Behind the Bastards - The School That Raped Everbody

Episode Date: December 12, 2019

In episode 100, Robert is joined by Miles Gray to discuss a school made for child molesters.FOOTNOTES: Odenwald school principal reveals horror abuse reports More sexual abuse victims at schools in Hesse Odenwaldschule board resigns in wake of abuse claims The politics of progressive education: The odenwaldschule in Nazi Germany Decades of Molestation Haunt Odenwaldschule Male Intergenerational Intimacy German principal admits school abuse stories ignored Abuse scandal hits elite progressive school Pedo-Sexuality How the Left Took Things Too Far Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. That's how we're starting this episode. I'm Robert Evans, a host behind the bastards, and I'm trying out new introduction techniques because I just got off of 40 hours of plane flights. My guest today is Mr. Miles Gray! Miles, what is this show about? I call it behind the bastards. I don't know what everyone else calls it. Do you also refer to it as behind the bastards? That's a great name. I think we might have to, Sophie, make a note of that one so we can steal it from Miles.

Sophie, don't just make a note of it. Get it tatted for posterity. Wait, where were you traveling for 40 hours? It was just a lot of layovers and stuff. It was only Europe, but you wind up getting stuck in airports here and there. I hear you, brother. So, Miles, how do you feel about schools? Oh, fuck school, dude. I'm a cool kid. Fuck school. You know, that answer, Miles, that you gave is going to turn out to be very appropriate for a couple of reasons, most of them unfortunate. Jesus Christ. I don't even know why I said anything.

We are talking about a school today, and it is definitely a fuck school, but not in any kind of good way. In horrible crimes. Child molestation, sort of. It's got dark really fast, Robert. Yeah, this is a bad way to introduce this episode, but there's no good way to introduce this episode. Yeah, this isn't behind the fun times. It's behind the bastards. That behind the fun times is my other podcast. Could you imagine a show where you're hosting it and you're just doing behind the scenes of some of the happiest, pleasant moments. Like, you know, pleasant moments in our history.

Hey, we released one happy episode. We did release, well, he died at the end. Yeah, it didn't end well, but the work was good. Yeah. I'd like to have an episode where Werner Herzog and I just talk about different puppets we think are cute. I think I like the baby Yoda. I'd like to hug and caress him. I like that he really kept his vibe up in the Mandalorian. He keeps it 100% Werner. He's never anything but Werner Herzog, and that's all we ever want from him.

Now, speaking of a German, this whole episode is set in Germany. Yeah, it is. So yeah, schools, miles, none of us is, I'm going to say, overwhelmingly happy with the school system in the United States. I think that's a safe bet. Especially our educational system is meant as a barrier to entry for a certain class. So when you look at school like that, rather than like, hey, education is available to everyone, it puts a bit of a bad taste. I mean, I literally just went to college because it was drilled in my head. It's like, well, you can't get a job unless you go to college.

And I was like, well, then I'm all right. That's why I spent 20 grand in debt failing to get a degree and then dropping out because I didn't want to spend another 15. Yeah, no, good call. So yeah, there's problems involved with college or involved with education in general in this country. And there have been for a long time. I think most of what I still remember from my high school days is how to install Doom on a TI-83. Oh, wait, you could get Doom on a TI-83? Oh yeah, dude, yeah, or Wolfenstein.

It was one of the two, I forget exactly which. Probably Wolfenstein, but the best I could do is get that one thing that was called like drug wars. Or like the mafia game. Oh, drug wars was the shit, yo. Yeah, drug wars be like, press one to deal heroin. And I'm like, yeah, here we go. But I don't know like algebra. Either do I.

And I never learned how to pay my taxes. Shout out to my accountant. Yeah, he's a cool guy. Now, my point here in this rambling introduction is that in the year of our lord 2019, we're not great at educating the young. And this state of affairs is not new. And in fact, we've been shitty at educating kids basically since we decided it was important to start educating kids. And today, Miles, we're going to talk about one of the boldest and most brilliant reformers in the history of education.

A man whose ideas and intellectual courage were in some ways still way ahead of even our time. Have you ever heard of Paul Geheb? Paul Geheb? Geheb, yeah. No. Well, Paulus Geheb is actually the actual name. But we're going to call him Paul this episode because I don't truck with any of that Paulus nonsense. What kind of name is Paulus anyway?

It's some infuriating German name. Those people stick extra us and s's on all sorts of shit. Wow. It sounds like someone who would be like the son of like Caesar. Like a Roman leader would be Paulus. Well, I'm going to guess actually all of the U.S. names came from Romans just fucking and conquering all over the place. Paulus is a Latin surname, meaning small or humble. Well, he was a small humble man.

So we'll talk about him for a little bit. Paul was born on October 10th, 1870 in Giesa on the Rhone Mountains in Germany. His father and grandfather were both pharmaceutical chemists and his dad was also a botanist who specialized in mosses. So he grew up surrounded and influenced by people who lived lives of the mind. Now, some of Paul's earliest memories were following his father through the forest to look for rare mosses. By age eight, Paul signed his letters, Paul Geheb, student of natural sciences. So he's a he's a he's a knowledge lover, Miles. Why? Because his dad was dragging him to the forest.

I'm like, I pick up that grass over there and put it in your pocket. Yeah. Well, but I think he liked it. I think his dad was good at inculcating a love of the natural world and excitement and all that stuff. So there's something. He was good at it. There's something like really when I when you said 1870 and they were pharmaceutical chemists, I'm like, that sounds like a comedy. Yeah. I mean, I'm going to guess most of what his dad is working with is like a mix of heroin and snail poison. And eugenics to little kids.

Yeah. And you jet. No, there's a little bit before they're doing much eugenics. I'll give that to them. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't think Paul would have been down with that. But we'll tell you what he was down with a little later. Okay. Now, Paul graduated primary school and he went to the universities of Berlin and then Jenna for a total of 10 years.

He almost got a doctorate. He was a wonderful student who was renowned by his teachers for his sheer thirst for knowledge. He came to hold an almost religious belief in what he called the perfectly integrated human, a person whose mastery of humanism, science, philosophy and physical activity would blend into one being of almost complete perfection. So this is his dream. That's like his version of a Chad. Yeah. I think it's his version of like enlightenment. Okay.

That's kind of like a quasi Buddhist. Yeah. The perfect man. That education can build a perfect person. Now, in pursuit of achieving this end, he studied theology, philosophy, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, anatomy and physiology in the nascent science of psychiatry. He also got ordained as a pastor and studied religion. So that's cool. I'm ordained. I said theology early.

Are you ordained too? Yeah. So am I. Now everybody's ordained thanks to the church of life. Yeah, me too. That's what I mean. I mean, you know, Miles, if you want, there might still be room on the boat. There were Billy and I are going to go get trained to put bleach at people's asses so we can become referent doctors. I'm down for that. I mean, honestly, you know, my strength is in scamming and motivational speaking.

Yeah. So if, you know, if I can be of service to that greater vision, I would be more than honored to help. Well, we'll keep your name on the shortlist for the ass bleaching trip. I just see a lot of people out there who are really, really struggling and could use some kind of light at the end of the tunnel. And, you know, there's no, there's no better way to have light at the end of the tunnel than by bleaching your asshole. Yep. Quite literally. Bit of light of a different tunnel.

Yeah. Yeah. So Paul spent some time as a preacher, but he felt himself more strongly drawn to teach and mold young minds. So we started pursuing this doctorate and he got as far as working on his thesis. But in those days, there was a fee to take your doctorate exam, 300 marks. And rather than spend that money on reaching the apex of his 10 year educational dreams, Paul Keheb decided a wiser use would be to donate the money to a family he knew who faced financial collapse due to their alcoholic father. So he's a nice guy.

Yeah. Okay, Mr. Preacher. Yeah. So far it seems pretty great, right? Right now, not sounding like a bastard to me. Not sounding like a man of God. Yeah, like a man of God who really puts his money where his doctorate isn't. Yeah, he never became a doctor.

And instead he decided that he was called upon to educate the poor children of Germany's great cities. In 1902, he met up with a fellow named Hermann Leitz, who was working towards much the same goal. Both men were part of a movement of educational reform in Germany, focused around changing the authoritarian structure of German education at the time, which wouldn't have looked out of place in a movie about the Hitler Youth set 40 years later. So German education is not focused on, shall we say, treating children like complete human beings. So what does that look like? Just screaming, corporal punishment? I don't think much screaming.

