A Truly Grim German Horror Story: The Kentler Experiment

Jack Curson

The architect of the 'experiment': Helmut Kentler.

This article explores the dark story of how the legacy of Nazism, and some of the misguided reactions against it, facilitated a shocking programme in which some of West Berlin’s most neglected children were sent into the homes of known paedophiles. The ‘experiment’ lasted from the late-1960s through to the early 2000s and was masterminded by the then-prominent German psychologist Helmut Kentler. The programme was authorised and financially supported by the Berlin Senate, which provided the foster fathers with a regular care allowance. Whilst investigators have been able to establish much of what happened, many of the details remain unknown. If the Senate archives ever contained files detailing how Kentler’s dark project came to be approved, the true scope of the programme or how he identified the foster fathers, they’ve been either lost or destroyed.

What we do know, is that by the time that his ‘experiment’ began in the late-1960s, Helmut Kentler was a leading scholar in the field of sexology, that is the study of human sexual relationships. At the time, the German newspaper Die Zeit described Kentler as Germany’s ‘chief authority on questions of sexual education’, with the then-admired academic having authored numerous notable books on sex education and parenting. Kentler directed the Department for Social Pedagogy and Adult Education at the renowned Pedagogical Centre between 1967 and 1974. Financed and supervised by the Berlin Senate, the Pedagogical Centre was established in 1965 with the aim of making Berlin a global leader in reforming approaches and practices regarding education.

West Berlin's Zoo Station.

During his time at the institution, Kentler came into contact with a 13 year-old male prostitute called Ulrich. Ulrich was one of the many young male prostitutes who solicited in the area surrounding the Zoo Station, the central transport hub in West Berlin. Ulrich told Kentler about a man he referred to as ‘Mother Winter’, who fed and attended to the various young male prostitutes in exchange for sex. Clearly struck by Ulrich’s testimony, Kentler wrote that “if the prostitutes call this man ‘mother’, he can’t be bad”. With the approval and support of the Senate, Kentler proceeded to expand and formalise Ulrich’s arrangement by arranging for a number of other local paedophiles to become foster fathers. It is this shocking arrangement which has come to be known as the Kentler Experiment.

The first report on the Kentler Experiment was published by political scientist Teresa Nentwig in 2016. Following Nentwig's initial revelations and the subsequent furore, the Berlin Senate commissioned a further report, which was eventually published by academics at Hildesheim University in 2020. The report established that there was a network across educational institutions, the state youth welfare office and the Senate in which paedophilia was accepted, supported and even defended. Additionally, the report highlighted that the Senate also ran foster homes for young Berliners with pedophiles in other parts of West Germany. Importantly, both reports were inhibited by the inaccessibility of materials in the city archives, whether it being due to them being missing, unsorted or sealed. This indicates that attempts at discovering the full details of the horrific experiment have been at best undermined by disinterested individuals, or at worst impeded by hostile ones. Nentwig initially assumed that the experiment ended in the 1970s. However, when the 2020 report was published, 2 victims came forward with their stories, one of which revealed that they’d remained in the foster home of pedophile Fritz Henkel until 2003.

The seat of the West Berlin Senate from 1949-1991, Rathaus Schöneberg.

In her 2022 book, Nentwig wrote that Kentler appeared to be conducting his own informal version of his ‘experiment’. Chillingly, one of her sources claimed that one of Kentler’s own foster children had come to her for therapy and divulged that Kentler had sexually abused them whilst under his guardianship. Moreover, one of Kentler’s old colleagues, Gunter Schmidt, has claimed that Kentler disclosed to him that he’d sexually abused one of his sons from the age of 13. Given Kentler was the foster father of numerous children whilst simultaneously being a long-time proponent of pedophilia, such claims are wholly intelligible and convincing.

Despite all this, Kentler was never prosecuted. Grievously, by the time the victims came forward the statute of limitations, that is the period in which individuals have the right to bring a claim, had expired. Clearly, this was no coincidence. Due to the criminal offence associated with the experiment, Kentler deliberately only made the experiment public after the expiry of the statute of limitations over 10 years later. By the time the victims had escaped their exploitative relationships and processed their trauma enough to come forward with their stories, decades had come to pass. As such, the ability of the victims to gain some kind of justice through the incarceration of the experiment’s chief architect and most influential proponent was lost. Kentler would die in 2008 aged 80, never having faced a criminal investigation.

