Germany mourns crash deaths of 16 students

The regional schools minister of the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia has described seeing faces of “enormous grief” this morning at the Joseph-Koenig Gymnasium school in Haltern, as the small German town comes to terms with yesterday’s plane crash in the French Alps.

Sixteen students and two teachers from the school lost their lives when Germanwings flight 4U 9525 descended in a remote mountainous area 100 kilometres north of Nice.

Speaking at a press conference in the local townhall, a visibly emotional Sylvia Löhrmann said that a team of 50 carers were present in the school this morning to support students, while the state of North-Rhine Westphalia will hold a minute’s silence on Thursday.

"All of Germany is grieving," she said. "I am a teacher too so I know how terrible this is and how long it takes to get into people's heads. Students I spoke to said they cannot understand how lost their best friends. How they can lose someone close to them? Every person deals with it differently. Students have to realise that it is okay whatever is happening with them."

The students who are believed to be aged 15 and 16 have not yet been named by authorities.

Pupils at the high school began arriving to the school this morning just before 7.30 am local time. Outside the front entrance, rows of candles were arranged on the steps, while a single sign read: “Yesterday we were many, today we are alone.”

Throughout the morning students were led, class by class, outside the school where they stood in small groups in front of the lighted candles. Teachers laid flowers in front of the school.

Speaking this morning, the headmaster of Joseph-Koenig school, Ulrich Wessel, said that when he had heard the news, he had hoped his students had not boarded the flight.

“I was at a school principal’s meeting and got a message to contact the school administration quickly, that there had been a plane crash en route from Barcelona to Düsseldorf.

“My first thought was -, it sounds stupid -‘hopefully not the plane with our students’.

“Then it was clear: the flight number was the same, the time was the same, sometimes there are two flights from the same airline with five minutes’ difference. But after half an hour it was clear this tragedy had struck our school.”

He said that he called the parents and asked them to come to the school.

The moment when he met the parents was “not something I’ll need twice in my life,” he said. “Someone asked me yesterday how many pupils are in my school. Instinctively I said 1,283, but it’s 16 fewer than that.”

He said that Germanwings had offered to fly the passengers' families to France but none of the students' families have chosen to fly to the crash site at this point.