I think more of that quiet but very stern and unbending German discipline. You know, they're not a shouty people a lot of the time. I think it was more just sort of, you know, everything was kind of military. There would have been a quasi-military feel to education. Talking up would not have been tolerated. Very rigid, very, very shame-based, I'm sure too. That was probably their great motivator. Yeah, shame-based and also everyone does the same thing and follows the same structure.

So like whether, you know, we now know kids, you know, different kids learn different ways. They wouldn't put in any, they would not, like, none of that bullshit in German school. You all do the same thing. They're like, yeah, we do exploration time where we let the children just sort of do as they want to do, to discover themselves. Children don't want things would be the German. Yeah, children don't want things. They don't want things. Paul became part of what was called sort of the back-to-nature movement in education.

He worked with a number of experimental learning institutions and wound up co-running what they called a school community in a place called Wickersdorf, or Wickersdorf since it's German. The basic idea behind this place is that it was a democratic learning institution. Students, parents, and teachers all elected representatives to vote on decisions about what curriculum to learn and, you know, how to handle different things. So seems like a pretty cool idea. Seems like something worth trying. Now, Paul's partner called this a self-educating community, and for several years it flourished.

Now, one major aspect of the Wickersdorf school was a focus on play, dance, music, and sports as all necessary in helping to craft well-rounded people. So you didn't just, you know, train kids to do whatever it is they were going to do as adults. You know, everyone needed to learn how to dance. Everybody needed to learn how to play an instrument. Everybody needed to learn sports. You know, it's this kind of idea of the perfectly integrated man that Paul's obsessed with. Is that kind of born out of this idea, like, if you know more things and you push yourself in as many different directions as possible, like, that's stretching yourself out for more growth or balance, basically?

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's kind of the idea. That reminds me, like, Dirk Nowitzki, the basketball player, he had a shooting coach that sort of had this same mentality. That was like, we're going to work on your jump shot, but this summer you're learning how to play saxophone. You're going to do a, you're going to, you're going to canoe and you're going to start doing, like, pottery. Not that it's necessarily the same, but it's sort of more like, we're going to help improve your skills by creating new skills that you didn't have in general. Yeah, it's kind of like how Karate Kid taught the Karate Kid how to do karate by teaching him how to clean Karate's house. Yeah.

Well, it's all karate. That's the secret message of Karate Kid is that all of life is karate. Thank you. Shout out to Pat Merida, aka Mr. Merida. The only person who taught me anything but how to install Wolfenstein on a TI-83. But also, he also told you, he taught you that too. He did teach me that too. It was weird that that karate class required $160 graphing calculator, but... Hey, everything's karate, man, even that graphing calculator. Yeah, so the Vickersdorf School did very well for years.

But by 1910, personality conflicts between Paul Keheben, his partner, Winneken, led to the breakup of the school. Paul resigned and decided it was time for him to start his own school. Now, while he'd been at Vickersdorf, Paul had fallen in love with one of his employees, Edith Kasserer. She'd started as a kindergarten teacher, which was not a very common job for a woman at the time, particularly a woman of her social stature, so she was a bit of a boundary breaker. Edith's dad was a wealthy industrialist. The fact that she decided to devote her life to educating the children of the poor rather than marrying rich and increasing the family wealth was something of a slap in the face to her father, Max, initially.

But while he opposed her marriage with Paul, by 1910, he'd been won over by Paul's charismatic enthusiasm for educational reform. And when his son-in-law decided to start a school, Max was only too happy to pour his own money into the project, so very happy story so far. No way any of this turns horrible. I mean, look, sounds great. Great step. Sounds great. Great father-in-law supporting your dreams. Sounds like a dream so far.

Really? Sounds wonderful, yeah. In 1910, the Odenwald School was open for business. Now, this is the school that Paul created with his dad-in-law's money. The Odenwald School was a massive evolution from the Vickersdorf School. Paul called it an educational laboratory and considered it a place for daring bold experiments in educational reforms, which he hoped would spur all of Germany and then the world beyond what he called the sluggish organism of public education. Now, he believed the key to reforming public education was to recognize that the individual personality of the child could not be developed in isolation, with pupils quietly taking information and taking in tests.

Instead, what was needed was a living community of adults and children working together to develop each other. The Odenwald School was a democratic learning institution. Students and teachers had equal votes on the school council. In Paul Gehieb's words, quote, the authority of the teacher is replaced by the authority of those who together represent the idea of the school. This authority is heated by adults as much as by children. That's the idea this is based on. It sounds good.

Sounds like it could work. Now, obviously, the adults are, you know, the more experienced and mature individuals, and so they were seen as having the responsibility to guide their students towards knowledge. But they weren't in charge of them in the authoritarian way, typical in most of the world at the time. As Paul said, to be governed is completely unknown in our school, for it is a community without superiors, a school without a director. It's some great stuff. A school without superiors, a school without... I mean, it's funny, when you started talking about this new school he made, I'm like, oh, he's starting to sound like he's getting a bit of a God complex here,

where he's almost been like, no, this is where the new shit is happening, and I'm completely changing everything, and it's me. Yeah, you know, at least on paper, it sounds like... It's kind of a mix of that, because like, he's definitely saying the whole system needs to be torn down, but he's also saying that like, we as a learning community are going to figure out what works better, because that's the real way to spur innovation. Now, I found a bunch of details on the organization of the Odenwald School in a 1962 article by Henry Kasserer, who was a nephew of Paul Gehebes, who attended the Odenwald School as a child, and here's what he said. Gehebes therefore introduced a new structure into the lesson plan. The CUR system. Its essential feature was that for a period of one month, each child had to choose courses in three subjects, each taught daily for 11 hours.

This made it possible for the student to concentrate on intensive studies in limited fields. Other subjects were then taken up during subsequent periods. The inviscence teaching was less on learning facts than upon learning to learn, to work independently, to study, and to understand. Another feature of the CUR system was that the children were to be gathered in study groups according to their level of maturity and knowledge, rather than according to age groups. Thus, a child might find himself with older children in one subject for which he was gifted, but with younger children in another subject where he had little previous schooling. So that makes a lot of sense. Sounds about right. Balance, like people around your intellectual level and whatnot.

Now, Paul was critical of gender segregation, which was very much common in German public schools at the time. The Odenwald School did not segregate students by gender. It was divided into families, each family run by a teacher who helped guide the children. Families consisted of both boys and girls, because Geheb believed it was critical to human development to have gender integration. Before his career as an educator, he'd been a militant crusader for women's emancipation. His 44-page application to the Imperial German government to start the Odenwald School had included 30 pages on the importance of gender integration. He wrote,

which is pretty woke for 1910. Yeah, I mean, I just, I don't know, I know what this show is, and what you said earlier, and now I'm starting to see the chess moves. Yeah, what do you mean by that? Well, you said you were alluding to some kind of abuse, and I just feel like in any sort of predatory situation, like a predator is looking for the most target-rich environment, and advocating for integration means many children of both genders.

And I just, I don't know, I'm just, I just know there's a turn, I've done this show enough with you, and then I'm going to start dry heaving and being disgusted, because humanity is just a gigantic waste pile. But go on, I'm waiting with you. Yeah, put a pin in that target-rich environment, thank you. We'll come back to that later. Yeah, so Paul's a reformer, and he thinks that this is going to act as like a laboratory to help figure out the way schools in Germany should work in the future,

and it's on paper. Yeah, seems like a noble pursuit, like you can't really say, you know, objectively, I understand what this person is going for. Yeah, now Paul's school was as successful as it was revolutionary. Over its first years, it would educate men who came to be some of the finest artistic and philosophical minds in Germany. Klaus Mann, Thomas Mann's son, went to the Odenwald School. So did Hans Beth, winner of the 1967 Nobel Prize for Physics.

I could go on, but most of the famous alumni are German famous, so their names are not particularly well known to most listeners. Well, try me. There's a lot of famous German thinkers who came from here. I only wrote down the two files, but there's a whole list of them, and they're all very German sounding. Now, by the time the late 1920s rolled around, the Odenwald School had developed an international reputation

as one of the finest centers of learning in all of Europe. Oh, not bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah, pretty cool. Now, Paul wrote and spoke eloquently on the rights of children, and his speeches are filled with quotes like this. There is no greater miracle among the inexhaustible miracles of creation, which in the strictest sense is unlimited in its richness, than the miraculous fact that nature dispenses its seed every day

with generous amplitude and that not one of its fruits is exactly the equal of the other. The younger the child, the more we enjoy it because we rejoice in the wealth of individuality and originality. What? Yeah, that could go a couple of ways, couldn't it? Wait, what's the richness part? That's a great question, Miles.

