Timesuck with Dan Cummins - Short Suck #22 - The Kentler Experiment: That One Time Germany Intentionally Hired Pedos To Be Foster Parents

Episode Date: November 22, 2024

Today I'm sharing a wild story that I'm surprised isn't much more known - that one time Germany intentionally hired known pedophiles to be the foster parents of unsuspecting little boys, thinking that these fosters parents would care more for the boys since they were more invested in them.... because they were having sex with them. Yep. This really happened. Recently.  It began in the 1970s, and continued throughout the 1990s. How??? For Merch and everything else Bad Magic related, head to: https://www.badmagicproductions.com

Welcome to this edition of Time Sucks, Short Sucks. I'm Dan Cummins and today I will be talking about a German academic who led one of the most shocking, vile post-World War II studies I've ever read about, Helmut Kettler. Warning, this episode will read like I am making this up. It is that absurd. Unfortunately, I'm not. There will only ever be one Richard Burt.

This is sadly all too true. In the 1960s to the 1990s, Kettler was a renowned psychologist, sexologist, scholar of anti-fascism, professor of social education, and outspoken proponent of the sexual liberation movement and reproductive rights for women. He was doing a lot of good work in that area. He was a prominent figure in both German academia and politics and was once described as the

nation's chief authority on questions of sexual education. Of the expansive body of work, the psychologist produced his crowning and most disturbing by leaps and bounds scientific achievement. And the topic of today's insane episode, and achievement is probably not the right word, was a decades-long experiment where he placed neglected and orphan boys in the foster care of known pedophiles and he seemed to truly believe that any sexual abuse they suffered, as long as it wasn't violent, as long as it wasn't physically forced upon them, would be good for them. And this was not an underground or illegal operation. It wasn't even a secret. It was a fully public, entirely

government-funded experiment and it lasted until the 90s. Now you're probably asking yourself, what in the fuckity fucking fuck was fucking going out with these dude fucking fuckwits? Or something along those lines. And once some of your initial rage and shock has lessened, you're probably also asking, how? How did the German government ever allow that to happen? Why didn't anyone try to save those boys from the danger they were being placed in? How was Cantler not only banned from the government involvement for the rest of his life or even bringing this shit up, how was he not imprisoned for openly attempting to hand over foster children to pedophiles? Pedophiles who were friends of his because he was also a pedophile. And

also, what the fuck was Helmut Kettler trying to prove with this experiment? Did he actually think this experiment could be beneficial to children? I'm going to do all I can to answer all that and more in today's wild time suck short suck. Words and ideas can change the world. I hated her, but I wanted to love my mother. I have a dream. I plead not guilty right now. Your only chance is to leave with us.

At first glance, if you completely ignore the horrific experiment he was in charge of, he spearheaded, you know, where he placed innocent children in the hands of disgusting sexual predators, if you just look at a lot of the rest of what he accomplished, Helmut Kettler seems like he was a pretty good dude. For starters, he was openly gay in a deeply prejudiced country where homosexuality was still considered a crime, and he fought for the rights of marginalized, the marginalized community he was a member of. He came out to the public in 1961 when sexual relations between two men were still illegal in West Germany, a country still reeling from the horrors of World War II, during which along with Jews, Poles, people of color, disabled people, Roma and Sinti people, Jehovah's Witnesses, convicted criminals, and more, gay men were sent to concentration

camps and killed en masse. And interestingly, when World War II ended in 1945 and the concentration camps were liberated from the Allied forces, or by the Allied forces, the prisoners interred for being homosexual were not freed with the others. Instead, they were moved from camp to prison to serve the full length of their Nazi dicks don't touch dick sentences. And I say dicks and not puss because it seems that gay men were the targets of their persecution far far more than women. The Nazis for lack of a better word just essentially or I don't know phrasing lack of better phrasing just they didn't take lesbianism seriously. Some lesbians were sent to concentration camps, but they weren't labeled as lesbians.

They were labeled as being asocial. The Nazis just weren't interested in lesbians, but they hated gay dudes. And Germany, both East and West, following the war, you know, would continue to vilify them. And going forward, when I'm talking about Germany, I'll be talking about West Germany. Or a unified Germany following the end of the Berlin Wall or You know the the falling of it East Germany just a whole different beast But isn't that wild about the Holocaust?

while the world was cheering on the Allies for nobly freeing everyone else when people were having serious talks all across the globe about the evils of racism and fascism and anti-semitism while parents were talking to their children about how wrong it is to hate someone just because they worship a different god than you or worship god in different way or hold different political beliefs or are a different ethnicity with different customs. A liberated Germany was like, yeah, but two hot hard father daddies touching each other's boners? That's still fucking gross, right? We still hate that. Still need to punish those motherfuckers, right? And the rest of the world, you know, was either just ignorant to what was going on, or like, oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that's super gross. Those guys have cooties. Cooties is contagious and dangerous. Leave in their cages before all of the world's men

decide that man-butt, man-mouth, man-mouth is way better than lady-puss and we go extinct, because no one's making babies anymore. Under paragraph 175 of the German criminal code, anymore. Under paragraph 175 of the German criminal code from May of 1871 all the way up to March of 1994, sexual relationships between males was illegal in Germany. Towards the end of its implementation the law was amended a few times to make it less strict and not really enforced but still on paper illegal. It wasn't until 1994 that it was abolished completely and it wasn't until 2017 that same-sex marriage was made legal. So the fact that Helmut Keltner was an openly gay public figure back in the 60s, you know, was a big deal. It was ballsy.

In addition to advocating for the decriminalization of homosexuality, he also conducted extensive research and wrote countless papers about why sexual repression was harmful, and he dedicated his life to finding the cures to society's ills. Or at least, that was a narrative that he spun for himself. And a lot of people seem to believe it. By all accounts, Helmut Kentler appeared to the public to be an altruistic genius, a forward thinker, this progressive, this type of man who would help bring post-war Germany out of the turmoil and shame it had suffered during

the dark days of the Nazi regime. He worked as a youth education consultant for the state government and courts of law, conducted extensive research into the creation of community support structures and informal education systems for at-risk youth, you know, children and adolescents, was the president of the German Society for Social Scientific Sex Research and sat on the advisory board of the Humanist Union. However, with all his noble work and activism and liberal philanthropy, what Helmut Kettler was really doing was finding ways to justify pedophilia. And he was somehow convinced an alarming amount of people, people in political positions of power, that pedophilia was justified. Fucking crazy.

