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German Experiment That Placed Foster Children with Pedophiles,<\/em> The New Yorker, July 26, 2021<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n To stare pure evil in the face with all its delusional complexities, yet the stark totality of its lies when fully revealed, is always, for a mind with\u00a0any conscience, or even any consciousness of self-interest, a uniquely terrifying and stupifying experience. The sexual abuse of children is always all the above. When perpetrated and enabled by the very structures which are supposed to protect children, to enlighten progress and to represent society in a liberal democracy, it seems, quite literally, an impossibility. But then so is the lion’s share of it, perpetrated and enabled by parents and relatives and those close to them who have power and influence and credibility.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n We have entered an age where the abuse of hundreds of millions of children is becoming more and more exposed and more and more held to account. But still a long way to go.<\/span><\/p>\n How close we are as a species to the starting point of this reckoning is made clear by a stunning article in The New Yorker this week, a masterpiece by Rachel Aviv,\u00a0<\/span>that tells a story that is–impossible.<\/span><\/p>\n Here it is:<\/span><\/p>\n “The German Experiment That Placed Foster Children with Pedophiles”<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0By <\/span>Rachel Aviv,\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span>Letter From Berlin, The New Yorker, July 26, 2021 Issue.<\/span><\/p>\n With the approval of the government, a renowned sexologist ran a dangerous program. How could this happen?<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n In 2017, a German man who goes by the name Marco came across an article in a Berlin newspaper with a photograph of a professor he recognized from childhood. The first thing he noticed was the man\u2019s lips. They were thin, almost nonexistent, a trait that Marco had always found repellent. He was surprised to read that the professor, Helmut Kentler, had been one of the most influential sexologists in Germany. The article described a new research report that had investigated what was called the \u201cKentler experiment.\u201d Beginning in the late sixties, Kentler had placed neglected children in foster homes run by pedophiles. The experiment was authorized and financially supported by the Berlin Senate. In a report submitted to the Senate, in 1988, Kentler had described it as a \u201ccomplete success.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Marco had grown up in foster care, and his foster father had frequently taken him to Kentler\u2019s home. Now he was thirty-four, with a one-year-old daughter, and her meals and naps structured his days. After he read the article, he said, \u201cI just pushed it aside. I didn\u2019t react emotionally. I did what I do every day: nothing, really. I sat around in front of the computer.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Marco looks like a movie star\u2014he is tanned, with a firm jaw, thick dark hair, and a long, symmetrical face. As an adult, he has cried only once. \u201cIf someone were to die in front of me, I would of course want to help them, but it wouldn\u2019t affect me emotionally,\u201d he told me. \u201cI have a wall, and emotions just hit against it.\u201d He lived with his girlfriend, a hairdresser, but they never discussed his childhood. He was unemployed. Once, he tried to work as a mailman, but after a few days he quit, because whenever a stranger made an expression that reminded him of his foster father, an engineer named Fritz Henkel, he had the sensation that he was not actually alive, that his heart had stopped beating, and that the color had drained from the world. When he tried to speak, it felt as if his voice didn\u2019t belong to him.<\/span><\/p>\n Several months after reading the article, Marco looked up the number for Teresa Nentwig, a young political scientist at the University of G\u00f6ttingen Institute for Democracy Research, who had written the report on Kentler. He felt both curious and ashamed. When she answered the phone, he identified himself as \u201can affected person.\u201d He told her that his foster father had spoken with Kentler on the phone every week. In ways that Marco had never understood, Kentler, a psychologist and a professor of social education at the University of Hannover, had seemed deeply invested in his upbringing.