could he have trusted Betz?
Betz denies malpractice
Because sunlight stimulates bone growth, the Krügers moved to southern Europe. But nothing changed. Even after a year and a half, there was still a gap between the bones. A CT scan revealed cartilage formation between the bones—the cause of Krüger’s severe pain.
He sought out another surgeon, who scraped the cartilage away and transplanted a piece of bone from Krüger’s pelvis into the gap.
“I believe Dr. Betz committed a treatment error. My bones are too thin and too round—he should never have inserted the nails,” Richard Krüger says. “But what shocked me most was Betz’s behavior after things went wrong. It seemed to me that he blamed me for what happened.”
Betz denies malpractice and says bones may heal poorly if a patient remains in a wheelchair for too long. He also claims that Krüger broke off contact after the complication.
Apparently, Richard Krüger is not the only patient who experienced Dr. Betz’s two faces. Krüger’s lawyer also represents a Chinese patient contacted by DIE ZEIT. In one leg, the bones never grew back together after lengthening; in the other, nerves and muscles died. To this day, the patient has difficulty lifting his leg. Betz also denies errors in that case.
It is a fact that Betz has never reported a defective nail to the Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices.
While Augustin Betz sends warning letters to DIE ZEIT’s editorial office, Richard Krüger sinks into thoughts he never had before. What, he asks himself, is actually wrong with accepting one’s own height? Aren’t there enough men who are short but happy?
Richard Krüger is truly no giant, but he still found a woman who loves him and did not leave him when he was in a wheelchair. Sometimes Krüger wonders whether he imagined it all—the disadvantage, the lack of success, the inferiority. Maybe these were only projections.
“Was I really missing something to be happy?”
He asks himself that question often now—and finds no answer.
*Names changed
https://imgur.com/a/fLDDlSU
And here is the podcast about Dr. Betz as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HM0KvSsBcc
https://www.instagram.com/p/C_van4XsSdc/?igsh=ZXllMmFiN2FsemVp
The original post is in German. This is a translation from German, and I will also share the original version below.
Limb Lengthening:
Bone Job
A doctor saws people’s legs apart and inserts nails so they can grow taller. Now the miracle healer is standing trial.
By Anne Kunze
From DIE ZEIT, No. 47/2018
November 14, 2018
Richard Krüger* had a problem that was difficult to explain to other people. He had always been healthy, worked as an engineer in Germany, France, and China, and enjoyed his job. Was he missing anything? In 2013, it didn’t seem so. Krüger had been happily married for 20 years and spoke five languages fluently. Twice a week he practiced a martial art he loved.
But there was something that tormented him. He noticed it early in the morning when he got out of bed in a coastal city in China. His legs were too short; he was too small. At least, that was how Richard Krüger felt.
Ten centimeters for success
He was convinced that his problem would only become smaller if he himself became bigger. At first, he tried special shoes, but having to take them off at the front door—for example when visiting Japanese friends—quickly became embarrassing. That’s why Krüger began looking for a doctor who could make him taller.
Krüger paid nearly €50,000. His thigh bones were sawn apart and telescopic nails were inserted, which he was supposed to extend by one millimeter per day by turning his lower leg. The gap was meant to fill with new bone. That was how Krüger intended to grow—millimeter by millimeter—until he was no longer 1.69 meters tall, but 1.79 meters. That was the plan.
Ten centimeters that were meant to help him no longer be overlooked for promotions at work and no longer be ignored in conferences. Ten centimeters that were supposed to make him more attractive and more successful in his martial art, kendo, in which the winner is the one who strikes the opponent’s head with a bamboo sword. In sports, at work, and in love, the taller man is more successful—Krüger believed that.
Ten centimeters. Do happiness and unhappiness really depend on that? The ten-centimeter question has become a social issue that hardly anyone notices, yet it occupies thousands of Germans and hundreds of thousands of people worldwide—especially men. They move through life with a panoramic view: Is there a man who is even shorter than I am? They look at the world from below and ask themselves: Do others look down on me? Do I always have to make extra effort to be seen?
Others get laser eye surgery—why not lengthen your legs?
