S2 E7 Air Date: Aug 23, 2024

Helmut Kentler, was a German psychologist, sexologist, and professor of social education at the University of Hannover. He was of the opinion that children should not be sexually repressed, that they were capable of having sexual urges and consenting to intercourse with adults. This revelation came to him while he was working as a youth education officer at the Evangelista Akademie Arnoldshain.

            By the early 1960s he’d become a research assistant in the protestant youth work, Studeinzentrum Josefstal at Neuhaus am Schliersee. He was the “first pedagogue” of the theory of emancipatory youth work. This would give him nationwide renown. He worked his way from promotion to promotion until he ended up as department director at the Pedagogical Centre in Berlin.

            All of this is to say that Kentler went around spewing his pedophile philosophies guised as sexual liberation. He published books and dissertations about his advocacy for emancipatory sexual education in the home. He claimed that parents should engage their children in peaceful sexual acts so that when they came of age to seek partners, they would not be fumbling and embarrassed. He stated that it was the violence that made pedophile sexual wrong and that those were the exception not the rule. In his studies he reported that the vast majority of pedophiles would not coerce or rape their victims because they genuinely loved them.

            This ideology lead to him seeking funds and participants for his model experiment. He collaborated with the west German government to place foster boys ages 13-15 with single men he knew to be pedophiles. His theory was that pedophiles had the best touch at reintegrating traumatized war orphans back into society allowing them to grow into mature adults.

            A factional hearing with the Federal Democratic Party was held in 1982. Here Kentler would report that; “These people only endured these moronic boys because they were in love and infatuated with them.” Basically saying that these damaged children were too much of a hassle for normal parents, leaving their only option to be pedophiles because they’d been patient with the boys because of their “taboo desires.”

            All of this took place in secret, hidden from the public until the statute of limitations would expire. From the 1960s to the 1990s, Kentler would scour orphanages placing an undetermined number of children with predators. He held sessions with the victims to monitor their progress and behaviors. In any situation where outside doctors or officials interviewed the boys, they would be silenced and spoken for by their captors.