<\/span><\/p>\n Nentwig had assumed that Kentler\u2019s experiment ended in the nineteen-seventies. But Marco told her he had lived in his foster home until 2003, when he was twenty-one. \u201cI was totally shocked,\u201d she said. She remembers Marco saying several times, \u201cYou are the first person I\u2019ve told\u2014this is the first time I\u2019ve told my story.\u201d As a child, he\u2019d taken it for granted that the way he was treated was normal. \u201cSuch things happen,\u201d he told himself. \u201cThe world is like this: it\u2019s eat and be eaten.\u201d But now, he said, \u201cI realized the state has been watching.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n A few weeks later, Marco phoned one of his foster brothers, whom he calls Sven. They had lived together in Henkel\u2019s home for thirteen years. He liked Sven, but felt little connection to him. They had never had a real conversation. He told Sven he\u2019d learned that they had been part of an experiment. But Sven seemed unable to process the information. \u201cAfter all those years, we had gotten out of the habit of thinking,\u201d Marco said.<\/span><\/p>\n As a young boy, Marco liked to pretend he was one of the Templars, an order of knights that protected pilgrims to the Holy Land. He was a lively child who occasionally wandered around his Berlin neighborhood unsupervised. At five, in 1988, he crossed the street alone and was hit by a car. He was not seriously injured, but the accident attracted the attention of the Sch\u00f6neberg youth-welfare office, which is run by the Berlin state government. Caseworkers at the office observed that Marco\u2019s mother seemed \u201cunable to give him the necessary emotional attention.\u201d She worked at a sausage stand, and was struggling to manage parenthood on her own. Marco\u2019s father, a Palestinian refugee, had divorced her. She sent Marco and his older brother to day care in dirty clothes, and left them there for eleven hours. Caseworkers recommended that Marco be placed in a foster home with a \u201cfamily-like atmosphere.\u201d One described him as an attractive boy who was wild but \u201cvery easy to influence.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Marco was assigned to live with Henkel, a forty-seven-year-old single man who supplemented his income as a foster father by repairing jukeboxes and other electronics. Marco was Henkel\u2019s eighth foster son in sixteen years. When Henkel began fostering children, in 1973, a teacher noticed that he was \u201calways looking for contact with boys.\u201d Six years later, a caseworker observed that Henkel appeared to be in a \u201chomosexual relationship\u201d with one of his foster sons. When a public prosecutor launched an investigation, Helmut Kentler, who called himself Henkel\u2019s \u201cpermanent adviser,\u201d intervened on Henkel\u2019s behalf\u2014a pattern that repeats throughout more than eight hundred pages of case files about Henkel\u2019s home. Kentler was a well-known scholar, the author of several books on sex education and parenting, and he was often quoted in Germany\u2019s leading newspapers and on its TV programs. The newspaper Die Zeit<\/em> had described him as the \u201cnation\u2019s chief authority on questions of sexual education.\u201d On university letterhead, Kentler issued what he called an \u201cexpert opinion,\u201d explaining that he had come to know Henkel through a \u201cresearch project.\u201d He commended Henkel on his parenting skills and disparaged a psychologist who invaded the privacy of his home, making \u201cwild interpretations.\u201d Sometimes, Kentler wrote, an airplane is not a phallic symbol\u2014it is simply a plane. The criminal investigation was suspended.<\/span><\/p>\n Marco was impressed by Henkel\u2019s apartment. It had five bedrooms and was on the third floor of an old building on one of the main shopping streets of Friedenau, an upscale neighborhood popular among politicians and writers. Two other foster sons lived there, a sixteen-year-old and a twenty-four-year-old, neither of whom was particularly friendly to Marco. But he was delighted to discover an armoire in the hallway that held a cage with two rabbits that he could play with and feed. In a report to the youth-welfare office, Henkel noted that Marco was \u201cexcited about almost everything that was offered to him.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Every few months, Henkel drove nearly two hundred miles with his foster children to see Kentler in Hannover, where he taught. The visits were an opportunity for Kentler to observe the children: to \u201chear what they say about their past; their dreams and fears; to know their wishes and hopes, to see how they each develop, how they feel,\u201d Henkel wrote. In a photograph taken during one of their visits, Kentler wears a white button-up shirt with a pen in the pocket, and Marco sits at a dining-room table beside him, looking bored and dazed.