I'm a simple emigrant and I'll tell you a scary bedtime story

At the beginning of the 1970s, the West Berlin Youth Welfare Office supported Helmut Kentler's idea: pedophiles were to take care of adoptive children. Probably every immigrant parent has heard horror stories about strict German parenting rules. Skipping school is absolutely forbidden, otherwise the School Affairs Office (Schulamt) will come and ding you with a four-figure fine. You can't leave children at home alone, and scolding too harshly either – the Youth Welfare Office (Jugendamt) will take the child away. Stranger still is that this story happened in modern Germany. Helmut Kentler at the time was a respected educator and an expert in sexual education and progressive pedagogy. In the beginning he conceived that children who engaged in street prostitution should be placed under the guardianship of pedophiles. He selected three men convicted of pedophilia. The idea was that such difficult children could not be loved by anyone else. He said: “I understood clearly that the three men had done so much for ‘their’ boy primarily because they had sexual relations with him.” For him, all of this was simply an experiment. And for the state — a social project. Since then Kentler acted not alone. Essentially, this is an incredible network of respected educators, social workers, employees of Jugendamt and other people. Children were simply handed over to men convicted or suspected of pedophilia, under the guise of rehabilitative guardianship, right in front of everyone's eyes. Children were deliberately taken from Berlin's children's homes into private guardianship, into shared living houses (something like mini-institutions — several children under one roof with a caregiver) and into the Odenwald School. Officials at that moment simply looked the other way: worried reports from people reached the same workers and were conveniently ignored. And only in the 1990s did cases of violence at the Odenwald become public, but it was already too late. Studies showed, that by that time the network had already covered the entire country: from Berlin to Lower Saxony, from Göttingen to Tübingen. It included universities, churches, research institutes. Even after Kentler's death, part of his supporters continued to work with youth, write expert opinions, shape norms. How many people in total were affected to date remains unknown. The investigation was initiated only in 2016, when two men who survived spoke publicly about their tragic story. But the scariest thing is that NO ONE was punished! Kentler himself died in 2008 long before the investigation, the same happened to several other criminals. Others remained at large because the statute of limitations had expired, and others, because they were respected people and equally respected people stood up for them. And the victims were offered some money; apparently those same “respectable” people kicked in a few kopecks and continued living their wonderful lives without suffering. What do you think of the examples of upbringing in an advanced country? #history #Ordnung photo: © picture-alliance/dpa