Germany was struggling to redefine itself following World War II and in an effort to push the pendulum away from the political far-right of totalitarian fascism and nationalism, they pushed way too fucking hard to the left. To the outer edges of liberalism, where people are so opposed to traditional values and so dedicated to reimagining what society should look like and leaning into the belief that everything is subjective, including essentially any and all notions of right and wrong, that it feels like nothing is sacred. Not even the innocence of children. Extremism. Will humanity ever fuck and learn that it's garbage? Or will we just remain in an endless cycle of shifting too hard to the right, and then too hard to the left, and a reaction,

you know, and then another reactionary way of too hard to the right, and then too hard to the left? When all our collective lizard brains evolve past simplistic binary thinking and embrace the truly nuanced state of human existence. This little mix of the two ideas seems to work best. But I guess the middle ain't sexy. Stable, but not sexy. The main thrust of Kentler's dangerously liberal work, no matter what it was, was rooted

in his belief that sexual relationships between adults and children are in no way dangerous, harmful or abusive. In fact, Kentler believed that children should benefit greatly could or would from engaging in a sexual act with an adult and that the decriminalization of pedophilia could somehow help the country quote prevent another Auschwitz. God, how the fuck do you get there? What kind of mental hurdles are you leaping over? You know what would have kept the Nazis from rounding up millions of people, mainly Jewish people, and murder them in concentration camps? Letting us all fuck kids. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, what

was that, Cantler? I don't think I heard you correctly. He really did postulate nonsensical arguments like that, and a scary amount of Germans carrying a lot of post-World War II guilt, people who seemed morally lost as they tried to find a new normal, somehow believed him. So why did Cantler make the focus of his life's work normalizing pedophilia? I mean, outside of the obvious reason of him wanting to stick his dick in kid-sized holes. To understand Cantler's fucked up theories about pedophilia, we got to go back to the most obvious source, his hot hard father daddy. Actually, I don't know if his daddy was hot or hard, but with daddy issues is where this all began for him. Keilner spawned into this world on July 2nd, 1928. Little is known as far as

specific details about his family, except for the fact that his dad was a lieutenant in the First World War and then later worked in the Nazi German government and both of his parents were big believers in the child-rearing philosophies of a man named Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schrieber. Is that exactly how you say his name? Probably not. I'm confident about the word Daniel. Pretty iffy about the rest. From the late 19th century to the first half of the 20th Schrieber was somewhat of a household name in Germany. He was a noted lecturer at the University of Leipzig,

wrote numerous parenting manuals on how to best raise kids in order to produce a stronger and more superior race of men. Schrieber's manuals continue to be printed and sold in the country all the way until 1950. And perhaps unsurprisingly, the ideas and ideals he proposed in them have been described as the spiritual precursor of Nazism

Shreiber argued that the ultimate goal of parenthood is to instill in your children an unconditional obedience to authority and The parents must do whatever is necessary to achieve this hit those motherfuckers beat him until they fear you and are too scared Not to do what they're told. That's how you create a good citizen According to Shreiber along with disobedience some of the other qualities and behaviors that must be beaten out of children were laziness, cowardice, meekness, sentimentality, vulnerability, and sexual desire. It's not like Schrieber had kids confused with robots. Man, not a lot of artists, not a lot of great artists, come out of a society built on Schrieber's principles. Yeah, fuck empathy.

In 1858, he wrote that it's a parent's moral obligation to suppress everything in the child. Emotions must be suffocated in their seed right away. That's literally a quote from him. Emotions must be suffocated in their seed right away. That's literally a quote from him. Emotions must be suffocated in their seed right away. Are you crying? There's no crying in life. When a child disobeyed their parents, especially their fathers, Shreiber said it was vital that they be punished. Some of the means of punishment he suggested were placing children in ice baths for extended periods of time. Yeah, that'll teach them. children in ice baths for extended periods of time. Yeah, that'll teach them. Withholding parental love and affection from the offending child or, it's my

favorite, hooking them up to one of the many many medieval mechanical strange contraptions he designed and sold. This guy was wild and very popular. Oh, history is so full of obvious maniacs who nevertheless become rich and famous and respected and embraced by the general public Despite their blatant zealotry, mental instability The times, they don't change so much sometimes Schrieber's contraptions were marketed to parents as tools to promote compliance in their children Some of his most popular devices were these large wide belts

They could be fastened to a bed frame and strapped across a child's chest to ensure they sleep through the night. Or at least, you know, fucking stay in their bed panicked and suffering throughout the night. There was this chin clamp connected to shoulder straps fucking thingy that restricted a child's movement, forced them to stand up straight. He also sold an iron rod that would press up against the kid's collarbone, be held in place by a strap around their back. It would keep them seated, sitting up straight at the dinner table and probably not talking too much.