Many of them travel from all over Germany, from the United States, Asian and Arab countries, to a doctor in Saarland: Augustin Betz. Online, he advertises that he has 20 years of experience in limb lengthening and performs an average of 75 operations per year, mostly on foreign patients. He has apparently helped many of them. Medical problems are said to occur rarely; according to his website, there has never been a major complication. Betz wrote that ultimately there was “no patient who did not reach his goal.”
However, Betz told DIE ZEIT that he never claimed “that every patient has so far reached his goal.”
Richard Krüger—now in his late forties—was also operated on by him.
“For me, what Dr. Betz promised sounded like a vacation,” Krüger says. “Two weeks in a comfort clinic, and just one day after surgery I would already be able to walk again on crutches thanks to the stable nails. After four weeks, I was supposed to be able to work again in China.”
In 2013, the description of the operation sounded to Krüger like a harmless procedure. Comparable to braces that are turned a little bit at a time until the teeth are perfect. Many people get laser eye surgery or hair transplants, have their lips injected or breasts enlarged—why shouldn’t they also lengthen their legs?
The only thing that grew was his anger at the world
Ten centimeters—that was Krüger’s hope. Nothing remains of it. Four weeks after the operation, the nail in his left thigh broke. He spent almost a year in a wheelchair, then months moving only with a walking frame. He was a prisoner in his own apartment. Only after the nails were removed in another operation did he slowly learn to walk again. Even today, five years later, his gait is stiff.
He had to give up his job. He will never practice his martial art again. Only his wife stayed with him. She cries for hours because of him.
“The doctor ruined us,” she says, a slender woman with trembling hands.
Richard Krüger also appears exhausted. The radiant, confident people in the photos on the living room wall no longer resemble the Krügers at all.
“I’ve become a different person,” Richard Krüger says. The only thing that grew was his anger at the world.
Richard Krüger sued Dr. Betz for damages and compensation for pain and suffering. Krüger claims Betz treated him incorrectly and failed to adequately inform him about the risks of the operation. Betz denies this. The case of Krüger versus Betz was heard on a Friday at the end of October before the Saarbrücken Regional Court.
His miracle weapon against the worries of short men
The 68-year-old doctor Augustin Betz is not exactly an imposing figure. Standing outside the courtroom—a nondescript, white-haired man in an ill-fitting suit—he could be mistaken for a retiree killing time in courtrooms. He follows the proceedings in silence, arms crossed, face closed.
But when he begins to speak, his voice fills the room. He gives a detailed account of a groundbreaking invention: a nail—his nail—the “Betzbone,” a unique miracle weapon against the worries of short people. He, Augustin Betz, has developed the best instrument for limb lengthening. That is how he sees it.
He wants to be seen as a benefactor, helping those who are “too short” achieve true greatness and permanent happiness. If there were ever a god in white, the doctor of doctors, then this surgeon from Saarland must have been his model. He also holds a professorial title, but in court he prefers to be called Dr. Betz—emphasis on “doctor”—because he does not perform his miracles in lecture halls, but at the operating table. He presents himself as a creator with a hammer, a nail-driving grand seigneur.
However, on the first day of the trial, the court deals with matters that must seem trivial to such a grand master—such as whether patient Krüger was adequately informed about the risks of limb lengthening.
At first, everything sounded wonderfully easy
Krüger tells the court how he waited seven hours for the agreed consultation and how, when he was finally admitted in the evening, everything sounded wonderfully easy. Essentially, only risks were discussed that could occur with any operation.
Complications specific to limb lengthening—such as bone infections, nail breakage, or the risk that the bones might never grow back together—were mentioned in an information brochure. But Betz had said his Betzbone was so stable it would only break in the event of an accident. Infections had never occurred with him. He did not mention the risk of non-union at all.
Krüger says he asked the doctor while looking at X-rays whether his bones were too round. His bones were completely normal, Betz replied. He praised the excellent mobility of Krüger’s legs—“the legs of an athlete,” he said. Betz spent more time telling stories about patients and giving tips for excursions during the stay in Saarland.
At least, that is how Richard Krüger remembers it.
Krüger was afraid
Svetlana Krüger*, called as a witness, confirms her husband’s account. She describes herself as “a scaredy-cat” and was initially opposed to the strange procedure. But after the doctor’s words, she says, she was convinced.
