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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