Strieber also invented a few contraptions that would physically prevent kids from masturbating. Like elaborate contraptions, such as this weird pulley based contraption where your hands would be tied to these ropes and the ropes are attached to these weights. So it looks like a just kind of like your basic um pulley kind of weight system at the gym where you can do like tricep press towns or bicep curls you know like one of those machines like if but if you had it tied to you

so I guess I don't know maybe as you're trying to move around and you got all these weights attached to you that you just wear your arms out to the point and once you're off the machine you're too tired to fucking beat off or dill yourself. I don't know. His beat off machines, anti-beat off machines, never really took off with general public. Although Kentler's father never purchased any of Schrieber's super fucking weird compliance contraptions, he was a staunch follower of his parenting philosophies, and thus Cantler grew up in an incredibly strict, cold, unloving, sexually repressive and physically abusive home. His father's pendulum was pushed way, way, way too far to the right, and in the age-old,

pretty predictable, stereotypical rebellion against the ideals of one's parents, you don't tell me what to do, Dad, anymore! He swung the pendulum way too far to the left. Very reactionary. In a 1983 magazine article, Kettler described walking with his father through the forest as a young boy. And he said that as they walked, quote, I had only one wish,

that my father should take my hand and hold it in his. Oh, if Daddy would have just held his hand, he would have never fucking put, you know, foster kids in pedo homes. Uh, but that didn't happen. I imagine his dad would have smacked him had he tried to hold his hand. What are you doing? Get off me, you little baby. What are you trying to, what are you trying to gain me? What's going on? Uh, Kentler resented his daddy for the tyrannical way he ran the household and later for the insurmountable sexual shame he felt his father had instilled within him. But the illusion of dominance and authority his father portrayed was shattered for young Kentler when he was just 10 years old.

It was 1938. Kentler and his family were living in Dusseldorf. One night, unbeknownst to them, the Nazi storm troopers had begun raiding the stores and homes belonging to the Jewish people. Germany's infamous Night of Broken Glass, when Nazi aggression towards its Jewish population took a massive, scary leap forward. In the middle of the night, young Kentler woke up to the violent sound of glass shattering. He ran out of his room in a panic to find his father standing in a thin nightdress, looking scared, talking to someone on the phone. He called the police just minutes before to report a break-in in the building.

Officer on the other line informed the old man that it was not a break-in. There were Jewish people living in his apartment complex, and the Nazis had come to teach him a lesson. How dare you be Jewish? Moments after his father hung up the phone, there was a knock at the door, standing on the other side, where their Jewish neighbors, young family with three little children, looking terrified, they explained that their apartment had been destroyed destroyed and they asked if they could just

spend the night with them until they could, you know, figure things out. No, that will really not be possible here, replied Kentler's father coldly and then he shut the door in their faces. And as he did, his night shirt shifted, Kentler caught a glimpse of his cowardly, cruel father's skinny, soft upper thigh and later wrote that in that moment My whole father suddenly seemed laughable to me and he vowed to never obey him again Evidently that wasn't quite true though because he also wrote that when he graduated high school eight years later Wanted to become a priest his dad forbid it

So despite Kenner's desire to devote his life to the church instead started studying what his daddy had told him to Which was electrical engineering. It wasn't until after daddy dropped dead two years later that Kenler got the courage to drop out of engineering school and pursue his real passions. By that point, Kenler no longer had any clerical ambitions. Instead, he spent the next few decades studying and teaching psychology, medicine, education, and philosophy at various universities. In 1960 he got his degree in psychology, a field which he said allowed him to be an quote,

an engineer in the realm of the manipulation of the soul. Dude clearly really wanted to shake society up and rebuild it according to his own vision. And in 1975 he received his doctorate in social education from the University of Hanover. That same year he also published his doctoral dissertation, an introduction to his work to come, a parenting manual titled, Parents Learn Sexual Education. Didn't start off creepy. In hindsight, oh, creepy as fuck. But he hadn't jumped off the deep end quite yet, at least not publicly. The main point of his thesis was that children have sexual feelings and sexual needs prior to hitting puberty.

Do they have sexual needs prior to hitting puberty? I don't think they do and the parents should never make their kids feel ashamed of this. One of the first feelings of shame exists, or no, excuse me, once the first feelings of shame exists he wrote they multiply easily and expand into all areas of life. He argued that the ways that his parents' generation were taught to raise their children were harmful, dangerous, and ended up poisoning them. And he wasn't wrong. You know, his parents' ways were too repressive, much too repressive. He wanted to change that and obviously went way too far. Like we went over earlier, the traditional child-rearing principles in Germany prior to World War II were emotional and sexual suppression,

unyielding obedience to authority, and paternal dominance. Cantler believed the Nazi takeover was partially caused by those values being aggressively and harshly instilled in generation after generation of German children. He argued that sexual suppression was especially to blame because when people are shamed into stifling their sexual energy they will eventually find another outlet for it which is most often destruction. So you know he was advocating more fucking less fighting. I do like to general ethos of that could probably leave you know the kids out of it. Cantler by the way was not the only person in Germany claiming that sexual repression was key to understanding the fascist consciousness. German legal scholar

Herbert Jaeger once said, I do think that in a society that was more free about sexuality Auschwitz could not have happened. Okay during the 1960s and 1970s that idea was also echoed by much of the general population of Germany. According to a really great article in the New Yorker that we relied on heavily for this episode, quote, sexual emancipation was integral to student movements throughout Western Europe. But the pleas were more pitched in Germany where the memory of genocide had become inextricably, if not entirely accurately, linked with sexual primness. Yeah, I would say that's not accurate. So the bottom line is that Kentler was not special

in thinking that sexual liberation was necessary for the prevention of another Nazi or Nazi-esque takeover. What made his ideas about sexual liberation different from everyone else's was the extent to which he thought they should be applied to children and to pedophiles. to which he thought they should be applied to children and to pedophiles. In his creepy as fuck 1975 book, Parents Learn Sexual Education, Koehler wrote that it was necessary for parents to introduce their young children to sexuality early on in their lives to prevent them from becoming, quote, sexually underdeveloped, sexual cripples. Okay, I'm talking about sexuality, you know, with your kids instead of keeping

a taboo and making it shameful. Okay. But in addition to introducing kids to the concept of sex, explaining how it works, what it feels like, what it looks like, etc. Candler also said it was important for parents to never shame their children for any sexual feelings, desires or, and this is big, experiences they might have, including experiences they might have with adults. Nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nobody, nobody, nobody, fucking nope. And now we have entered Pedoland. But before I share details of how completely insane all this becomes, time for today's mid-show sponsor break. And now let's hear what horror Kentler was presenting.