Betz, however, says that Krüger was already very well informed about the operation and its risks. He claims he explained all risks “unsparingly,” “up to the possibility of crippling.” He never said that there had never been complications. He always conducts consultations this way, he told the court.
Under medical law, there is the so-called “always-the-same rule,” which allows doctors not to recall a specific consultation word for word but to argue that they always provide the same explanations.
The initial consultation cost €400. An operation date was quickly set—just a few months later, in July 2013. Krüger quit his job in China.
“I couldn’t exactly explain it if I suddenly came back ten centimeters taller,” he says.
Krüger transferred nearly €50,000 and flew to Saarland with his wife.
Was there really an informed consent discussion?
The evening before Krüger was to go to the hospital, an unfamiliar woman appeared at the hotel where he was staying. She said he needed to sign a consent form, which had supposedly been announced by phone. The Krügers assumed she was a secretary or a nurse.
In court, the woman—also called as a witness—said she had been an assistant doctor at the time and occasionally conducted consent discussions for Betz. She, too, claims to have provided unsparing information and says she always did so that way.
Richard Krüger signed the documents and went to the hospital the next day.
“You cannot on the one hand advertise your surgical method as problem-free and yourself as infallible, and on the other hand claim to have provided unsparing information about how dangerous the procedure actually is,” says Krüger’s lawyer, Berlin medical law specialist Jörg Heynemann. “That has nothing to do with unsparing disclosure.”
Initially, everything went according to plan. But four weeks after the operation, when Richard Krüger tried to stand up in the changing room of a rehabilitation clinic’s swimming pool, the nail in his left thigh broke. During transport to the hospital, his thigh bone also fractured.
“Just keep clicking!”
Betz operated on Krüger again and inserted the same type of nail. He said it was not a big deal at all. Krüger should simply keep “clicking” his legs; Betz had already done it for him under general anesthesia. “Clicking” is what Betz calls the movement of the lower leg used to extend the telescopic nail millimeter by millimeter.
But Krüger was afraid. On the X-ray, he saw that the nail in his right leg was already bent. He stopped clicking, which—according to Krüger—made Betz very angry.
Krüger’s bones should have grown back together quickly, but they did not. His legs hurt, he sat in a wheelchair, and he despaired of his fate. How could he have trusted Betz?
Betz denies malpractice
Because sunlight stimulates bone growth, the Krügers moved to southern Europe. But nothing changed. Even after a year and a half, there was still a gap between the bones. A CT scan revealed cartilage formation between the bones—the cause of Krüger’s severe pain.
He sought out another surgeon, who scraped the cartilage away and transplanted a piece of bone from Krüger’s pelvis into the gap.
“I believe Dr. Betz committed a treatment error. My bones are too thin and too round—he should never have inserted the nails,” Richard Krüger says. “But what shocked me most was Betz’s behavior after things went wrong. It seemed to me that he blamed me for what happened.”
Betz denies malpractice and says bones may heal poorly if a patient remains in a wheelchair for too long. He also claims that Krüger broke off contact after the complication.
Apparently, Richard Krüger is not the only patient who experienced Dr. Betz’s two faces. Krüger’s lawyer also represents a Chinese patient contacted by DIE ZEIT. In one leg, the bones never grew back together after lengthening; in the other, nerves and muscles died. To this day, the patient has difficulty lifting his leg. Betz also denies errors in that case.
It is a fact that Betz has never reported a defective nail to the Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices.
While Augustin Betz sends warning letters to DIE ZEIT’s editorial office, Richard Krüger sinks into thoughts he never had before. What, he asks himself, is actually wrong with accepting one’s own height? Aren’t there enough men who are short but happy?
Richard Krüger is truly no giant, but he still found a woman who loves him and did not leave him when he was in a wheelchair. Sometimes Krüger wonders whether he imagined it all—the disadvantage, the lack of success, the inferiority. Maybe these were only projections.
“Was I really missing something to be happy?”
He asks himself that question often now—and finds no answer.
*Names changed
https://imgur.com/a/fLDDlSU
And here is the podcast about Dr. Betz as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HM0KvSsBcc
https://www.instagram.com/p/C_van4XsSdc/?igsh=ZXllMmFiN2FsemVp
The original post is in German. This is a translation from German, and I will also share the original version below.