Παιδιά στη Γερμανία δίνονταν επί δεκαετίες σε παιδόφιλους άντρες για να γίνουν ανάδοχοι γονείς τους
Το «σχέδιο Κέντλερ» στο δυτικό Βερολίνο «έδινε» άστεγα παιδιά συστηματικά σε παιδόφιλους, θεωρώντας πως θα γίνονταν ιδανικοί ανάδοχοι γονείς, μια πρακτική που -σύμφωνα με έρευνα- κράτησε δεκαετίες.
Ο καθηγητής ψυχολογίας Χέλμουτ Κέντλερ ξεκίνησε το «πείραμα» την δεκαετία του 1970, δίνοντας σκόπιμα παιδιά που δεν είχαν σπίτι σε παιδόφιλους άντρες. Αυτοί οι άντρες θα γίνονταν εξαιρετικά στοργικοί ανάδοχοι γονείς, υποστήριζε ο Κέντλερ.
Έρευνα που πραγματοποίησε το πανεπιστήμιο Hildesheim διαπίστωσε πως οι αρχές του Βερολίνου εφάρμοζαν αυτή την πρακτική για σχεδόν 30 χρόνια, ενώ οι παιδόφιλοι ανάδοχοι πατέρες λάμβαναν μέχρι και τακτικό βοήθημα για την ανατροφή των παιδιών.
Ο Χέλμουτ Κέντλερ (1928-2008), που κατείχε σημαντική θέση στο κέντρο εκπαιδευτικής έρευνας του Βερολίνου, ήταν πεπεισμένος πως η σεξουαλική επαφή ανάμεσα ενήλικες και παιδιά ήταν ακίνδυνη.
Οι υπηρεσίες παιδικής πρόνοιας του Βερολίνου και η Γερουσία έκαναν τα στραβά μάτια στις αναδοχές ή ακόμα και τις ενέκριναν.
Πριν από μερικά χρόνια, δύο από τα θύματα αποκάλυψαν την ιστορία τους, με το πανεπιστήμιο Hildesheim να διεξάγει έκτοτε συνεντεύξεις αναζητώντας ταυτόχρονα πληροφορίες σε αρχεία.
Αυτό που ανακάλυψαν ήταν «ένα δίκτυο σε εκπαιδευτικά ιδρύματα, την κρατική υπηρεσία πρόνοιας για τους νέους και τη Γερουσία του Βερολίνου», στο οποίο η παιδοφιλία ήταν «αποδεκτή και υποστηριζόμενη».
Ο ίδιος ο Κέντλερ διατηρούσε τακτικές επαφές με τα παιδιά και τους ανάδοχους πατέρες τους. Σε βάρος του δεν ασκήθηκε ποτέ δίωξη, αφού μέχρι τα θύματά του να βρουν το θάρρος να μιλήσουν, τα εγκλήματά του είχαν ήδη παραγραφεί. Για τον λόγο αυτό τα θύματα δεν έχουν λάβει μέχρι σήμερα καμία αποζημίωση.
Οι ερευνητές διαπίστωσαν ότι πολλοί από τους ανάδοχους πατέρες ήταν διακεκριμένοι ακαδημαϊκοί. Κάνουν λόγο για ένα δίκτυο που περιλάμβανε υψηλόβαθμα μέλη του Ινστιτούτου Max Planck, του Ελεύθερου Πανεπιστημίου του Βερολίνου και του διαβόητου Σχολείου Odenwald στην Έσση, που βρέθηκε στο επίκεντρο ενός τεράστιου σκανδάλου παιδοφιλίας πριν από αρκετά χρόνια, και πλέον έχει κλείσει.
Η Γερουσιαστής του Βερολίνου, Sandra Scheeres, χαρακτήρισε τα ευρήματα της μελέτης «σοκαριστικά και τρομακτικά».
Μια πρώτη έκθεση για το «πείραμα Κέντλερ» δημοσιεύτηκε το 2016 από το Πανεπιστήμιο του Göttingen. Οι ερευνητές της εν λόγω μελέτης δήλωσαν στη συνέχεια ότι η Γερουσία του Βερολίνου δεν έδειξε να ενδιαφέρεται για την αποκάλυψη της αλήθειας.
Ωστόσο, οι αρχές του Βερολίνου δεσμεύτηκαν να ρίξουν φως στην υπόθεση.
Με πληροφορίες από Deutsche Welle
The German Experiment That Placed Foster Children with Pedophiles
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’s 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 “Kentler experiment.” 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 “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 was impressed by Henkel’s 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 “excited about almost everything that was offered to him.”
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 “hear 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,” 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.
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