In his self-serving dissertation, Kentler, now openly a pedo advocate, Dirty Rock Spider, adviced that if your child approaches you and says they've had a sexual encounter with an adult, you shouldn't necessarily be concerned. He wrote quote, the wrong thing to do now would be for parents to lose their nerve, panic and run straight to the police. If the adult was concerned, Jesus Christ, if the adult was considerate and tender, the child could even have enjoyed sexual contact with him. And here's where someone should have taken a copy of his book and used it to either beat him to death or into an extended hospital stay.

Kellner was now focusing his work, had been focusing it for several years actually, this was not his first creepy book, on promoting the idea that pedophilia isn't all that bad, that it can even be beneficial for a kid's mental health and development. Totally, right? I mean, I mean we all know someone who says stuff like, oh I love my uncle, he's great. We've been really close ever since he

started to gently, benevolently, benevolently, I can't talk to you, molest me when I was eight. Now sometimes we still fuck for funsies. What a guy. I just don't know what I'd do without him. Get out of here. For example, in another book published five years prior in 1970 called Sex Education, he wrote that quote, our children have to deal with worse than sexual seduction attempts and sexual attacks over the course of their lives. God, he's really trying to minimize it. If nothing more, Jesus Christ, if nothing more has happened to your child than he was sexually seduced, then we don't need to worry. Oh my God. On the other hand other hand if he was physically beaten up the child would have suffered irreparable damage. Really? Irreparable? I was beaten up as a kid

several times Never molested and I gotta say I would not want to go back and flip it around I was able to shake off some physical beatings pretty quick Not sure I would have been able to do the same with molestation. Kellan reiterated this view in the forward he wrote for sex education, for a sex education book, excuse me, a book he wrote for children called Show Me, that was published in 1971. Oh my god, that's a terrible name for a sex ed book for kids. Show Me? Seriously? Why not call it Get in the Basement?

Or Take it Off? Show me, which is thankfully no longer in print. Do not try to find it. You will get it. It's child porn. It was comprised of a bunch of pictures, many of them extremely sexual in nature and thus extremely disturbing. Taken by photographer Will McBride of various naked

kids and their genitals accompanied by explanatory text written by psychiatrist Helga Fleischhauerhardt. The controversial book was the recipient of four different obscenity charges levied against its publishers almost immediately. However, in all four cases, because the book was technically not considered child porn, but educational, the judges deemed it unobscene and prosecutors lost. Despite that, legal charges would continue to be thrown at ShowMe. In 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court banned it when it banned the knowing distribution of non-obscene child pornography.

You can't have a fucking educational loophole if you're taking pictures of kids fucking. Although the book was not the direct subject of the Supreme Court case, it was referred to continually throughout it. And in the end the verdict caused it to be pulled from all American bookshelves and rightfully so. Although ShowMe is not available for purchase anymore, you can still order a copy, a used copy of it if you don't mind the police delivering it to your door, along with an arrest warrant. But for real while it's not available for purchase some old newspaper articles talking about it do give us a pretty good idea

of what was portrayed in sight. And there is a Wikipedia page about it. Even that one! I opened the Wikipedia page for a second. I was like nope! Like when the first picture I was out in a coffee shop I was like oh shit, no! In a New York Times article published July 13th 1975 author Linda Wolf describes the books visual contents The photographs reveal the world of sex through the eyes of two five-year-olds Fuck we witness what they witness We puzzle with them over their belly buttons and the fact that he has a penis and she has a vagina She turns bottoms up so he can see close up what she's got and he shows her how he pees and poops.

Pretty sure they both pooped the same. The book at this point seemed to be directed to satisfying the sexual curiosities of kindergartners but soon these children are pondering the sexual behavior of their adolescent siblings. The boy has seen and we see through his eyes, his teenage brother and a barely pubescent girlfriend having intercourse. This is like photos. The girl has watched her older sister rub her clitoris, and we see that too. Holy shit. We also witness awes- this is a weird quote of hers. We also witness awesome adult-sized penises being masturbated and mouthed.

Easy, Linda Wolf. Easy. Awesome adult-sized penises being masturbated and mouthed. Easy, Linda Wolf. Easy. Awesome adult-sized penises. This isn't the place for you to start getting all fucking hot and bothered, you weirdo. Linda then writes, Later we are treated to magnified pubic hairs, grotesquely enlarged testicles, and angles on intercourse no child will ever see,

no matter how obliging his adolescent siblings, unless he is face-up between the legs of the participants. What the fuck? In the end, Linda Wolf concluded that Show Me was too frightening to be shown to young children and too stupid to be shown to teenagers. She wrote, indeed Show Me will make many teenagers feel exploited since it merely tantalizes and toys with the young but does not inform them. Thus, in every way, it twists a daring but good idea into a child

abusive joke. To select it for a child or even a teenager is to admit not that one is a sexually liberated parent but that one is so uncomfortable with the subject of sex that one dares not be discriminating. So yeah, it's child porn. It's fucking demented. Kids do not need to see photos of other kids fucking to know what sex is or how it worked. That is absurd. But Kentler obviously did not agree. He had a very different opinion about the portrayal of the naked bodies of children and teenagers. In the foreword of Show Me, he discusses the importance of introducing children to sexuality early on,

destigmatizing the fact that children have sexual desires and needs, and how repressed sexual feelings in children can one day turn them into disturbed and poorly adjusted adults. In the short text he also writes about a number of other horrifying things including how a three-year-old girl might achieve an orgasm and how breastfeeding for boys as young as three weeks old can be an erotic and sexually satisfying experience for both mother and child. What are you talking about? This fucking three-week old Little boy like you don't even know he has arms. He doesn't know fucking anything at all His brain is just a little fucking mushy Sponged void of almost any contents. There's a little fucking pile of shit in his head

He just he just hoping to get milk. He just he just knows he's hungry on some primitive level. He's not at three weeks old being like, oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, oh, daddy like it. Oh, daddy like it, mama. To repeat what I said earlier, what the fuck any fuck was fucking going on? Kindler concludes the forward by arguing for his very favorite thing in the world. The benefit of sexual relationships between children and adults. Even if those adults are parents. Did I mention he didn't have a problem with incest? No sexual boundary was taken with this group.