<\/span><\/p>\n Marco had been living with Henkel for a year and a half when Sven moved in. The police had found him in a subway station in Berlin, sick with hepatitis. He was seven years old, begging for money, and he said that he had come from Romania. Noting that Sven had \u201clikely never experienced a positive parent-child relationship,\u201d the youth-welfare office searched for a foster home in Berlin. \u201cMr. Henkel seems to be ideally suited to this difficult task,\u201d doctors from a clinic at the Free University of Berlin wrote.<\/span><\/p>\n The two boys took on different roles in their new family. Sven was the good son, docile and loving. Marco was more defiant, but at night, when Henkel came into his room asking to cuddle, or waited for him while he brushed his teeth before bed, he had to comply. \u201cI just accepted it out of loyalty, because I didn\u2019t know anything else,\u201d Marco told me. \u201cI didn\u2019t think what was happening was good, but I thought it was normal. I thought of it a little bit like food. People have different tastes in food, the way some people have different tastes in sexuality.\u201d If Sven\u2019s bedroom door was open and he wasn\u2019t there, Marco knew what was happening, but the two boys never talked about what Henkel did to them. \u201cIt was an absolutely taboo subject,\u201d Marco said.<\/span><\/p>\n One night, Marco took a knife from the kitchen and slept with it under his pillow. When Henkel approached his bed and discovered the blade, he withdrew quickly, called Helmut Kentler, then handed the phone to Marco. \u201cThere\u2019s a devil behind my wall,\u201d Marco tried to explain. Kentler had a calming, grandfatherly presence. He assured Marco that there was no such thing as devils, and Marco agreed to surrender the knife.<\/span><\/p>\n Marco\u2019s mother and brother were allowed to visit roughly once a month, but Henkel often cancelled the visits at the last minute, or cut them short, saying that they were disruptive. Afterward, Marco would sometimes urinate in his bed or lose focus in school, writing numbers and letters backward. \u201cIt was as if he wanted to say: there is no point in anything,\u201d Henkel wrote. Kentler warned the youth-welfare office that Marco\u2019s \u201ceducational successes are ruined by a few hours of being with his mother.\u201d Marco\u2019s father was not allowed to see him at all, because Henkel reported that Marco said that his dad had beaten him. Marco was so terrified of his father, Henkel said, that he suffered from \u201cfearful fantasies when he noticed people of Arab appearance on the street.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Marco\u2019s teachers recommended that he see a child therapist, who was supposed to meet with him for two hours a week. But the therapist said that Henkel was holding Marco \u201cprisoner\u201d\u2014Henkel always sat close by, in an adjacent room. Marco remembers that, once, after a session began without Henkel\u2019s realizing it, he barged into the room and hit the therapist in the face. When a school psychologist referred Sven for counselling, too, Henkel would not allow him to take any psychological tests, according to records. \u201cNot with me!\u201d he shouted. \u201cIf you all want to make a \u2018case\u2019 out of [Sven], then do it without me.\u201d (Sven seemed upset by the outburst, asking Henkel, \u201cDoes that mean you want to give me away?\u201d)<\/span><\/p>\n In a letter, Kentler advised the youth-welfare office that, if a psychological assessment had to be done, he would perform it. \u201cInsights beyond my findings are not to be expected,\u201d he wrote. He acknowledged that Henkel could appear \u201charsh and hurtful,\u201d but \u201cI ask you to consider that a man who deals with such seriously damaged children is not a \u2018simple person,\u2019\u00a0\u201d he wrote, in another letter. \u201cWhat Mr. Henkel needs from the authorities is trust and protection.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n When Marco was nine, his mother petitioned a district judge in Berlin to allow her to spend more time with him. Marco\u2019s father told the youth-welfare office that he could not understand why Marco was growing up in a \u201cstrange family,\u201d deprived of an Arabic education. He also \u201cmade massive accusations against the foster father\u2019s behavior,\u201d a caseworker wrote. But Marco\u2019s mother had signed an agreement stating that she would \u201calways be guided by the best interests of my child,\u201d and that determination was made by the youth-welfare office.<\/span><\/p>\n A hearing was held in March, 1992, a month before Marco turned ten. The judge asked to speak privately with Marco, but Henkel stood directly outside the room and said, \u201cIf you are being threatened, call out!