I mean, you know, the charitable undertaking of that is that, you know, younger children haven't had their individuality beaten out of them as much by this harsh German system that we live and design to produce, you know, soldiers and factory workers, and so it's a joy to spend time with young children because you can really just cultivate their individuality and all that stuff. So that's one way you could take it. It's weird because one's like, yeah,

before they're completely indoctrinated with like societal expectations, they still have that purity, that innocence, and also you can mold them too. Like, they're more pliable at this age. Like, they're malleable in terms of how they're looking at the world and things like that. I mean, it's funny because the first part I get because a lot of people, like, if you're into any kind of spiritual texts and things like that, always refer to, you know, when you're a child,

you're sort of at this level of consciousness where you can observe many things and still enjoy them because of your not being hit with all kinds of societal norms and things like that or cultural patterns of thinking. So when I'm like, oh, okay, yeah, we should be more childlike at times. Well, so far, as we come to our first ad break, Miles, everything seems great. Everything seems fine. Everything seems very healthy,

and I'm sure that that's how it will continue for the remainder of the 12 pages that I've written. Oh, save us. You know what's also fine? You know what will save us, Miles? The products and services that support this show. Oh, fantastic. I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards,

and if there's one thing I hate more than fascism, it's finishing a long work day and realizing I have no food left. It happened to me the other day after writing a three-part episode, and then I realized that I had a Hello Fresh box that was just sitting out in front of my house. I cooked some delicious fish tacos, and it was awesome. Hello Fresh is the easy way to get home-cooked meals simply. You don't have to go to the grocery store

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So if you want to try Hello Fresh right now, you can get nine free meals with HelloFresh.com slash BTB and using the promo code BTB9. That's right, nine free meals if you just go to HelloFresh.com slash BTB9 and use promo code BTB9. Check it out! We're back! Now, we're talking about Germany, obviously, in the 1920s here, Miles,

and if we all know one thing about Germany in the 1920s is that it turns into Germany in the 1930s. We're going to be talking about Nazis, and that is the time that it is now. Now, Paul Gehieb was not a fan of the Nazi Party as it rose to power in the late 20s and early 30s. Now, the Odenwald School was not a political institution, but obviously its focus on liberty, free thinking,

and gender integration did not gel well with fascism. It also drew in harassment because the school's funder, Max Kasserer, was an assimilated Jew, so there's a number of dangerous things going on with the Odenwald School. And I'm going to quote now from a write-up I found in TNF about how the Odenwald School handled the rise of the Nazis. The first in a series of Nazi raids on the communist Jew Odenwald School took place in March 1933 and led to the purge of the faculty,

the abolition of coeducational residences, and the end of student self-government. New Nazi teachers formed chapters of the Hitler Youth and League of German Girls, the Nazi educational leadership of Hesse, hoping to benefit from the school's fame, forbade Gehieb to close it. In response to these measures, Gehieb pursued a dual strategy in 1933. On one hand, he promised cooperation, agreed to Nazi mandates,

and repeatedly told the authorities that his school's goals were consistent with those of the New Germany. At the same time, Gehieb privately condemned the Nazi regime and made plans to emigrate and take some of his pupils with him. He hastened the closure of the Odenwald School by secretly encouraging parents to withdraw their children. With the help of a sympathetic official in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, Gehieb closed the school and moved to Switzerland in March 1934.

Max Kasser believed that his son-in-law was not sufficiently accommodating towards the Nazis, and for months disapproved his plans to emigrate. In Switzerland, Gehieb struggled at first, but by the end of the war, the Ecole de Humanité, which is the school he started in Switzerland, was an acclaimed haven for young refugees from all over Europe. Meanwhile, a new, more explicitly Nazi school opened at the old, old Odenwald School.

During the war, however, its director successfully protected some children of Jews and dissidents. So that's a good story, right? Yeah. I'll send it great, yeah. He doesn't go along with the Nazis? His father-in-law, you said, who was the assimilated Jewish businessperson, he was telling him, you're not being Nazi enough? Yeah, that's actually really common. Right, I mean, a lot of assimilated German Jews were like,

just work along with them, it'll be okay. I mean, it's like anything when you sort of internalize that sort of hatred in order to survive and operate within society, but yeah, okay. That must have been weird, yeah. It must have been, Gahib has to leave Germany, which yeah, it wouldn't have been a friendly place for him. They started school in Switzerland, but the Odenwald School continued to operate in Germany,

and after the fall of Nazism, it reopened under its original operating principles run by a series of dedicated educators and some child rapists. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. So I don't know how to make this transition easy. Yeah, you did. Yeah, thank you. The Odenwald School was as filled with child molesters as an average day at Disney World. Oh boy.

So yeah, yeah. This was as a result of the fall of Nazism, when they restaffed it up? Well, not... This even predates the Third Reich. A lot plays into this, Miles. Now, none of this was known at the time. What was known for decades was that after Nazism fell, the Odenwald School continued to operate and be a very prestigious learning institution

for children from all over Europe operating under enlightened principles of student self-government and gender reintegration. That's the surface story. Right. But in 1998, reports were first made public that Gerald Becker, who ran the school from 1971 to 1985, had been reported as a child molester by several of the kids in his care. Investigations into this were suspended because so much time had passed.

At least, that was the official justification. The reality of the situation is that with its high rate of prestigious alumni, the Odenwald School and its leader were connected people, and everything was swept under the rug. Now, Becker had first come to the school in the late 1960s. Now, this was a time of increasing liberalism and openness in society. Becker and the school's music teacher, a guy named Wolfgang, took horrific advantage of this.

Both men lived in the same house, one at the top and one at the bottom floor, with their families of children living in between them. Since both men were pedophiles, this was essentially the perfect living of the situation for predators. They picked specific children to be in their families, who they then molested. Peoples recalled that they were regularly groped in the morning and forced to masturbate their instructors in the afternoon.

One of those children, Adrian Kay, later recalled this. Back then, we children didn't even discuss the things we saw and experienced on an almost daily basis. It was a closed system. Another student recalled, I remember being woken up as a 13-year-old by Gerald Becker sucking my penis like a possessed man. So, not great, not great, not great. Ah, Robert.

Yeah. Wait, the family thing? You were saying that's part of that structure, like that school structure you were talking about earlier. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That Gahib instituted, yeah. So the teacher, okay, so it's a three-story home where each teacher is on either side of the middle part,

which is all of the students who are the quote-unquote family. Yeah. And the fucking teachers pick their family from the pool of enrolled students. Yeah, yep. Ugh. And this way, so this, but this comes out in the 80s, you said, or in the 90s.

In the 90s, yeah, this comes out in the late 90s. Well, I can see it makes sense because for the longest time, we just had the, we just were like, I don't know, man. We don't know how to, we're not equipped to actually talk about assault against children. We'll just call it like, stay away from that person or something's different about that fellow. Yeah, yeah.

And that's kind of what goes on here. Although, I should say that's what it seems like is going on here at first. Right. Oh, man. So, numerous pupils reported abuse at the hands of Gerald Becker and his friend, the music teacher. But the teachers that like kids reported this to

at the Oldenwald school tended to ignore those reports. In 1985, one teacher, Barbara B, was told by a student that Becker had molested them on the previous night and paid for the pleasure with a stereo and a pair of sneakers. Now, this teacher reported this to Becker's successor, who was the new head of the school after him, but nothing was done.

Becker was other than his child molestation. A shining example of a dedicated educator and someone who was clearly respected in the field. When he wasn't molesting kids, he gave vivid speeches celebrating the enlightened beliefs of the Oldenwald school. Former teacher Salman Ansari recalled, whenever Gerald Becker gave a speech, he always said ours was the world's best school

with the world's best teachers. Now, part of why this was allowed to go on for so long were the deep connections Gerald Becker enjoyed to the German government. He was friend and colleague to a fellow named Helmut Becker, who was not related to him. But Helmut was the guy who first spearheaded the effort to reform the West German educational system

after World War II. He was the first director of the Max Planck Institute and a huge fan of the Oldenwald school. Helmut described this in other independent schools as a kind of incubator within the public school system. He then added, this applies in particular to boarding schools in which relaxed encounters between parents and pupils provides better protection for human sexuality.