You probably got that from the three-week-old boy getting all fucking worked up, sucking mom's tit. And mom getting worked up. To demonstrate the benefits of sex between kids and adults, he referred to a Dutch study where 30 people who had, quote, sexual relationships with adults when they were children were surveyed about the lasting effects of those relationships. According to Kentler, and probably no one else, the participants of the study almost

always rated their sexual relationships as positive. He also included a quote from the results of the actual study which said, The frequency of psychologically or functionally neurotic symptoms and social behavior of the participants do not differ from the general Dutch population. On the contrary, the test shows that the victims are less likely to feel threatened or tense than the average Dutchman. Seems as if they understand themselves better, are more self-critical, and less defensive. Mm. Keller then offers his own conclusion to the study by saying that, quote, If the environment does not discriminate against pedophilic relationships, one can expect positive

effects on personal development, the more the older party feels responsible for the younger. So basically he's just saying like, if society was just, we're all just on board with fucking the kids, then the kids would have a great time. Oh my god. I'm not familiar with the Dutch study he was referring to here. And I'm not, I wasn't willing to search for it. Uh, cause I don't want to be, uh, going to prison. Uh, surprisingly, Kenler was never shot, point blank in the head, uh, for saying any of this bullshit. Wasn't even ostracized for it.

He was celebrated. One lady did punch him in the early nineties. One lady finally was like, shut the fuck, literally punched him while he was speaking. Came up and punched him. But that was it. Now it should be noted that the culture in post-war Germany, again, very different. Very different than it is now in Germany. Thank God. As I mentioned earlier in the decades that followed World War II, the German people on the whole were trying desperately to distance themselves from the fascist morality and value systems that dominated the country during World War II. And German people on the whole were trying desperately to distance themselves from the fascist morality and value systems that dominated the country during World War II. And also, like I said earlier,

many believed that the number one thing that needed revolutionizing was the country's stringent attitudes towards sex and sexuality. In addition to student protests that were happening all over the world, excuse me, in the 60s and 70s, another prominent aspect of the German sexual liberation movement during those decades were experimental daycare centers. Oh yeah. And they were just as creepy as you're probably thinking. Germany was out of its fucking mind for almost the entirety of the 20th century, just collectively. First World War I, then World War II, then whatever this shit is. These experimental daycares were established in over 30 cities across the nation,

and their goal was to provide a safe space where children could go to understand their sexuality without shame. At these places, the toddlers were encouraged to be naked and, quote, explore one another's bodies. What is happening? Who was taking their kids to these places? Who was thinking that their two-year-old needed to get out there and grab some baby dick? One German historian later wrote that with these experimental daycare centers quote There is no question that they were trying to remake German slash human nature. Yeah, but remake it into what?

Around the same time the Green Party of Germany was forming officially It was an environmentalist group, but it also incorporated anti-war and sexual liberation ideologies. Early on in its inception the Green Party focused their political efforts into addressing the quote sexual oppression of children. What the fuck it's like Mambler or whatever. Amongst other things they fought aggressively for the age of consent to be abolished. IE to legalize pedophilia. And just like with helmets, they weren't even beaten to death one time. All the jokes I've heard over the course of my life about like

weird ass, very extreme, fetish German an undergrad, spending a semester in London. And she told me that she had been, this is not funny, I'm just laughing at the previous thing. She told me something very sad and tragic actually, that she'd been raped by a guy in a park when she was a kid. Like some creep literally hiding in the bushes. And they never caught him. And I remember thinking how crazy that was.

Like, what? Just a dude hiding in the park waiting for kids and while I know that there are those guys here in the US and everywhere else, this episode made me think about her story and now I'm just wondering was he one of many dudes waiting in the park today? Like jockeying for position? Like was there too many dudes to fit in the bushes and there was just a line of other dudes waiting to go hide in the bushes? I feel like that you know this happened in fit in the bushes and there was just a line of other dudes waiting to go hide in the bushes. I feel like that, you know, this happened in the early 80s. Was Germany just chock full of pedos because of all these terrible notions, this terrible

ideology? Well, Helmut Kintler, being a public champion of the sexual liberation movement and advocate for children's sexuality, unsurprisingly was a huge supporter of the Green Party. That party has changed, by the way, and more often they don't seem to hold these views anymore in their incarnation. So that was the environment that Helmut Kettler existed in. The concept of children being sexual beings and the trivialization of pedophilia was being discussed in both social and political mainstream landscapes. He was one voice in a massive choir of people all singing the same pro-pedophilic song. But evidently his voice was the loudest and his career skyrocketed because of it. Oh what a world! In the 70s, Kentler

was asked to lead the Department of Social Education at the Pedagogical Center, a prestigious international research institute in Berlin. His primary job at the center was to help reform the country's education practices and find ways to provide support for the millions of at-risk youth in Germany. Awesome. Good call Germany. Yeah, let's put that guy in charge of supporting at-risk youth. Specifically, Kentler was focused on the child runaways, heroin addicts, and underage prostitutes of Germany. Specifically, Kentler was focused on the child runaways, heroin addicts, and underage prostitutes of Germany. Just lambs getting lined up for the slaughter. In the 1970s, many of these children could be found congregating in the archways at the Berlin Zoo railway station.