The Seeds of the Experiment - Germany's Troubled Past

Creator of the poisonous pedagogy which informed Kentler's early years, Moritz Schreber.

To truly understand how such a horrific experiment was both approved of, and facilitated

by, popularly elected German politicians, it is essential to look back at the social history to which Kentler and his peers were reacting against. In the 19th-century, long before the rise of the Nazis, German approaches to parenting and sexuality were typified by rigid conservatism and emotional suppression. This mindset is exemplified by one of the nation’s most popular 19th-century writers on childcare, Moritz Schreber. Schreber promoted the repression of raw emotions and individuality amongst children as a means of creating stronger individuals, allegedly ‘freed’ from vulnerability. Evidently, Schreber’s ideas were misguided. Indeed, this is emphasised by the fact that many of Schreber’s children suffered from mental disease. One of his sons, Daniel Paul Schreber, wrote an autobiographical account of what would now be termed paranoid psychosis in his book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Notably, this work became influential in the historical development of psychoanalysis, as a result of its interpretation by the father of the discipline, Sigmund Freud.

After Hitler's Nazi Party took control of Germany in the early-1930s, the social conservatism and draconian approach to child-raising exemplified by Schreber was fused with the authoritarian capacity of a fascist state. The forceful expansion of the state into the everyday lives of the German people allowed for the systematic enforcement of ideas which, whilst certainly strong prior to Nazification, had previously prevailed more organically. Gone were the, admittedly limited, progressive gains of the Weimar Republic period, which lasted for only around 15 years between the end of the First World War and Hitler’s accession to power. In its place, sexual repression and austere child-raising was enforced on a totalitarian scale. Certainly, the most brutal consequences of these developments were experienced by sexual minorities. Around 100,000 German homosexuals were arrested during Nazi rule, hundreds were castrated and around 15,000 gay men were consigned to concentration camps, 60% of whom are thought to have died. However, a rigid approach to individual and sexual expression was pervasive across German society, with pernicious consequences for the nation's people.

Gay concentration camp prisoners, wearing the pink triangle which was used to signify their reason for imprisonment.

Whilst the horrors of Nazi Germany marked the dark zenith of sexual repression and social conservatism, postwar Germany wasn’t marked with a dramatic reversion from these core tenets of Nazi ideology. Indeed, postwar West Germany exhibited an absorption with social conservatism and sexual propriety. This preoccupation was inherently linked with the dilemmas of moral guilt and complicity relating to the atrocities of the Second World War, an idea neatly summarised by German poet Olav Münzberg’s declaration that the children of the era had “ethics and morality forcefully jammed into them” as “penance for Auschwitz”. Stringent restrictions on female productive rights were enforced, and whilst the barbarity of the Nazi’s treatment of homosexuals was disposed of, still around 100,000 German men were prosecuted for homosexuality in the 2 decades which followed the end of the Second World War.

These restrictive and traditionalist values which dominated Germany under Hitler, and to less fatal extents both before and following Nazi rule, would fundamentally inform Kentler’s own childhood during the 1930s and 40s. Kentler’s father worked in the German army’s High Command during World War Two and was a characteristically strict and severe parent. Indeed, he followed the highly damaging parenting philosophy espoused by Schreber in the previous century. Moreover, Kentler was gay and claimed to feel he “always had one leg in prison”, given Germany’s discriminatory treatment of homosexuals. Clearly, Kentler’s toxic childhood and repressed sexuality can’t be used as justification for his later actions. However, these deeply personal experiences of Germany’s severe approach to childcare and sexuality certainly provide an important context for the extreme views Kentler espoused in his later life.

Bleach in the Bath Water

Influential Marxist and Psychoanalyst, Wilhelm Reich.

Kentler was actively involved in left-wing student politics throughout his time at university, and during his psychology studies he was particularly influenced by the Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. Reich posited that the key to building a new society was the free flow of sexual energy, and viewed the ideologically-driven sexual repression of the masses as an essential component for understanding the success of numerous fascists movements in the 20th century. Reich’s ideas were hugely consequential and came to influence Kentler along with a great number of his contemporaries, who came to believe that it was sexual repression which was an essential component of the fascist consciousness which so brutally afflicted the German people.