\u201d Marco sounded as if he had been coached. He told the judge that his foster father, whom he called Papa, loved him, and his birth family did not. When the judge asked if he still wanted his mother to visit, he responded, \u201cNot often.\u201d He said that once a year would be better, and insisted that \u201cPapa should be there.\u201d He explained that he was afraid of his biological father, and now that he was with Papa he was no longer scared. \u201cOnly sometimes at night,\u201d he added.<\/span><\/p>\n After the hearing, Kentler sent a letter to the judge, saying, \u201cFor the best interests of the child, I consider it absolutely essential that contact with the family of origin\u2014including the mother\u2014be completely suspended for the next two years.\u201d Kentler also emphasized that Marco needed distance from the men in his family, because they set a bad example. He said that Marco\u2019s mood changed when he spoke about his father. Though Kentler had never met Marco\u2019s dad, he characterized him as authoritarian, abusive, and macho. He also disapproved of Marco\u2019s fifteen-year-old brother, who was six feet four and weighed two hundred and twenty-five pounds. The boy \u201cgives the (false) impression of strength and superiority,\u201d Kentler wrote, and was already molding himself in his father\u2019s image; he was \u201caddicted to being the big man.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Kentler\u2019s career was framed by his belief in the damage wrought by dominant fathers. An early memory was of walking in the forest on a spring day and running to keep up with his father. \u201cI had only one wish: that he should take my hand and hold it in his,\u201d Kentler wrote in a parenting magazine in 1983. But his father, a lieutenant in the First World War, believed in a \u201crod and baton pedagogy,\u201d as Kentler put it. Kentler\u2019s parents followed the teachings of Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber, a best-selling German authority on child care who has been described as a \u201cspiritual precursor of Nazism.\u201d Schreber outlined principles of child rearing that would create a stronger race of men, ridding them of cowardice, laziness, and unwanted displays of vulnerability and desire. \u201cSuppress everything in the child,\u201d Schreber wrote, in 1858. \u201cEmotions must be suffocated in their seed right away.\u201d When Kentler misbehaved, his father threatened to buy a contraption invented by Schreber to promote children\u2019s posture and compliance: shoulder bands to prevent slouching; a belt that held their chest in place while they slept; an iron bar pressed to their collarbone, so they\u2019d sit up straight at the table. If Kentler talked out of turn, his father slammed his fist on the table and shouted, \u201cWhen the father talks, the children must be silent!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Kentler was ten during Kristallnacht, in 1938, when Nazi Storm Troopers raided Jewish temples, stores, and houses. Kentler\u2019s family was living in D\u00fcsseldorf, and Kentler was awakened by the noise of shattering glass. He came out of his bedroom and saw his father in a nightdress, holding the phone. \u201cIn his loud, dominant voice, my father called for a police deployment because someone had broken into our building,\u201d Kentler wrote in \u201cBorrowed Fathers, Children Need Fathers,\u201d a 1989 book about parenthood. \u201cIt was a longer conversation, during which my father became ever quieter, and ultimately he timidly hung up the receiver, stood there like he had collapsed and quietly said to my mother, who had been standing next to him for some time: \u2018They\u2019re going after the Jews!\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Soon, the doorbell rang. A Jewish family\u2014a mother, father, and three children\u2014who lived in the apartment below stood at the door. Their apartment had been destroyed, and they asked if they could spend the night with the Kentlers. \u201cNo, that will really not be possible here,\u201d Kentler\u2019s father said. He shut the door. Kentler glimpsed his father\u2019s nightshirt climbing just above his knee, revealing his soft naked legs. \u201cMy whole father suddenly seemed laughable to me,\u201d he wrote.<\/span><\/p>\n Shortly afterward, Kentler\u2019s father was called back to active duty. He rose to the rank of colonel, and moved his family to Berlin, where he worked at the High Command of the army of Nazi Germany. \u201cMy father\u2019s authority was never based on his own accomplishment, but on the large institutions in which he snuck into, that rubbed off on him,\u201d Kentler wrote. He was seventeen when the Nazis were defeated and his father came home, \u201ca broken man,\u201d Kentler wrote. \u201cI never again obeyed him and I felt terribly alone.