This station was not only the main transportation port for West Berlin, it was also a hub of illicit activity where adults and kids alike purchased both heroin and sex from adults and children alike. Supposedly doing research for his job at the pedagogical center, Kettler frequented the zoo station. Sorry, I almost said zoo station, which is very fucking different image in Germany. No, zoo station. Quite often to meet with the population he was responsible for. One afternoon he struck up a conversation with a 13 year old prostitute named Ulrich, whom Kandler described as one of the most sought-after prostitutes in the station scene. And so many people just needed to get murdered back then. When Kandler asked Ulrich where he slept tonight, he said that he and other kids, you know, child prostitutes, often provided for by a much older man they called

Mother Winter. Oh, Mother Winter, the walking child prostitute haven. Oh, I'm sure he wasn't doing anything to those kids. No, he was fucking them. In exchange for sex, Mother Winter would provide the children of Zoo Station with things like food or shelter or laundry. God, what an ally. What a caretaker. Keller was immediately intrigued by this relationship between Mother Winter and the young boys that sold him sex. And by intrigued, I'm guessing he meant to say aroused. Quote, if the prostitutes call this man mother,

he can't be bad, he wrote. Keller was just, he was both disgusting and just a fucking idiot if you actually believe this. Keller later observed that Ulrich's advantage was that he was handsome and that he enjoyed sex so he could give something back to pedophile men who looked after him. Oh yeah that's a that's a totally fair exchange. You know he could have also just said thank you and and mother boner could have not been a

predator and could have just been like you're welcome and just to help these kids just you know just to be kind you could have been altruistic A light bulb now went off in Cantler's extremely demented head and he began to theorize that pedophiles might actually be the best foster parents Following his own perverted line of reasoning Cantler realized that because children do have sexual desires That's his words. I would say that most young children do not have those desires. Curiosity, not the same as desire. I didn't have any fucking desire pre puberty. Kellar thought that having a sex relationship with an adult would most likely benefit a child's mental development. Mm-hmm. So having foster a foster parent or parents that they have sex with might help them become, you know,

more well adjusted as his thinking. On top of that, Kellar believed that being sexually attracted to their foster children would make the pedophile foster parent more nurturing and caring. Yeah, everyone knows that the best most loving protective parents fuck their kids. Get away from my girlfriend! I mean daughter. I mean daughter girlfriend. This is insane. To test this theory, the first thing Kettler did was to get the German government to formalize the arrangement between Ulrich and Mother Winter, as in pay him, making a 13-year-old child prostitute the official foster child of the pedophile, paid pedophile, who was already raping him.

This motherfucker is presenting this insanity to the German government and they're like, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, das ist gut. I kliebes. Oh, das ist gut Then how is this real and fucking recent history? Then Kentler went on to find other known pedophiles in Berlin and helped them get certified as foster parents He did this with the full knowledge approval and funding of the Berlin Senate At the time the government was desperate for solutions to their many problems like, you know Senate. At the time the government was desperate for solutions to their many problems like you know drug like you know opiates and stuff,

opioids, growing population of homeless youth and as we went over earlier back then the general attitude towards pedophiles and pedophilia much insanely more lenient than it is now. A radical to radical shift away from you know what how the punitive life was under Hitler. The Senate's records about the Cantler experiment are scarce and vague. For starters there are no surviving documents about how the experiment initially came to be approved by the Senate. It's unknown if there were any. Additionally the files that do exist on the experiment are scattered in unsorted heaping piles in a dark basement of an undisclosed Berlin

government building. Top of that. Officials say that those documents are also unreadable and offer no specifics about the names of the foster parents or foster children involved with the project. A lot of people think that the most damning documents were destroyed. When officials, you know, finally were like, oh, this is fucking, this is dark, this is bad. The public is realizing how fucked up this is.

We gotta hide this. Every once in a while, Kintler would update the Senate about his work, but only in regards to three foster homes, at least officially. However, a 2020 investigation into his experiment found that in reality, there were countless state-sanctioned pedophile foster homes involved with the experiment. Again, there's no definitive list of the foster parents, but according to a 58- 58 page investigation investigative report from that 2020 investigation some of the homes quote were run by sometimes powerful men who lived alone and were given this power by academia research institutions and other pedi oh my god pedagogical environments that accepted supported or even lived out pedophile stances. So cool, so you had a pedophile research institutions,

you know, full of pedophiles funding other pedophiles. This is like the kind of shit like the David Icke or Alex Jones talk about, except it's real. Speaking of Alex Jones, did you hear that the satirical comedy website, The Onion bought his Infowars business? Oh, chef's kiss. One of the known pedophiles that participated in Kentler's experiment was a shit stain named

Fritz Henkel. With Kentler's help, Fritz ran his foster home for 30 years and in total had over 20 boys placed in his care. Over 20 boys he for sure molested. When he began fostering children in 1973, a teacher of his first foster children filed a complaint saying that Fritz was quote always looking for contact with little boys. Yeah, that's Fritz. Six years later in 1976 a caseworker discovered that Fritz was in a quote homosexual relationship with one of his foster sons and an investigation was launched with overwhelming evidence of sexual abuse, it sure seemed like a win for the prosecution. However, thanks to the intervention of, can you guess, Helmut Kentler. The investigation was stopped before it could really even get started.

Calling himself Fritz's permanent advisor, Kentler wrote a letter to the court saying that in his expert opinion, Fritz was an outstanding foster parent and a trustworthy caregiver. Kentler condemned the prosecution and the psychiatrist that wrote the initial report, saying that they had taken things wildly out of context and their accusations against Fritz were moronic. Because Kentler was a public figure and the country's leading expert on all things child care, the courts valued his opinion, and the case against Fritz was thrown out. This was not the only time Kentler rushed to Fritz's defense and saved his ass from getting thrown in jail throughout Fritz's 30-year career as a serial foster parent slash pedophile.

Kentler often stepped in to reassure the authorities of the guy's competence. Oh no no he's great! No he's doing a great job with these kids. Oh yeah. A few years later when another caseworker complained of Fritz's inappropriate behavior with foster children, Kentler wrote a letter to the youth welfare office saying that even though Fritz sometimes inappropriate behavior with foster children. Kellner wrote a letter to the Youth Welfare Office saying that even though Fritz sometimes appeared to be harsh and hurtful, he was still very much a loving and qualified caregiver. Yeah, yeah, a little too loving. Loved in the wrong ways.

He concluded the letter by saying, I ask you to consider that a man who deals with such seriously damaged children is not a simple person. What Fritz Henkel needs from the authorities is trust and protection. Oh dear God. 1988. When Fritz was 47 years old, he took in a five-year-old boy who goes by the pseudonym of Marco in this New Yorker article. At that age, Marco was an outgoing little kid full of energy and zest for life. By the time he left Fritz Henkel's foster home, 13 years later, he had become a shell of his former self.