What? Yeah, you notice something weird about that line? Say that again one more time out loud in English? Yeah, he described the Oldenwald school and other independent schools as an incubator within the public school system and added, this applies in particular to boarding schools in which relaxed encounters between parents and pupils

provides better protection for human sexuality. Better protections for... That's an odd thing to say, isn't it? Yeah. There's a number of quotes like that, that are odd things to say and kind of hard to figure out. At the time, people must have just had the same reaction you did, but there were no clear explanations for why.

Yeah, they're like, that could sound really fucking terrible. Or maybe this dude's really smart, I don't know. Yeah, it's like Paul Geheb's line about enjoying little kids, where it's like, that could mean a few things and you probably give him the benefit of the doubt. Yeah, you think it's like an educator, like, well, there's no way it's for some kind of malicious intent. Yeah.

Gerald Becker hired Helmut to work at the Oldenwald school. Now, Helmut's godson was a student at the school and within a few months of coming on board, Helmut's godson reached out to his godfather and complained that principal Gerald Becker had climbed into his bed to try to have sex with him. You might expect this to have led to a gigantic shit show, since Helmut had the influence to demand

just about anything he wanted from the school and the government. But instead of doing anything, Helmut recommended that Gerald seek treatment for his child molesting problem. Gerald was sent off on what amounted to a medical vacation and then returned to the school and molested more children. I mean, it's just... That's pretty Catholic-y sounding.

Yeah, exactly. I was saying it's the same pattern of dealing with... I guess not dealing with it, where you're being like, okay, we're pretty sure this happened, but we don't even know what to do, so put them on time out. What is a medical vacation in those days? Just to go to some kind of retreat?

Yeah, I think he probably went to some spa. Yeah, a lot of steam baths. And the reason he's protected is because of how respected he is within the upper echelons of the government. He's respected, his school is respected. Helmut, who reformed German education after World War II, is like...

His name gets all tied up in the Old and Bulge School's reputation, so it's nobody's powerful's best interest for anything to get out about what's happened. What Gerald Becker is doing to these students. Right. So Gerald Becker got to die before he faced justice, which you always want to hear in a story like this. Another person who died before facing justice was Walter Schaefer,

who was Gerald's successor as head of the school, and the man who probably worked hardest to cover up his crimes. Now, in the late 1990s, the German media completely ignored the revelations about one of the school's proudest institutions. None of this really came out until 2007, when a woman named Margarita Kaufman became the school's headmistress. She was the first person at the Old and Bulge School with any sort of influence who took the problem of child molestation seriously.

In 2010, she became aware of the mounting number of child molestation allegations, and she brought in a former judge, Bridget Tillman, to investigate. According to Derspiegel, quote, Bridget Tillman and a lawyer published a report on the school that brought up the anniversary. There are no holds barred appraisal, paints a frightening picture of widespread abuse at the Old and Bulge School. They identified more than a dozen perpetrators, more than 70 victims, and cited 17 witnesses alone

justified against the school's longtime principal, Gerald Becker. So in the late 1990s, you start getting these reports that Becker's molested some kids, and then in the mid aughts, the school's new headmistress convenes an investigation, and they find that actually more than a dozen teachers at the school and staff members have been molesting kids. So the first aid thought it was just the one? Yeah, they thought it was just Gerald and the music teacher. Oh, the music teacher, right, right, right.

And then after the investigation, they're like, oh, there's a person. Yeah, they start looking into it more, and the more they look into it, the more perpetrators they find, and the more victims they find. And is this like with talking to past pupils and things like that? Yeah. And then did they discover that even currently at the time in the 90s, they're also dealing with like a large number of... Oh, yes, yeah.

The further back they go, the more allegations they start to find. Oh, but then they found 12 people that were currently working there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. I mean, it also makes sense. I mean, obviously it's a shift in like the culture too, but like, was there ever another woman directing the school prior to her? I don't think so.

I think she was the first female headmistress of the school, the director. Was she hired as some kind of reformer, you think, or she was just sort of, because she's a woman and a little less interested in protecting male predators, was like, something's wrong. I actually care about these kids. What the fuck is this? Yeah, I don't know if it's because she was a woman or just because she was a better person than the other teachers,

but she actually gives a shit. Yeah, or not to say that being a woman makes you more interested, but I think that deviation from the pattern before. Yeah, we take a strong stance here that, you know, empowered modern women can be child molesters too. I just want to be clear about that. Oh, yes, I'm sure that's been in past episodes too. Yeah, absolutely.

Actually, yeah, the Georgia Tan episodes. Yeah. So, yeah, so they start looking into this, and the more they look into this, the more out-involved teachers they find who had molested students, and the more students they find who had been molested. Now, this story finally broke into the mainstream news in 2010, and a series of journalists from different papers

and law enforcement agencies began to conduct wider-ranging investigations into the old involved school. And what they found was fucking soul-crushing miles. I'm going to quote now from a 2010 Irish Times article. Some eight teachers, including a former headmaster, have been accused of sexually abusing at least 33 former students. Now, former students have told of torture rituals where older students raped younger students

and scolded their genitals. What I've heard completely goes beyond all imagining, as said Miss Kaufman, headmistress of the school since 2007, I just don't know how this kind of behavior carried on without teachers hearing cries of pain. In an interview with Desite Newspaper, Miss Kaufman said that the school operated in the past like a cult with abusive allegations suppressed

out of a misplaced awe for the reforming pedagogical concepts of Gerald Becker, who was principal from 1972 to 1985. So that's the way this starts being spun in the 2000s, which is that they're definitely trying to trace this problem back to Gerald Becker, right? So that's the story as it comes in, is that this guy comes in, because he's so respected, nobody notices his abuse, and he enables other people to commit abuse.

And that's where the Odin Voltage School goes wrong, starting in the 1970s. That's the line you start to see. It's because of that guy, that one bad apple. That one bad apple that spoiled the bunch. As reports came in, Becker was revealed as the ringleader for what can only be described as a gang of pedophile teachers.

They wrapped themselves in the cloak of progressivism, emphasizing the Odin Voltage School's reputation for forward-thinking experimental teaching methods to hide abuse. Former students reported that teachers saw themselves as revolutionaries, fighting against stodgy ideas about education and prudishness, and replacing them with the ideals of the sexual revolution. To this end, Becker and other teachers watched children showered, viewed child pornography while working,

and regularly woke children up in the morning by masturbating them. So, classic revolutionaries. Yeah, so by the time all this came out, Gerald was old and sick, and he died before facing any justice as I already stated. His partner, like a romantic partner, Hartmut von Hintig, was a prominent educational expert in Germany. And he said this at the time, I have no doubt that these friendly gestures

were never carried out against the will of the students. Friendly gestures? Yeah. A surprise assault while you're sleeping is a friendly fucking... I don't... I'd say it depends on your friend group. The thing about this too is like, it's also what you're talking about is like a cult too.

Because you're saying precisely because other people were in awe of this fucking revolutionary approach to abusing kids or quote-unquote education or whatever you want to call it, that that is what sort of enabled this culture of silence. Because like, well, was it that they saw it and they were rationalizing like, well, I guess that's a revolutionary method or it's like, well, we're taking the good and the bad.

It's like, there's so much going on here. And we're gonna dig into it a lot because there's a fucking crazy amount going on. Yeah, I'm just like, my wheels are blowing off. This has been one of the harder episodes to structure because there's so much to get into. But yeah, we're gonna keep delving into this because there's layers upon layers.

So further reporting by a website called The Local, which is a German paper, revealed that students at the Oldenwald School were regularly applied with drugs and alcohol and even used by teachers as sex slaves for whole weekends. I'm gonna quote from Der Spiegel again. Eventually, the permissiveness became almost total and it wasn't the tormentors but the tormented

who were made to feel guilty. The declared minimum objective was to be bisexual. If you didn't achieve that, you were a failure, says former pupil Gerald R, who came to the school in 1975 and was first abused by his music teacher the following year. We knew one thing. Everything was permitted at any time.

Gerald R, the alumnus who were called Gerald Becker flating him like a possessed man, says of his school days. So everything's permitted at any time is the way these kids are raised to sort of expect things are gonna work in the Oldenwald School. Right, so it's almost like... So everything was a surprise.

