How Could You? Hall of Shame-Germany-Helmut Kentler

This will be an archive of heinous actions by those involved in child welfare, foster care and adoption. We forewarn you that these are deeply disturbing stories that may involve sex abuse, murder, kidnapping and other horrendous actions.

From Berlin, Germany, foster father Helmut 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 “complete success.”

Marco had grown up in foster care, and his foster father had frequently taken him to Kentler’s 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, “I just pushed it aside. I didn’t react emotionally. I did what I do every day: nothing, really. I sat around in front of the computer.”

Marco looks like a movie star—he is tanned, with a firm jaw, thick dark hair, and a long, symmetrical face. As an adult, he has cried only once. “If someone were to die in front of me, I would of course want to help them, but it wouldn’t affect me emotionally,” he told me. “I have a wall, and emotions just hit against it.” 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’t belong to him.

Several months after reading the article, Marco looked up the number for Teresa Nentwig, a young political scientist at the University of Göttingen 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 “an affected person.” 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.

Nentwig had assumed that Kentler’s experiment ended in the nineteen-seventies. But Marco told her he had lived in his foster home until 2003, when he was twenty-one. “I was totally shocked,” she said. She remembers Marco saying several times, “You are the first person I’ve told—this is the first time I’ve told my story.” As a child, he’d taken it for granted that the way he was treated was normal. “Such things happen,” he told himself. “The world is like this: it’s eat and be eaten.” But now, he said, “I realized the state has been watching.”

A few weeks later, Marco phoned one of his foster brothers, whom he calls Sven. They had lived together in Henkel’s home for thirteen years. He liked Sven, but felt little connection to him. They had never had a real conversation. He told Sven he’d learned that they had been part of an experiment. But Sven seemed unable to process the information. “After all those years, we had gotten out of the habit of thinking,” Marco said.

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 Schöneberg youth-welfare office, which is run by the Berlin state government.

Caseworkers at the office observed that Marco’s mother seemed “unable to give him the necessary emotional attention.” She worked at a sausage stand, and was struggling to manage parenthood on her own. Marco’s 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 “family-like atmosphere.” One described him as an attractive boy who was wild but “very easy to influence.”

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’s eighth foster son in sixteen years. When Henkel began fostering children, in 1973, a teacher noticed that he was “always looking for contact with boys.” Six years later, a caseworker observed that Henkel appeared to be in a “homosexual relationship” with one of his foster sons. When a public prosecutor launched an investigation, Helmut Kentler, who called himself Henkel’s “permanent adviser,” intervened on Henkel’s behalf—a pattern that repeats throughout more than eight hundred pages of case files about Henkel’s home. Kentler was a well-known scholar, the author of several books on sex education and parenting, and he was often quoted in Germany’s leading newspapers and on its TV programs. The newspaper Die Zeit had described him as the “nation’s chief authority on questions of sexual education.” On university letterhead, Kentler issued what he called an “expert opinion,” explaining that he had come to know Henkel through a “research project.” He commended Henkel on his parenting skills and disparaged a psychologist who invaded the privacy of his home, making “wild interpretations.” Sometimes, Kentler wrote, an airplane is not a phallic symbol—it is simply a plane. The criminal investigation was suspended.”

“Marco’s mother lost her plea for more access to her son. She was still allowed visits every few weeks at the youth-welfare office, but the meetings went increasingly badly. During the first visit after the court hearing, Marco told his mother that he didn’t want to see her, because she didn’t get along with his foster father. “While he was saying this, he did not make eye contact with his mother,” a social worker wrote. At the next visit, three weeks later, he refused to accept his mother’s gift—pens and a pad of paper—or to answer her questions. He repeatedly asked to leave, until his mother reluctantly agreed. She was “visibly shaken and cried,” the social worker wrote. “She no longer knows what to do.” The next day, Henkel called the youth-welfare office and said that he would support Marco “in demonstrating his rejection of his mother.”

“For years, Marco tolerated Henkel, but, as he began going through puberty, he said, “I started to hate him.” He spent an hour each day lifting weights, so that he would be strong enough to defend himself. One night, when Henkel tried to fondle him, Marco hit his hand. Henkel seemed startled but didn’t say anything. He just walked away.

Henkel stopped trying to sexually molest Marco, but he became punitive. At night, he locked the door to the kitchen so that Marco couldn’t eat. (“His greed when eating was noticeable,” Henkel once wrote.) He also hit Marco. “Go on, let off some steam,” Marco sometimes said, taunting Henkel. “He said he wasn’t hitting me—he was hitting the devil inside of me,” Marco told me.

When Marco turned eighteen, he was legally free to leave Henkel’s home, but it didn’t occur to him to move out. “It’s very hard to describe, but I was never raised to think critically about anything,” he said. “I had an empty mind.”

“One day, Kramer developed the flu. In the course of forty-eight hours, his breathing became increasingly labored. For years, Marco had checked on Kramer several times each night, to make sure that he was breathing. Now he was so worried that he lay in bed beside him. Henkel had always resisted calling doctors for the boys. By the time he gave in, Kramer could not be resuscitated. “It happened in front of my eyes,” Marco said. “I was looking into his eyes when he died.””

******
“For much of his career, Kentler spoke of pedophiles as benefactors. They offered neglected children “a possibility of therapy,” he told Der Spiegel, in 1980. “When the Berlin Senate commissioned him to prepare an expert report on the subject of “Homosexuals as caregivers and educators,” in 1988, he explained that there was no need to worry that children would be harmed by sexual contact with caretakers, as long as the interaction was not “forced.” The consequences can be “very positive, especially when the sexual relationship can be characterized as mutual love,” he wrote.

But in 1991 he seemed to rethink his opinion, after his youngest adopted son, the one he praised in the letter to Schmidt, committed suicide. ”

*****
“Marco and Sven tried to file civil lawsuits against the state of Berlin and the Tempelhof-Schöneberg district, the location of the youth-welfare office, for breach of official duties. But, under civil law, too much time had passed. The AfD asked an expert to analyze whether the statute of limitations had to apply to this case. Berlin’s education senator, Sandra Scheeres, a member of the Social Democratic Party, wanted to see if Marco and Sven would accept a compensation package rather than pursue a lawsuit that seemed doomed. She believed that the AfD was giving them bad advice, unnecessarily prolonging their attempt to get money.

*****
“When I visited Marco, in May, he and Emma had just moved from Berlin to a new development on the city’s outskirts that he asked me not to name or describe, because he didn’t want his neighbors to know about his past. He now has two children, and they were playing with Emma in their large back yard. Inside, Marco listened to meditative lounge music and drank water from the largest coffee mug I’ve ever seen. I had the sense that with a different childhood Marco might have aged into a fairly jolly middle-aged man. He was playful and earnest and spoke poetically about his view of the afterlife. He shared his children’s developmental milestones with nuance and pride. In a gust of hospitality, he asked if I wanted Emma to cut my hair, before apologizing profusely and saying that my hair looked just fine.”

The German Experiment That Placed Foster Children with Pedophiles
[New Yorker 7/26/21 by Rachel Aviv]

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