No empathy for any living thing, no idea how to navigate the world just totally dead inside. Before being knowingly tossed into the home of a pedophile, Marco had lived with his mom and older brother in Berlin. To provide for her two kids, Marco's mother worked at a sausage stand at the other side of town from where they lived. Marco's father had divorced her and moved away so the little boys were often left on their own. While plain unsupervised one afternoon in 1988, Marco ran across the street without looking and got hit by a car. While he was in the hospital, a division of the Berlin

Youth Welfare Office started looking into him and his family. The caseworker from the Youth Welfare Office discovered that not only was Marco left alone quite often, he was also frequently sent to daycare in dirty clothes. His mom almost showed up, you know, or almost always showed up two to four hours late to pick him up from daycare. The caseworker concluded that Marco's mom was unfit to care for him

and recommended that the five-year-old boy be instead placed in a foster home with a, quote, family-like atmosphere. But instead of that happening, he was given to a known pedophile. When Marco first arrived at Fritz Henkel's foster home, he was dazzled by what he found there. Fritz, along with his two other teenage foster sons, lived in an expansive five-bedroom flat

in the upscale neighborhood of Friedenau. The place was much bigger than his mother's apartment. Big windows looked out on the main shopping street. Long hallways for him to run up and down. Fritz even had two bunnies that Marco was allowed to play with and feed. In his first report sent to the Youth Welfare Office, the office which, I want to remind you, was fully aware that he was a pedophile. Fritz wrote that his new foster son was

quote excited about almost everything that was being offered to him. Oh, was he? Very disturbing to think about what was being offered to him. However, before too long, the initial dazzle of his new surroundings faded, and Marco quickly fell into a state of despair and confusion regarding what his life had become. The specific details of the abuse are not revealed in any articles, but it is made clear that soon after Marco moved in, Fritz did begin to anally rape or otherwise molest him on a pretty much daily basis, crawling into his bed night after night. And though no one ever talked about it, there was an unspoken understanding

that what Fritz was doing to Marco, he was also doing to all the other boys in the house. In addition to being sexually abusive, Fritz was also emotionally manipulative and physically violent with the children in his care. He forced them to call him Papa, continually reminded them how lucky they were to have a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs.

It was all because of him. Even though the state was paying him to have these kids. He instilled in them a distorted sense of loyalty. He rewarded them for good behavior, you know, which was sexual encounters, enthusiasm during these encounters, encouraged disobedience in schools so they would be kicked out and, you know, not form meaningful attachments at school, isolated them from their friends and biological families.

At first, Marco's mother and brother were allowed to visit him once a month, under the supervision of his foster father. However, the visits were often either cut short or simply canceled by Fritz, and as time went on, Marco saw less and less of his real family, who Fritz frequently told him did not care for him, and who Fritz hid attempts to visit him from him. The longer Marco lived in this hellhole, the more withdrawn he became from the rest of the world, the more other people started to notice him becoming withdrawn. Specifically, Marco's teachers

observed that every time the little boy saw his mom, he would become noticeably more despondent, ill-tempered. Because of this, the school recommended Marco meet with a therapist. His foster dad agreed, but on one fucked up condition He had to be present for every single one of the sessions, which is outrageous That's not how therapy is supposed to work. Fritz refused to let Marco be alone with the therapist The one time the therapist started a session before he showed up. He allegedly literally slapped her in the face The therapist informed the youth welfare office that Marco was being quote held prisoner by his foster father and that a psychological evaluation should be conducted on the boy unsurprisingly Kentler stepped in didn't

let that happen. He called the office told them that if a psychological evaluation needed to be done that he would do it himself. Oh yeah uh-huh. Insights beyond my findings are not to be expected he wrote. Growing up Marco and his foster brothers never knew they were part of a government-funded experiment. What they did know however was however was that for some reason the distinguished academic and public figure Helmut Kettler took a very special interest in their upbringing. Marco described Kettler as playing an almost excuse me grandfatherly role in their foster

family. Though they rarely saw him in person he and Fritz talked on the phone almost every night and if any of the boys got too upset in their foster family. Though they rarely saw him in person, he and Fritz talked on the phone almost every night. And if any of the boys got too upset at their foster father for how he treated them, Kenlar would suddenly appear in person or over the phone to remind them how good they had it with Fritz. For example, one evening Marco took a steak knife from the kitchen hidden under his pillow. Later that night when Fritz crept in to quote cuddle with the young boy, Marco pulled out the knife held it in front of him, warding the pedophile off. At first Fritz panicked, ran from the room, but a few minutes later he reappeared in the doorway sheepishly holding the phone for Marco to take. Kentler was on the other

line in a calming and sympathetic voice. He asked the boy what he was afraid of. Why did he threaten his dear old foster daddy? Not knowing what else to say Marco responded, there's a devil behind my wall. Cantler, ever the compassionate mentor, told Marco that it was okay to be afraid but that there was nothing to be afraid of. There are no such thing as devils. He is perfectly safe and loved and cared for in the home of his foster father. Cantler convinced Marco to surrender the knife, to promise never to do such a silly little thing ever again and then of course Fritz got back to molesting Marco. Every few months Fritz would drive Marco and his foster brothers 200 miles away to the University Cantler worked at in Hanover. Fritz once wrote that the

visits gave the psychologists a chance to hear what the children saw say about their past, their dreams and fears, to know their wishes and hopes, to see how they develop, how they feel. To Marco, these visits were boring and tiresome affairs, but to Cantler they were vital to his experiment. They gave Cantler a chance to observe his test subjects firsthand, to gather data about them to get a proper read on how his experiment was progressing. And in the end, Cantler concluded that the experiment was going fucking awesome!