It's like accepted the culture of the school as shit's gonna happen because that's just how things work at the Oldenwald School. Yeah, and at first they think it just goes back to the early 70s, but as these stories come out, more people start to tell their own experiences. One of these people who related her experiences was German television presenter Emily Fried,

who attended the Oldenwald School starting in 1969. In a book published to Mark the School's Centenary, it recounts how a teacher coaxed her into playing strip poker in his apartment. She said he goaded her for being a prudish, petty, bourgeoisie, Swibian girl until she finally caved into the pressure, although she was embarrassed and suppressed

her memory of the incident for decades. So if you don't fuck us, you're bougie. You're bougie. Yeah, you're too prudish. And the whole... Like, was the bisexuality thing born out of like an actual philosophical idea? I think the...

Or it's purely like, we want to be... I don't know, we just want people to be as sexually elastic as possible. That's it. We want people to be sexually elastic. We want them all fucking... And like, they wanted the students also fucking other students because the more of that that was going on, the more it camouflaged the teacher's predations on these kids.

Oh, my God, dude. Yeah, I mean, it's fucking wild. Like, even the... You know what won't create a culture of child molestation? These goods and services that... These goods and services, that's right, Miles. I knew that. I love these goods and services. That's our only line for advertisers.

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Now, when the news of all of the rapes at the Oldenwald School came out, Emily, who was just talking about being called bougie for not wanting to fuck her teacher, wrote a column for a Frankfurt newspaper. In that column, she explained that for her, some of this was her feelings of whether or not to report anything or whether or not this was okay. Her emotions on the matter were very muddled by the fact

that the Oldenwald School took what you might call a healthy attitude towards sexual relationships between students. They didn't punish kids for starting relationships or whatever, these are teenagers or whatnot. You could see how at the time someone would be like, oh, they're just trying not to be as sex-negative as a school is if you don't know about all the child molestation that's going on. She noted in her column,

it was suggested to students that the respected principal understood them very well and that it was a sign of recognition to show mutual affection. We students were happy to be able to explore sexuality in an angst-free climate, that some teachers used this freedom as a cover for their assaults as a scandal. So that's how Emily winds up, even as a victim of this, Emily winds up feeling like, well, the school was basically good

and this climate was basically good, and some teachers taking advantage of the system, which is kind of, I think, and I think as we'll see her trying to protect herself emotionally a little bit, because that's one of the confusing things about being molested in a situation like this. I'm sure the years at the Oldenwald School were very positive, had positive memories for a number of the kids who were victims there.

So you've got to try to build this up as like, no, the basic system was good, it was just a few people who used the freedom to abuse other, like abuse the freedom, essentially. That's the way this young woman, or she's not a young woman anymore, but that's the way she kind of thinks back on her time in the school and tries to protect herself emotionally.

But there's evidence that even between the students themselves, a lot of what happened at the Oldenwald School was profoundly abusive. There was at least one report of an adolescent girl who was molested by several of her classmates. And it's worth noting here that while all these children were a definition victims, a number of them victimized each other too. So this is a very confusing and messy situation. Yeah, because the culture was just,

it's just a fucking free-for-all at every level, and there's just no, it's just pure chaos. Yeah, yeah, and this is seen as like, like ideologically important, revolutionary. Like, that's really how the teachers frame it to the students. That like, what's going on at the Oldenwald School is just too far ahead of mainstream morality for most people that understand. Like, how would they extend that logic out?

It's like, how is us assaulting each other, making us better students, or more balanced people? Yeah, I think it's, you know, it's very easy to convince people to do something terrible if the thing that they were already doing wasn't great. And like, German sexual mores in the 1960s and 70s weren't the healthiest that humans have ever developed. Just like American sexual mores at the same time.

You know, they're very repressive, they're very like based on shame and guilt, and that's not healthy. So you can get people to buy into something that's even worse if the thing that they grew up doing is also fucked up. Right, or to them it's like, yeah, this definitely is an optimal. What's the harm in trying the complete other side of the spectrum? Exactly.

One people at the school at the time later recalled, we were taught that we were different from everyone else. And what child, what person can remain unmoved by the sense of constantly being marveled at? We were real daredevils in our own paradise behind Golden Gates. So fucking confusing here. Now, even at the time, it was not paradise for all of those kids. Adam Kerfer, a former student at Oldenwald,

went to school hell and described regular forced showers with his teachers. He claims his music teacher, who was the head of his family, regularly pimped him and other boys out to friends on school trips. So you get this mix of students who like later on recognize, yeah, we were abused, but it was also a really good time. And these students who have consistently been like, no, this was a nightmare from the beginning. So again, really different recollections from different kids.

Well, I wonder, yeah, if it's just sort of subconsciously, like anything like, you know, that cycle of abuse just continues. Other people, like if the ones that do continue were just resigned to the fact that that was, you know, that's what was their reality going forward. Yeah, I think that's what's going on here. So once all of this broke in 2010, the school board resigned under mass outrage that they had chosen to investigate the matter internally back in 1998

when the first reports on Becker came out. Rather than report all that mass child rape to the police, headmistress Kaufman thought this line of reasoning was bullshit. She blamed the cover up on what she called mafia structures with the powerful friends that Gerald Becker had accumulated, including heads of state and newspaper publishers. Yeah, there's like a, let's see, one of the articles I read on this in women's studies quarterly describes it as a like institutional protection.

Right. Because the Odenwald School is seen as like such a key aspect of like the educational reform movement in Germany. So like, because these people are proud of the educational reform since the Nazis, they can't discard the Odenwald School because it's kind of at the forefront of that, even though it's very clear that like really fucked up shit's going on there. So that's part of why this all gets swept under the rug.

Right. Now, the author of that article, pedosexuality and especially German history and women's studies quarterly suggests that a lot of the explanation for why all this molestation happened at Odenwald in the 70s and 80s is tied into the sexual revolution and the intellectual climate of the 1960s and 70s, particularly in Germany. The author credits the concept of pedagogical eros, which was first cooked up by a guy named Gustav Weineken,

who was Paul Gehieb's old partner at the school he helped run before founding Odenwald. Now, the term pedagogical eros referred initially to homosexual erotic attraction between a pupil and a teacher. Weineken didn't see this as a bad thing. He was very influenced by platonic Greek attitudes towards teacher-student relationships, which were often erotic and sexual, and we can look back in time and say like we're profoundly abusive as well. Yeah.

But he's looking at this stuff as like, oh, this is the way teaching ought to be. This is Paul Gehieb's old partner in the early 1900s. He was looking back and like, hey, man, they had some good ideas. Yeah. The kid fucking. I don't know why we're disrespecting our history or some shit. Yeah. Is that really just, oh my, pedagogical eros?

That's like, it's so weird though to like, the language and the vocabulary these people create to not call what they're doing what it is. Yeah, you have to have that language around it. Otherwise people will realize, well, you're just talking about fucking kids, dude. Right. If they were up front, it's like, yeah, and then I just abused the kids sexually. They wrap themselves in ideology to get away with this sort of thing. Right.

I guess that's the hallmark of any fucked up movement. Yeah, it's the same thing that the Catholic priest did. It's just a different ideology, but it's the same thing. So you have these very old ideas about like Greek, you know, pedagogical eros and stuff, and you have these things kind of merging with very modern ideas of the sexual revolution, because the 1960s and 70s is a time when people are increasingly in the West lifting taboos against sex, which is good, but when you mix it with these child molesty desires and some of these like old bad ideas, you get this very toxic slurry that results, and it's a very complicated thing that happens,

but it's not just at the Odenwald School, and this is where we start talking about what was happening in the rest of Germany at the time, because there was actually a very weird and virulent strain of pro-child fucking ideology that ran rampant among the German intellectual community in the first decades after World War II. Have you ever heard of the Kinderladen movement? That sounds familiar. Yeah, it's a fairly prominent thing. It started in the 1970s as a reaction to the unspeakable horrors of Nazism.