This concept of sexual emancipation was a major theme of the counterculture of the 1960s. The simultaneous rise to prominence of the gay liberation movement, second-wave feminism and the sexual revolution, a term coined by Reich himself, led to radical student activism and a broader rethinking of social values across the Western world. However, the significance of sexual emancipation was more intense in Germany than elsewhere in Western Europe, where the vivid recent memory of genocide had become fundamentally intertwined with sexual repression. Whilst this focus on sexual repression can justifiably be seen as an attempt to deflect more fundamental reflections on the German people’s complicity in the holocaust towards a more limited focus on sexuality, the idea’s importance in the contemporary psyche is crucial.

Gay rights protestors in West Berlin.

As such, Kentler aimed at developing a fresh conception of child-rearing, one fundamentally driven by sexual liberation and diametrically opposed to the kind promoted by Schreber, which had governed his own upbringing as well as that of millions of other Germans. Evidently, the core premises of such a renewed approach offer a range of benefits. Such an approach would allow children freer expression of their raw emotions and diverse personalities, whilst the promotion and celebration of sexual diversity would fundamentally empower sexual minorities. However, the corrosive aspect which would darkly manifest itself in the Kentler Experiment came when sexual emancipation was extended as far as those who sought to exploit and abuse innocent children. The challenging of taboos regarding sexuality and gender were certainly powerful, but the extension of this counter-culture attitude to a well-founded and ethically-sound taboo was a grim, and tragically consequential, over-stretch.

Certainly, a desire to integrate paedophiles within the community of those who were to be liberated by the sexual revolution was never dominant. Indeed, the campaigning of women’s and gay rights campaigners was particularly effective in eventually sidelining paedophiles and their advocates. The frustration of these communities at being grouped alongside child abusers, quite rightly, animated virulent criticism that such individuals could ever gain a foothold in a progressive social movement. Regardless, for a certain period of time, there was clearly an active and influential political and academic constituency which supported pedophilia, as a misguided means of challenging the legacy of the Nazis. Indeed, such ideas were candidly explored in the national arena. For example, in 1976, a writer in the popular German magazine Das Blatt suggested that the challenging forbidden sexual desire, including that for children, could be considered a “revolutionary event”. Kentler was an influential figure in this space, indeed one who openly and frankly spoke about his own support for paedophilia. In an interview with influential German magazine Der Spiegel Kentler claimed paedophiles could provide abandoned children with “a possibility of therapy”, whilst elsewhere he declared that sexual relations between adults and children could be “very positive”.

However, for this ideological acceptance of paedophilia to be operationalised in the Kentler Experiment, a further ingredient was required. In tangible terms, this ingredient may simply be identified as the collection of tragically unfortunate children who were the victims of Kentler’s experiment. However, to truly understand how such a heinous venture could be inflicted upon some of the most disadvantaged children in Germany, it is essential to understand how Kentler, and the political class who were complicit in his ‘experiment’, perceived these children.

A young Berliner rests with the ominous backdrop of the Berlin Wall.

Whilst reflecting on his ‘experiment’ during a 1981 speech to the German parliament, Kentler commented that the paedophiles ‘only put up with these feeble-minded boys because they were in love with them’. In essence what Kentler was claiming was that the children were so downtrodden and deprived that being fostered by paedophiles was their best hope. Aside from his misguided view that a paedophile foster parent could have a positive rather than detrimental impact on a child, this illustrates Kentler’s hopeless belief that these children were in such an otherwise irredeemable position that they could wish for no better. Given Kentler’s words didn’t provoke a concerted outcry from Senate politicians, it seems that this, if not Kentler’s depraved arguments regarding paedophilia, was crucial in their implicit support for his activities. The fact that the Senate aimed for West Berlin to become a bastion for progressive solutions to educational and societal issues certainly influenced their support for Kentler’s extreme programme. However, it was the bleak view that the children who were involved in Kentler’s programme had already irrevocably lost all hope for a somewhat stable and loving upbringing, that led the political class to approve and facilitate Kentler’s horrific project.

Influential political philosopher and holocaust survivor, Hannah Arendt.