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The postwar years in West Germany were marked by an intense preoccupation with sexual propriety, as if decorum could solve the nation\u2019s moral crisis and cleanse it of guilt. \u201cOne\u2019s own offspring did penance for Auschwitz,\u201d the German poet Olav M\u00fcnzberg wrote, \u201cwith ethics and morality forcefully jammed into them.\u201d Women\u2019s reproductive rights were severely restricted, and the policing of homosexual encounters, a hallmark of Nazism, persisted; in the two decades after the war, roughly a hundred thousand men were prosecuted for this crime. Kentler was attracted to men and felt as if he \u201calways had one leg in prison,\u201d because of the risks involved in consummating his desires. He found solace in the book \u201cCorydon<\/a>,\u201d by Andr\u00e9 Gide, a series of Socratic dialogues about the naturalness of queer love. \u201cThis book took away my fear of being a failure and of being rejected, of being a negative biological variant,\u201d he wrote in a 1985 essay called \u201cOur Homosexuality.\u201d But nothing could be done to remedy his relationship with his parents. \u201cThey no longer loved me,\u201d he wrote.<\/span><\/p>\n In 1960, Kentler got a degree in psychology, a field that allowed him to be \u201can engineer in the realm of the\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. manipulatable soul,\u201d he said at a lecture. He became involved in the student movement, and at a meeting of the Republican Club, a group established by left-wing intellectuals, he publicly identified himself as gay for the first time. Not long afterward, he wrote, he decided to turn \u201cmy passions into a profession (which is also good for the passions: they are controlled).\u201d He earned a doctorate in social education from the University of Hannover, publishing his dissertation, a guidebook called \u201cParents Learn Sex Education,\u201d in 1975. He was inspired by the Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich<\/a>, who had argued that the free flow of sexual energy was essential to building a new kind of society. Kentler\u2019s dissertation urged parents to teach their children that they should never be ashamed of their desires. \u201cOnce the first feelings of shame exist, they multiply easily and expand into all areas of life,\u201d he wrote.<\/span><\/p>\n Like many of his contemporaries, Kentler came to believe that sexual repression was key to understanding the Fascist consciousness. In 1977, the sociologist Klaus Theweleit published \u201cMale Fantasies<\/a>,\u201d a two-volume book that drew on the diaries of German paramilitary fighters and concluded that their inhibited drives\u2014along with a fear of anything gooey, gushing, or smelly\u2014had been channelled into a new outlet: destruction. When Kentler read \u201cMale Fantasies,\u201d he could see Schreber, the child-care author whose principles his parents had followed, \u201cat work everywhere,\u201d he wrote. Kentler argued that ideas like Schreber\u2019s (he had been so widely read that one book went through forty editions) had poisoned three generations of Germans, creating \u201cauthoritarian personalities who have to identify with a \u2018great man\u2019 around them to feel great themselves.\u201d Kentler\u2019s goal was to develop a child-rearing philosophy for a new kind of German man. Sexual liberation, he wrote, was the best way to \u201cprevent another Auschwitz.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The trials of twenty-two former Auschwitz officers had revealed a common personality type: ordinary, conservative, sexually inhibited, and preoccupied with bourgeois morality. \u201cI do think that in a society that was more free about sexuality, Auschwitz could not have happened,\u201d the German legal scholar Herbert J\u00e4ger said. Sexual emancipation was integral to student movements throughout Western Europe, but the pleas were more pitched in Germany, where the memory of genocide had become inextricably\u2014if not entirely accurately\u2014linked with sexual primness. In \u201cSex After Fascism<\/a>,\u201d the historian Dagmar Herzog describes how, in Germany, conflicts over sexual mores became \u201can important site for managing the memory of Nazism.\u201d But, she adds, it was also a way \u201cto redirect moral debate away from the problem of complicity in mass murder and toward a narrowed conception of morality as solely concerned with sex.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n