The basic goal of the movement was to raise children to be more disobedient to adults, so people look at what happens in the Nazis and they're like, oh, this culture of obedience that we've inculcated in Germany has horrible consequences, so we need to inculcate a culture of disobedience now within our students, which makes sense, right? You can see the logical through line there. Absolutely, see why you would come to that conclusion. Now, in previous eras, German child rearing had placed a strong emphasis on obedience above all else. The idea was that raising children in Germany had to completely change

in order to avoid a repeat of the horrors of the 30s and 40s. So this all came from a good place, but it didn't stay in a good place. And I'm going to quote again from that Women's Studies Quarterly article. Within the anti-authoritarian Kinderladen movement, which was closely associated with the early phage of the new women's movement, great significance was assigned to the idea of liberating child sexuality. This was linked to a vision reaching back specifically to Wilhelm Reich, who held that liberation of child sexuality would lead to the liberation of human beings.

The idea fit in with the politicization of desire in the context of the 1968 movements and can be seen analogously as a politicization of childhood sexuality. The proclamation of their liberation was expected to contribute to their childhood happiness. A number of texts from the West German anti-authoritarian educational milieu did not distinguish between childhood and early adult sexuality, but sought to flatten sexual distinctions within the generations. Now, Wilhelm Reich is the guy who coined the term sexual revolution. And so there's a lot going on here.

It seems like what you've got is this very well-meaning movement that comes out as an understandable reaction to the horrible crimes of the Nazi era. But you also have all these people who just want to fuck kids and see this as an opportunity to like, well, I can slide a little bit of my ideology in here. It's one of the things I believe and I can cloak it as something more than just me being horny for little kids. Right. I'm changing attitudes. I'm saving a future generation of Germans so that nothing terrible happens.

Well, also completely taking advantage of that sentiment for their own dark purposes. So, yeah. And I don't want to say like the whole Kinderladen movement was not about child molestation. There were actually a lot of very important developments in educational and child rearing policy traced back to it. But you also had a fuckload of pedophiles with involvement who used the opening up of society as a chance to prey on little kids. Quote, within the circles of these movements, the alternative milieu

and the emancipatory sexology of the 1970s, texts and documents on child sexuality lacked perspective that reinforced a child's right and ability to say no to sexual conduct. So, this is part of how you can... Wait, what? To say... So, these teachers who are trying to basically stick and thinkers who are trying to basically like mainstream child molestation by hijacking the Kinderladen movement, they're noting the importance of emancipating children's sexuality,

but they're not writing anything about the importance of consent. That doesn't matter. The assumption then is that kids want this kind of contact. And people went with that because I mean like, if you're really... A whole lot of them did, man. The obedience is purely built on agency. Well, that's because this isn't a real... This chunk of the movement isn't real.

No, right. It's not real ideology. Sure, but I guess even if you were hearing this out loud and you're like, this is fucking terrible, can I... Because if they had to explain themselves, they'd be like, okay, I got caught. It's this matter of once the weight of cultural forces behind change, most people are cowards. Whether that cultural change is like the switch to Nazism or the switch to childhood sexual liberation,

an awful lot of people are just going to kind of go along with it if it seems like what everyone else is doing. Right, right. And that's what is happening here. Now, this is all very complicated to talk about, especially since some of what happened in the Kinderladen movement has its roots in the struggle for gay rights. See, in the 60s and 70s in Germany,

the age of consent for heterosexual sex was 18, but the age of consent for homosexual male sex was 21, which is obviously unjust. So there was a campaign to lower the age of consent for homosexual male sex down to 18. And there's nothing wrong with that, obviously. If you're going to have the age of consent be 18, it should be 18 for everybody.

Nobody's, I don't think anybody's going to have a problem with that. But you can see how the general air of discussion around a lot of the left at that time would have been focused on lowering age of consent and how that brought cover to people who wanted the age of consent to be way lower than 18. So it's just like the same way you have white supremacists taking advantage of this disruption in the economy

and people giving these strawman arguments about, well, it's this other group, and then people with darker purposes go, yeah, yeah, right, right, also white power. It's like white supremacists seeing that everyone's talking about nationalized healthcare and are like, yeah, we do need more socialism, but it's got to be a socialism that excludes people

who aren't part of the racial community, like a national sort of socialism. Yeah, this happens in every sphere of life. Were there different laws for gay sex between women? Notice how you made that distinction. I don't think they really thought about it. Oh, wow, of course. That's one of those things.

Sometimes it was kind of easier to be a gay woman than a gay man just because nobody really thought about it as much. It wasn't even discussed. It was taboo really to talk about gay male sex, and I think sometimes gay women kind of slid under the radar because people just assumed it didn't exist. Wow, one of the unintended benefits of toxic patriarchy. Yeah, I guess.

Again, this is all very complicated to talk about. I may be a little bit wrong about what I'm saying about lesbian sex in this period. I only read into so much here. Well, yeah, I thought it was weird that even the government was like, there was a distinction to even codify that. Yeah. Now, I found a very good article about all this on Der Spiegel

called The Sexual Revolution in Children, How the Left Went Too Far. And it points out that Klaus Reiner-Wohl, the publisher of a popular leftist magazine at the time in Germany, wrote open calls for sex with minors while molesting his own daughters. It also goes into horrific detail about how some experiments and communal living during this period went very, very badly. Quote,

In the summer of 1967, three women and four men moved into an apartment in an old building on Gisebrexstraße, together with two small children, a three-year-old girl, Grisha, and a four-year-old boy, Nessim. For the residents, the cohabitation experiment was an attempt to overcome all bourgeoisie constraints, which included everything from separate bank accounts and closed bathroom doors to fidelity within couples

and the development of feelings of shame. The two children were raised by the group, which often meant that no one paid much attention to them, because the adults had made it their goal to not just tolerate, but in fact affirm child sexuality, they were not satisfied to simply act as passive observers. Now, the article goes into some uncomfortable detail about what happened with that,

and I'm not going to quote the stuff about the sex acts that followed because it's gross, but there's this complicated area where you have like, you know, kids are going to experiment and like grab things, right? Right, right. When everyone's going around nude all the time, kids will grab adults and adults will feel that it's like counter-revolutionary, basically, to stop this,

and so some of the molestation happens that way, too. Like, it's very, very complicated and weird what goes on in German kind of leftist revolutionary circles at this time. And this was, yeah, just sort of, again, to push back against all these social constructs and say, what if we take all, take them all down and there are no rules to the point that we're veering into, like, just the darkest kind of shit? That's exactly what happens.

And, you know, there was a stigma against making a fuss about it if you thought what was going on was unhealthy because doing so would make you seem counter-revolutionary. Oh, right, like you're being proved. You're being conservative, right? Yeah. One teacher later recalled, quote, it's difficult to take a stance.

I felt that what we were trying to do was fundamentally correct, but when it came to this issue, fucking kids, I thought, this is crazy, it just isn't right, but then I felt ashamed of thinking that way. I think many were in the same position. It's a cult. You stick that same reasoning to people who kind of went along with the Nazi regime's crimes,

and I'm sure it speaks for millions of Germans in that period. So, yeah, it's really ironic to me that a movement that started as an anti-authoritarian response to fascism ended with people sitting by and watching other kinds of horrific crimes occur because they were still too scared to go against the group. There's a lot of lessons about human nature in here, and none of them are positive.

Yeah, seriously. Yeah. The excesses of the Kinderladen movement are, I think, evidence of how deeply toxic group think can be, regardless of what side it comes from, and how vulnerable times of social change and exploration are to the whims of hidden predators. It's any time, like now,

where change is in the air, you have to be very fucking careful because change is always, especially necessary in a society, as unhealthy as our own, but it also provides cover to the worst kinds of human beings. And also, the sort of naivety to think you could completely, just 180, like an entire nation's culture within a generation.

It is absurd. It's centuries and centuries of norms and traditions that give you that, and to be like, well, all right, if we do this and kids just like, we make them all rebellious, and our kids just need to be more punk rock, that's not the solution. And to think that, again, but I think also,

that wasn't really the point for a lot of people. The point was to create this environment in which this kind of behavior could be seen as not necessarily taboo because it's in the name of revolution and evolution. And this is where the episode gets more confusing again, because it makes sense if you look at it the way, it's starting to look right now, which is that,

okay, late 60s, early 70s, you have this movement in Germany for educational reform and a new way of looking at how children are raised, and child molesters use this as cover to essentially abuse kids. And this guy, Gerald Becker, winds up in charge of the Oldenwald School, influenced by these ideas and inculcates

a culture of child rape within the school, right? Makes a lot of sense, goes in line with German historical trends at the time, except for one problem. Gerald Becker and the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s is not when the Oldenwald School started becoming a haven for child rape. It started with the person we started talking about

at the beginning of this episode, Paul Geheb. Now, for a very long time, Paul was viewed as something as a hero, both within the field of education and within Germany. Albert Einstein called him one of the few upright men who maintained the honor of Germany during the horrible Nazi era. The school he established in Switzerland during a war

became a haven for child refugees and orphans of Nazism's mad dash through Europe. But Paul was not the man he seemed to be, and the Oldenwald School's history of child abuse went back much further than the late 60s. In fact, it goes all the way to the beginning. None of this came to light until late in 2010 when Der Spiegel conducted a deep investigation into the school.