In her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, the renowned political philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the term ‘the banality of evil’. In her book, Arendt analysed the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the key architects of the Holocaust. Through this phrase, Arendt sought to convey her view that, rather than being a malevolent individual, Eichmann was simply a thoughtless man who sought self-advancement within the Nazi bureaucracy and was, in essence, disconnected from the reality of his wicked acts. In many ways, the sympathetic approach of certain individuals on the left, exemplified by Kentler, towards paedophilia represents the polar opposite of the banality identified by Arendt. Rather than sleepwalking into malevolence, individuals like Kentler were so eager to breakdown the authoritarian and rigidly traditional social values which had been espoused by the Nazis that they lost all consideration of the fundamental power and comprehension imbalances which define interactions between adults and children. Certainly, challenging the dogmatic traditional values was an important and progressive good which the left delivered to Germany, in particular with regards to gender identity and sexuality. However, the inclination of some to group paedophiles alongside women and sexual minorities was not just an appalling insult to these communities, but also a hugely consequential posture which would lead to the abuse of an unknown number of marginalised children. Rather than throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, Kentler and his ideological allies added bleach to the bath.

The Political Fallout: Dark Pasts and Dark Arts

"The Greens - Alternative for everyone"

Whilst the Kentler Experiment is relatively unknown in Britain, revelations surrounding the project received considerable attention in Germany and, inevitably, has been used as a political football between competing political parties. Much of this is rooted in the significant inroads the pro-paedophilia movement made in the early years of the Green Party. The Green party was established in 1980 with the aim of providing parliamentary and political representation for the various progressive movements which had emerged in the 1960s and developed throughout the 1970s, notably environmentalists, gay rights campaigners, feminists and anti-war protestors. It is important to establish that the Green Party never adopted a pro-paedophilia platform at a national level. The so-called paedosexual movement quickly waned by the mid-1980s, due to both a heightened focus on victims rights and the tireless campaigning of feminists and sexual minorities, who were unmercifully grouped alongside paedophiles as individuals to be liberated by the sexual revolution. However, given the aforementioned specificities of Germany’s historical context, pro-paedophilia activists made their most significant inroads in this left-wing, counter-culture political party.

Influential Green politician, Jürgen Trittin.

At the party’s second ever national convention in Saarbrücken in 1980, a commission was established to specifically address the interests of paedophiles. Later, a national working group on ‘Gays, Pederasts and Transsexuals’ received funding from the Green Party, with the group only finally being dissolved in 1987, when paedophiles were rightly disaggregated from sexual minorities. Shockingly, the Greens also adopted, however briefly, pro-paedophilia stances at state and local levels. Future German minister and Green Party leader Jürgen Trittin signed off on a 1981 local party platform which argued in favour of legalising sex between adults and children. Moreover, the party’s manifesto in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1985 included support for the legalisation of ‘non-violent sexuality’ between adults and children. Thankfully, public outrage and political protestations against such stances meant they were only briefly adopted and were never endorsed at the national level. However, during the party’s formative years, there appears to have been an environment in which pro-paedophile activists could freely, openly, and at times successfully, advocate their principles.

Tragically, pro-paedophilia circles within the party also facilitated real-life child abuse. In 2013, the German national newspaper Die Welt detailed the story of an anonymous male victim who’d suffered abuse at a left-wing commune in the 1980s by the then-prominent Green Party member Hermann Meer whilst he was still a child. Moreover, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, an MEP and leader of the Greens at the European Parliament until 2014, received widespread condemnation when a recording surfaced in which he described his own abuse of children when he worked as a teacher at an alternative Frankfurt kindergarten, an account which Cohn-Bendit has since claimed to be a fabrication.

Controversial Green politician, Daniel Cohn-Bendit.

Obviously, the political fallout following revelations regarding the warm reception some pro-paedophile groups received in the party’s early years is wholly intelligible. This is a highly concerning chapter of the recent history of a major German political party. Indeed, the Greens now have 5 ministers in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’ traffic light coalition cabinet, which is made up of Scholz’s own centre-left Social Democratic Party, the liberal Free Democratic Party and the Greens. As such, the party now holds real influence on German policy during a turbulent time for the nation, given the War in Ukraine and its varied domestic consequences. Thus, concerns over the party’s recent past and the judgement of individuals who are, or were recently, active in the party are clearly relevant. Importantly, being on the right side of morality is a fundamental aspect of the Green’s political capital. The Green’s have a consistent history of promoting policies supporting environmental protection and the empowerment of minority individuals, whilst the party also played a key role in highlighting abuse in the Catholic Church. Evidently, its harbouring of pro-paedophile actors in its formative years somewhat challenges the consistency of this core tenet of the Green’s political image.

