Starting in 1969, Berlin welfare authorities handed over the care of at least three homeless teenagers to Dr Helmut Kentler, a sex researcher from Hanover. He placed the youths with known paedophiles, including one who already had a criminal record for child abuse, believing that it would give troubled teens a social anchor while giving the paedophiles a chance to become caring foster parents.
In most cases the paedophiles were asked to care for 13-, 14- and 15-year-old drug addicts and prostitutes, of which there were about 1,000 in 1970s West Berlin.
Germany’s paedophile past reared its head again in 2013
when links emerged between founding members of the Green Party and West Germany’s Paedophile Movement, which rode the coat-tails of gay-rights groups and lobbied for the decriminalisation of consensual sex between adults and children.
In 1975 a Green Party leading light,
Daniel Cohn-Bendit (this guy is in European Parliament atm), who was a kindergarten teacher at the time, wrote a book praising “erotic games” between adults and young children. In 1981 Jürgen Trittin, today a senior Green MP and then a young party official in Göttingen,
signed off on a party pamphlet seeking the decriminalisation of paedophilia.
The party commissioned a study into the full extent of Green-paedophilia links. Published a week before the 2013 federal election, it cost the party countless votes and prompted a grovelling apology from Trittin. He argued that the paedophile links had to be seen in the context of the sexual revolution of the 1970s, which encouraged a “fiction that there could be sexual relations between adults and children beyond violence or abuse of trust”.