Now, by this point, other investigators had revealed the sweeping history of sexual assault from the 60s up until the early 90s, at least. Adrian Kerfer, the chairman of a group formed by children molested by Oldenwald teachers, estimated at this point that between 500 and 900 children had been victimized. But most people still believed that Paul Geheb and his beloved legacy as a reformer were clean.

All of that was blasted away by the investigation of an educationalist named Christy Stark. Stark basically gains access to the archives at the Oldenwald School and starts like reading through all of these letters that had been sent from parents to teachers and from school administrators, starting from the very beginning of the school. And a lot of what she finds is deeply fucked up.

And I'm going to quote from that Der Spiegel write-up. On September 13, 1924, a mother wrote to Geheb's wife Edith who had built up the school with him. This mother, E.M., described in detail her 12-year-old son's allegations that he had been abused by a teacher. It wasn't the first such claim. Three weeks earlier, a father had taken his daughter out of the school on the grounds that she had been very disturbed

by the nocturnal visits by adults that she had witnessed. Educationalist Crystal Stark says that the school received a number of such letters from concerned shock parents over the years, with some pointing the finger at older peoples and others at the teachers. So, after hundreds of hours of painstaking research, Stark writes a dissertation on all this. Now, prior to her research, the understanding

was that most of the children who had been abused at Oldenwald were boys. But she found vastly more complaints from parents about suspected or confirmed sexual relations with between their daughters and school staff. Some of these parents presented love letters that their daughters had received from teachers during summer vacation.

And shockingly, these early 1900s parents were generally too scared to complain, which is probably why the behavior flew under the radar. One mother even promised the school directly that she had no intent of causing a scandal that would put the school in an unfavorable light. Even in the days of Gahib, the Oldenwald school's reputation as a bastion of bold experimentation and scholarship

protected it from harm. So, now I'm going to quote again from that Der Spiegel article. On February 23rd, 1931, Gahib wrote to a female pupil who had asked for his help. A 17-year-old girl to a friend of his in London, a fellow teacher who was supposed to improve her English, but whom she said molested her. Gahib defended his colleague vehemently.

He bravely treads new ground in the realm of sexuality in particular and has discovered new successful methods that are, of course, extremely infuriating for a higher society in its hypocritical sexual morality. So, this is how Gahib argues to an abused child. Yeah, that she wasn't, in fact, abused. Now, he...

I just, like, also, I mean, I get it, because history moves at its own pace, and especially things from this era, we don't have the same speed at which information travels, but it's wild that it's, like, 2010. They're like, oh, yeah, back in 1920, like, this has been going on for ages now. A century, yeah.

Yeah, so when that girl, you know, wrote him this article complaining about being molested, Gahib advised her not to make a fuss, and he wrote, it's natural that stupid little girls immediately feel sexually threatened. Call him a pig and maybe even call for the police to get involved.

She's dumb for, yeah. And this happens all the time with women. You guys know, you've seen it a hundred times. Yeah. It's like the whole sentiment of it all. The also, like, the shame part, too, is, like, very interesting, because I know, you know, the Germans

and the Japanese, you know, forming the Axis back then in World War II, like, the sort of similarities in culture, too, like, you know, even in Japanese culture, you would maybe be a little hesitant to call something out, not necessarily to this scale, but in general, because

you don't want to be seen as the person who's trying to disrupt something or malign a group or something like that, and it's a very powerful force to just sort of maintain the status quo, because, you know, obviously Americans, too, we're on the difference on the other side of the spectrum to

a aggressively, probably toxic degree where it's like, we'll fucking scream about everything and anything, and sometimes about shit that really isn't even bad, just because we want to be able to scream about something. But when you see even this, like, this mother was like, I'm looking at the evidence in front of me, yet the thing

that is preventing me isn't that I don't, I'm not, it's not that I'm mistaking what is actually happening here objectively. I don't want to be seen as a bolt rocker. Yeah, and it gets even more fucked up than that, because, you know, we talked

a lot about what Paul did during the Nazi era and how, like, he resisted the Nazis and, you know, his school helped protect kids, and that's all true, but the Nazi era also provided Paul with a shield for a lot of his abuse, so that girl

who got molested that he wrote this letter to, her father was a lawyer and he pulled her out of school, but he didn't feel comfortable suing or pressing charges because he was a Jewish person and his daughter was also Jewish. Yeah, so

this suggests that Paul Gehieb, who bravely stood up to the Nazis, may have purposefully reached out, so, like, this Jewish lawyer, he's not a wealthy lawyer, and his daughter was only able to afford membership in the old involved school because Paul Gehieb had authored her a scholarship,

which suggests, perhaps, that Paul Gehieb may have purposefully reached out to members of vulnerable groups in order to extend scholarships, knowing that their marginalization would make them less likely to retaliate against him in the school. That's, like, classic predator behavior. I mean,

nobody's gonna listen to this Jew talk about our or raping kids. Yeah, and also the government doesn't care about them, so they're a low priority. It's the same thing, like, with the amount of sexual abusers that will teach on reservations, too, and because of, like, tribal laws, they're like, well, I can just fuck off the res, and then

it's a different system of law, and I can skirt it and continue to prey upon vulnerable groups. It's, like, I mean, it doesn't, it's not that it's it's just I was gonna say, it's not fascinating, because it's so dark, but to

know that it's the exact same process that goes into it, whether it's, like, if there are priests who are going after children who may be, like, like, hearing impaired or deaf or, like, whatever, because they know those children speak less

to their parents and are less likely to talk to their parents about what happens because of that they're targeted, and now to see in this one he's taking advantage of the anti-Semitism of the time to also find additional cover, too, in this instance. Yep. Well, do you think that was as intentional as

it was, or this is one example, or was he also maybe, like, giving scholarships to students who were from those groups, too? Like, they're like, yeah, you may be marginalized, but also you can come to this school for free or whatever. Well, I think he was doing that, and I think it made it look like

it was a very progressive school, and he was protecting these kids, but I also think he took advantage of that status. Yeah. Yeah. Of the fact that they had less protections. Yeah. Now, Klaus Mann is probably the most internationally renowned alumni of the Odenwald School, Thomas Mann's

kid, and Der Spiegel's reporting suggests that he, too, was a victim of Paul Geheb. In 1925, Mann published a book called The Old Man, which is a story about a school principal who prays on young girls at his school. In the book, he wrote this. After dinner,

the principal lies down on a sofa and listens to the sounds of playing and singing children. A girl comes in. The principal speaks to and then becomes intimate with her, Mann wrote. He began stroking the girl. He even laid his head, his white, unimaginably old head, with its fawn mouth and to her lap. The text goes on to report about urgent

greedy caresses and of another girl whom, looking her straight in the eye, he threw himself at and kissed. Now, this is argued by Der Spiegel as a portrait of Paul Geheb, basically. Klaus Mann saw this legendary reformer molesting girls at school

and couldn't say anything directly about it, but put it in one of his books after he got out of the school when he was a famous writer. Yeah. And in fact, when the book was published, Geheb complained to Thomas Mann because he believed that the story would inflict

damage on the old involved school. So that's yeah. Now, the documents Stark poured through included a 1918 letter written to Paul Geheb by one of his young students. The author writes that she depended on him and had a right to a ring, perhaps

due to all that had happened. She felt that this would make her safe or at least safer. Now, the wording of this letter from a student to Paul Geheb doesn't make it entirely clear what happens, but it sounds like Paul got a teenager pregnant. That's what this letter sounds like. You've got this young girl writing to this teacher

saying that she depends on him and he should give her a ring because of what he did to her. Right. Yeah, maybe made her get an abortion. It's very hard to say. Yeah. Now, we do know that the school's 10th anniversary celebration in 1920 was canceled because

a female teacher committed suicide. We now know that this woman had a relationship with Geheb as well, and it's unclear what drove her to suicide, but I think it's, we can safely assume it was something very shady and probably had to do with all of this. And was it suicide? I don't know.