However, unfortunately, much of the reaction to the revelations surrounding the Kentler Experiment appears to be just another example of victims becoming political footballs for politicians, who exploit them for their own expediency. Germany’s far right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) sought to capitalise on the scandal surrounding the Kentler Experiment as a means of propagating its own highly conservative and exclusionary social values. AfD parliamentarians used the furore not just to challenge left-wing parties to address their histories, but also to call for a reversion to the restrictive ideas which Kentler had rebelled against. Alongside its thinly veiled racist leanings, indicated in its support for dramatically curtailing immigration and its stated aim of defending Germany’s native culture, the party also supports conservative social policies which seek to repeal the progress which has been achieved by generations of progressives. For example, the AfD defends the traditional family as an essential building block of social life and opposes same-sex marriage, whilst a group associated with the party held ‘Stop Kentler’s sex education’ rallies to protest how sexuality is currently taught at German schools.

"Stop Islamisation" - AfD propaganda.

In a long-read piece in the New Yorker, Rachel Aviv focuses on the life of one of the victims of the Kentler Experiment, Marco. Following litigation, Marco secured a major offer of damages from the Senate for their facilitative role in his abuse, however an AfD adviser who’d helped him in his campaign urged him to continue his lawsuit against the Senate. Consequently, Marco stated that he felt as if he was being manipulated and, fearful of becoming a “political tool” in an election campaign, he chose to accept the compensation and drop the charges. The fact that the AfD sought to drag out Marco’s case, despite the fact he’d secured the compensation he desired, emphasises the self-interest which has driven the AfD’s response to revelations regarding the experiment. Rather than listening to victims or pursuing real justice, the AfD’s preoccupation has been with damaging its opponents politically and turning back time to reinvigorate the kind of repressive, traditionalist values to which Kentler reacted against.

A Belated Reversal and Life After Kentler

In a roundabout, and woefully belated, change in conviction, Kentler would in his later life radically change his position regarding paedophilia. After his adopted son committed suicide in 1991, that is the child which he is alleged to have abused from the age of 13, Kentler read an academic paper by the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi. In this work, Ferenczi posited that sexual relations between adults and children were invariably exploitative, asymmetrical and harmful as a child’s personality is “not sufficiently consolidated in order to be able to protest” leading them to “identify themselves with the aggressor”. Obviously, psychological arguments, alongside a vast swathe of further moral and ethical positions, had long-been employed to comprehensively condemn paedophilia. However, sadly, it took personal tragedy, indeed one involving an individual who is alleged to have been a personal victim of Kentler, for him to truly reflect on his own perspective. Clearly, the suffering of an unknown number of other more distant children was detached and abstract enough from his own life for Kentler to overlook or sideline their suffering. In 1999, Kentler made his last recorded public statement in which he claimed paedophilia to be a “sexual disorder” as a result of the “monopoly on definition” which adults inevitably hold regarding the understanding of sexual relations. Whilst Kentler’s dramatic reversal may reflect progress regarding societal approval regarding paedophilia, it came far too late for the victims of his dark project. Indeed, it came even before some of the last known victims left the homes to which they’d been condemned to during their childhood.

Sadly, yet expectedly, political opportunism has sullied much of the subsequent discourse regarding the Kentler Experiment. Only with comprehensive, sincere and honest reflection can some form of common-understanding and progress beyond this this dark part of Germany’s recent history be achieved. Indeed, there is some hope. With a focus on resocialisation, Germany has become a pioneer in treating paedophiles before they offend. For example in 2005, in the same city in which Kentler’s fateful experiment was carried out, the Charite Hospital established the world’s first program to treat potential paeophiles before they offend, providing a combination of drug treatment and therapy which has so far offered encouraging results. Progressive projects like this, and a more authentic reflection on the Kentler Experiment is the best that can be hoped for, given the victims have been deprived of the opportunity for real justice.