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.
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 “likely never experienced a positive parent-child relationship,” the youth-welfare office searched for a foster home in Berlin. “Mr. Henkel seems to be ideally suited to this difficult task,” doctors from a clinic at the Free University of Berlin wrote.
“We run under his feet, making him trip and fall on us. We sue his ass back to the Stone Age, the house is ours, and he’s the one sleeping in a pile of stinky laundry.”
Cartoon by Ivan Ehlers
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. “I just accepted it out of loyalty, because I didn’t know anything else,” Marco told me. “I didn’t 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.” If Sven’s bedroom door was open and he wasn’t there, Marco knew what was happening, but the two boys never talked about what Henkel did to them. “It was an absolutely taboo subject,” Marco said.
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. “There’s a devil behind my wall,” 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.
Marco’s 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. “It was as if he wanted to say: there is no point in anything,” Henkel wrote. Kentler warned the youth-welfare office that Marco’s “educational successes are ruined by a few hours of being with his mother.” Marco’s 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 “fearful fantasies when he noticed people of Arab appearance on the street.”
Marco’s 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 “prisoner”—Henkel always sat close by, in an adjacent room. Marco remembers that, once, after a session began without Henkel’s 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. “Not with me!” he shouted. “If you all want to make a ‘case’ out of [Sven], then do it without me.” (Sven seemed upset by the outburst, asking Henkel, “Does that mean you want to give me away?”)
In a letter, Kentler advised the youth-welfare office that, if a psychological assessment had to be done, he would perform it. “Insights beyond my findings are not to be expected,” he wrote. He acknowledged that Henkel could appear “harsh and hurtful,” but “I ask you to consider that a man who deals with such seriously damaged children is not a ‘simple person,’ ” he wrote, in another letter. “What Mr. Henkel needs from the authorities is trust and protection.”
When Marco was nine, his mother petitioned a district judge in Berlin to allow her to spend more time with him. Marco’s father told the youth-welfare office that he could not understand why Marco was growing up in a “strange family,” deprived of an Arabic education. He also “made massive accusations against the foster father’s behavior,” a caseworker wrote. But Marco’s mother had signed an agreement stating that she would “always be guided by the best interests of my child,” and that determination was made by the youth-welfare office.
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, “If you are being threatened, call out!” 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, “Not often.” He said that once a year would be better, and insisted that “Papa should be there.” He explained that he was afraid of his biological father, and now that he was with Papa he was no longer scared. “Only sometimes at night,” he added.
After the hearing, Kentler sent a letter to the judge, saying, “For the best interests of the child, I consider it absolutely essential that contact with the family of origin—including the mother—be completely suspended for the next two years.” Kentler also emphasized that Marco needed distance from the men in his family, because they set a bad example. He said that Marco’s mood changed when he spoke about his father. Though Kentler had never met Marco’s dad, he characterized him as authoritarian, abusive, and macho. He also disapproved of Marco’s fifteen-year-old brother, who was six feet four and weighed two hundred and twenty-five pounds. The boy “gives the (false) impression of strength and superiority,” Kentler wrote, and was already molding himself in his father’s image; he was “addicted to being the big man.”
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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.
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 “likely never experienced a positive parent-child relationship,” the youth-welfare office searched for a foster home in Berlin. “Mr. Henkel seems to be ideally suited to this difficult task,” doctors from a clinic at the Free University of Berlin wrote.
“We run under his feet, making him trip and fall on us. We sue his ass back to the Stone Age, the house is ours, and he’s the one sleeping in a pile of stinky laundry.”
Cartoon by Ivan Ehlers
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. “I just accepted it out of loyalty, because I didn’t know anything else,” Marco told me. “I didn’t 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.” If Sven’s bedroom door was open and he wasn’t there, Marco knew what was happening, but the two boys never talked about what Henkel did to them. “It was an absolutely taboo subject,” Marco said.
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. “There’s a devil behind my wall,” 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.
Marco’s 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. “It was as if he wanted to say: there is no point in anything,” Henkel wrote. Kentler warned the youth-welfare office that Marco’s “educational successes are ruined by a few hours of being with his mother.” Marco’s 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 “fearful fantasies when he noticed people of Arab appearance on the street.”
Marco’s 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 “prisoner”—Henkel always sat close by, in an adjacent room. Marco remembers that, once, after a session began without Henkel’s 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. “Not with me!” he shouted. “If you all want to make a ‘case’ out of [Sven], then do it without me.” (Sven seemed upset by the outburst, asking Henkel, “Does that mean you want to give me away?”)
In a letter, Kentler advised the youth-welfare office that, if a psychological assessment had to be done, he would perform it. “Insights beyond my findings are not to be expected,” he wrote. He acknowledged that Henkel could appear “harsh and hurtful,” but “I ask you to consider that a man who deals with such seriously damaged children is not a ‘simple person,’ ” he wrote, in another letter. “What Mr. Henkel needs from the authorities is trust and protection.”
When Marco was nine, his mother petitioned a district judge in Berlin to allow her to spend more time with him. Marco’s father told the youth-welfare office that he could not understand why Marco was growing up in a “strange family,” deprived of an Arabic education. He also “made massive accusations against the foster father’s behavior,” a caseworker wrote. But Marco’s mother had signed an agreement stating that she would “always be guided by the best interests of my child,” and that determination was made by the youth-welfare office.
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, “If you are being threatened, call out!” 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, “Not often.” He said that once a year would be better, and insisted that “Papa should be there.” He explained that he was afraid of his biological father, and now that he was with Papa he was no longer scared. “Only sometimes at night,” he added.
After the hearing, Kentler sent a letter to the judge, saying, “For the best interests of the child, I consider it absolutely essential that contact with the family of origin—including the mother—be completely suspended for the next two years.” Kentler also emphasized that Marco needed distance from the men in his family, because they set a bad example. He said that Marco’s mood changed when he spoke about his father. Though Kentler had never met Marco’s dad, he characterized him as authoritarian, abusive, and macho. He also disapproved of Marco’s fifteen-year-old brother, who was six feet four and weighed two hundred and twenty-five pounds. The boy “gives the (false) impression of strength and superiority,” Kentler wrote, and was already molding himself in his father’s image; he was “addicted to being the big man.”
READ THE REST HERE
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