Now, I've got my next team hat on. Yeah, was it suicide? Yeah, exactly. Hard to say. In 1930, at the school's 20th anniversary, Paul had some of the girl students pose naked for a photographer. He was then given an album of the photos which biographer Martin Nauff described

in 2006 as particularly risque, semi-ironic, semi-serious and unthinkable in the present day. So, Nauff, who again, like, Paul's this educational Titan, so this is a very positive biography, and nobody at the time in 2006 expects this as evidence

that Paul Geheb was molesting anybody, but with, in the context of this additional evidence, like, oh, yeah, of course, he made himself a porn calendar of his students. Jesus Christ. This is... I think, I mean, wow,

you've really found a real bastard. Yeah. Yeah. I might go with him. I'm just, like, gobsmacked at how out in the open it was, but just sort of taking advantage

of the perfect societal climate where it gave enough cover to do something so overt and also just sort of where we were as a, you know, world global culture on, like, how we viewed these things, and it just I...

On some level, were there also people who were in positions of power wrapped up in this or it was purely based off of this sort of, like, intellectual appeal or the way he was spinning it that was giving him this cover? I mean, it's both. You know, you have

a lot of famous alumni from this school, a lot of rich and powerful people send their kids there. It's viewed with a lot of prestige. You know, it's respected enough that the Nazis aren't willing to shut it down. They just want to, like, take control of it because it's this internationally recognized institution.

And it's become, I think, it's clear now that the Oldenwald school was from the beginning more of a palace to sexual abuse than an institution of learning. And it's one of those things you read at the top of this, all these famous attributes about how the school was organized, the division

of children and students into families, the rural location of the campus, the focus on the equality of children and adults. And, like, at the start of the story, before you know any of this, that seems like a really high-minded rhetoric.

And once you have all of the context, it seems like a perfect way to construct a society in which you can abuse children incredibly effectively. And in retrospect, the signs are all over the school. Dr. Henry Cassier, Gahib's nephew

and a student at the Oldenwald school, wrote a praiseful article about Paul and his educational methods in the UNESCO Courier in the early 1960s. And it includes a quote that I think is really telling. And I don't know if Cassier was an abuser or an abuse victim. He went to the school, he very well may

have been abused. He very well may have been both. It's hard to say. But this quote is really telling to me. Among his friends, Paulus, Paul Gahib, counted men like Romain Rowland, Gandhi, Tugore, Albert Schweitzer, Einstein, men who put their stamp on the age. What did

all these men have in common? To answer in the words of Tugore, they were all travelers whose eternal journey is toward the future, climbing barriers, crossing mountains. Through the gaping century they strode out into the unknown, into the unseen. In their blood the trumpet sounded, beyond all borders, go beyond.

Oh my God, yeah. Yeah. So is that, I mean, were these people hanging around each other too a lot? Oh yeah. So is this like, you know, I guess the

OG Epstein kind of circle of influential person who, I mean, is there a dimension of this where he may have been trafficking too? Or people knew like, if you hang around Paulus, there is a good chance that there are going to be children around.

Paulus is kind of an Epstein-like figure. He's this guy who, there's definitely allegations that later on, you know, like Becker and people who are in the school later on pimped out kids.

And I think it would be foolish to assume that Paul wasn't doing the same thing. Right. And I think you have to look at his association with guys like Einstein and wonder the fuck. Yeah, right. What did she get up to, Albert? Yeah. It seemed like all those people

would see themselves in the work that they're doing is so massively important, right? And even as that quote was like going beyond barriers, going past whatever, going past what is legal in the name of exploration or this like, it's in service of my genius

or something. Yeah. It's really complicated. It's really messy. You know, it makes me think back to how we now know that what's his name? Bill Gates?

Stephen Hawking. And Bill Gates too, but Stephen Hawking visited Epstein's island and was on his plane. And so yes, it was Bill Gates. You've got all these people who are treated in society as mental titans. Many of them with solid justification to be treated that way.

But also this intense need to kind of elevate themselves above society. And, you know, that's not always a bad thing because society is fucked up, but I think it leads some people to justify

things that are horrific because it's just the thing that they happen to want. And yeah, I don't know. The fact that Einstein comes into the story obliquely, I've heard no allegations that he was ever did anything. But also, like, how would we have known?

Yeah. Well, and I'm sure too, even then, like, for someone like Einstein whose name even rings even louder than Gahib's, like, there must have been even more pressure like, dude, I'm not about to say something about Albert Einstein or whatever.

Yeah. And I guess that is that thing, right? At a certain level maybe just having the world know you might be the smartest person or the greatest this or the wealthiest that just isn't enough, that you have to go, no, I need to further demonstrate my superiority

by saying that norms and the laws of mortals just do not apply to me at all because I'm in this position too. Like, if that sort of furthers that because at a certain point if your ego is wrapped up in your, you know, sense of self of being this sort of deity,

then yeah, like, why would you even ever think you could, you need to abide by the rules for the normal, the morals. Yep. Oh, boy. Fun story.

Yeah. Yeah, thanks. This has made me want to start a school. Look, if anything, we just, to what? To protect the idols? No, to protect the kids. You don't,

to stop all this from happening, you just build a big walled compound and you put all the kids in there and then you shoot anyone who tries to enter. Mm-hmm. It's like a prison, but without doors. Mm-hmm.

Interesting. Yeah, I think this is good. You know, I'm looking forward to your TED Talk. It'll be interesting, to say the least. Yeah, yes, my TED Talk on locking children in a cage from child molesters. I mean, honestly, at this point,

people would be like, I mean, there was something about that talk. I really got something from that. I don't know. How you feeling at the end of this, Miles? Inspired you? No, it's just like, you know, this has been the abuse of children

and the weak is a theme that will always echo into eternity in those directions in the past and in the future. And it's like, no matter how far back you go

or whatever, when you look at the details, the same types of people and personalities create these very similar outcomes. It's just that every 50 years, it has a new version or a new way of it happening or a new

look and feel to it where this... When we talk about it every time, it's like, oh, it's like this, it's like this. It could be about Jerry Sandusky, it could be about Paul Nasser, it could be about Jeffrey Epstein, and anything.

It's just the same thing over and over. I guess the benefit is the more we're able to look at these things like this and see these patterns objectively and the sort of tactics is the way we can somewhat maybe try and reduce

these differences, but... And I think it's important to see this within the context of both the left and the right, or I guess it might be more useful to view it as conservative versus progressive. And a conservative institution, a culture of child molestation

or of just abuse in general, grows up among these ideas of entrenched authority and hierarchy and respect for... We don't want to shame the church, we don't want to shame yourself because I'm for you too, so you'll be judged for doing it.

Whereas kind of on the more progressive end of things, no, no, no, we're liberating ourselves. This is a positive moment, and if you don't feel comfortable with this, then you're counter-revolutionary, you're bougie, you're too conservative,

and you should be ashamed of that. So the structure is different depending on whether it's a progressive and conservative movement that the abusive is hiding in, but they're both equally prone to

fostering predators, because that's how predators work. Right. Speaking of predators... Bunch of bastards. Nope. You want to plug your Twitter or something? Yeah, I'll

plug my Twitter. I'll also plug my new podcast with one of your listeners' favorite guests, Sophia Alexandra. Her and I have a new podcast called 420 Day Fiancé, where we talk about the TLC show 90 Day Fiancé

in an elevated way. We're high. But that is the new show, and I employ your listeners if you like hearing us talk about much lighter topics. Yeah. That's a great show. Other than that,

we're going to talk about what we do on our website on Twitter, on Instagram, Miles of Grey, and every day, actually twice a day now on The Daily Zeitgeist with Jack O'Brien.

Well, talk Zeit, geist yourself up with Jack and Miles. Check out the 420 Day Fiancé. Find us on the web site Find me at IWriteOK on Twitter and find

there's really no good joke to tie into this episode about the mass rape of children, so I'm just going to end the episode on that note. That's very responsible of you. Thank you. Have a good day, everybody. Don't think too much about this stuff afterwards, but you will.

Yeah. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse were like a lot of goods. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without

progress. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without progress. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on Trial on the iHeart Radio app,

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