Oh, I have a boner all the time, it's great! He didn't say that thing about the boner, but I'm sure it's true. In 1981, Cantler was invited to speak to the German parliament about why homosexuality should be decriminalized, but during his speech, the psychology ended up talking less about gay rights, a lot more about his pedo experiment, which is a real bad look. He told the German Parliament that he, along with the funding, approval, and support of the Berlin Senate, what they were doing with the foster care system, he told them about the pedophiles and the access they were being given to children, about the sexual encounters

that occurred in the foster homes, how the boys were benefiting from them. The fucking Senate is listening to this. The Parliament is like, oh yeah, oh das is gut. The pedophiles, he explained, were actually the only people in the whole world willing to care for these neglected disobedient and quote moronic children. And they were all super grateful for it. He told Parliament, quote, we look after and advise these relationships very intensively. These people only put up with these feeble-minded boys.

Jesus Christ, because they are in love with him. Holy shit. They weren't people-minded by the way. God, even if they were, that's, that's fucking even darker. I mean, why would anyone, why would anyone care for this kid? Look at this kid. He can't take for himself. You know, his fucking brain, his body doesn't work right.

He can't, you know, can't fucking do much. Can barely talk. Who's gonna look after him unless he gets to fuck him, right? What are they getting out of it? That's literally what he's saying. Lawmakers, it appears, were neither alarmed nor horrified. Nor horrified by what they heard come out of Kentler's butthole of a mouth. In a 1988 report submitted to the Berlin Senate,

Kentler said the experiment was a complete success. That's fucking still going on, 1988. The results of the experiment according to Cantler provided proof that sexual contact between kids and adults not a cause for concern. And the pedophiles make stellar foster parents because as I went over earlier, you know, they're inclined to take, you know, a little better care of the kids because of that incentive of getting to fuck them. He went on to say that foster boys benefited from the experience and the sexual interactions they had with their foster fathers had a very positive impact on them. Especially when the sexual relationship can be characterized as mutual love. Whew.

Okay, now you'll be horrified, but not surprised, to learn that Helmut Keltler was also a foster father. Of course he was. He had three young boys in his care and in 1985 he revealed to his close friend and colleague Gunther Schmidt that he was in a sex relationship with the youngest foster son. I mean of course he was. Is anyone surprised? Gunther Schmidt was the former president of the International Academy of Sex Research. I crossed paths with Kettler on many occasions through their shared field of study. Knew each other very well. Schmidt like many others, fully aware of the experiment Kentler was conducting. He told the New Yorker that he, quote, honestly had respect for it. I thought these are really young people who are in the worst situation. They probably have a long history at home. They had miserable childhoods

and someone is looking after them now. And if Kentler is there, it'll be fine. And the Berlin Senate is also there. Then in 1985 Schmidt received a letter from his homeboy, Kentler saying that he wanted to share with Smith his life hack to aging happily, which was of course drum roll, please pedophilia. Kentler explained that the reason he hadn't lured turned into an old curmudgeon like so many other academics his age was that he and his 26 year old foster son were in a quote

very fulfilling love story. For fuck's sake he went on to say that even though it had been 13 years since they first entered this relationship it still felt fresh. Little quick math. 1985 when he wrote this letter. Kenlar was 57 years old, foster son 26, which means when they started their relationship Kenlar was 44, foster son was 13. Article does not say how Schmidt responded to the letter or if he did anything to stop his pedophile friend from, you know, just being a fucking piece of shit. But it seems like he probably did not do all that much because Cantler went on raping his foster son for another six years.

And then he only stopped because his foster son, this love of his life, the one he was in this fairy tale love story with, killed himself in 1991. Yeah. Confused as to why his other half slash son slash continual rape victim would end his life, Candler looked for answers in the essay Confusion of the Tongues Between Adults and the Child written by psychoanalyst Sandor Farenti, a prominent student of Sigmund Freud's. The essay is super long and tedious and wordy, but essentially what it's all about is how pedophilia is wrong because of the power dynamic and the fact that children don't have the capacity to protest being fucked or consent to it. Pretty basic. How did Kentler and German politicians not just intuitively inherently know

that shit? How fucking dumb do you have to be to understand that? But that was apparently simply mind-blowing for Kentler. In a 1992 interview with a German historian, Kentler spoke of the guilt he now felt about his son's suicide. He explained that his foster son killed himself because as a kid he had been in a sex relationship with an adult and was never able to process the trauma of it. Kentler conveniently left out the fact that he was the adult in question. Instead told the interviewer that his foster son had been sexually abused by his birth mother

and he said he hung himself because of that. Kellner said he had an idea how damaging sexual encounters between a child and adult could be now. Or sorry, he didn't understand how damaging they could be until he read the essay the essay and then said unfortunately I only read the Farenti I gotta pronounce his name for a second Farenti essay after his death dude Kenler explained that he felt guilty because he hadn't known how to support his son oh my god I was too stupid he said and certainly I'm partly to blame. Oh yeah. Mm-hmm. Partly? By the late 1990s, Cantler's foster experiment had come to somewhat of an end. He stopped visiting the pedophiles and their foster children, stopped recording notes and writing

analyses. The experiment for Cantler seemed to just fade it away. And what was likely his last recorded public statement about pedophilia in an interview in 1999, he finally referred to it as a quote sexual disorder and alluded to the impossibility of an adult and a child sharing an understanding of sexual contact. The problem he said is that the adult will always have the monopoly on definition. Dude had to fuck little kids for over three decades to finally be like, you know what? On second thought, this is bad. This is wrong.

But he never apologized to any of the kids he victimized personally or the kids victimized in his experiment. And none of them got any compensation from the state for what was done to them to my knowledge. Despite Kellner finally realizing, well, fucking hopefully all of you knew immediately that this is evil and this experiment should end for all the children he fed to sexual predators, the experiment never really ended. After Cantler and the Senate gave up on the study, it appears that none of the children were even pulled from the foster homes and their pedophile caregivers were allowed to continue being foster parents who undoubtedly continued to molest them. Fritz Henkel, for example, continued running his foster home until he was forced to shut down in 2003 and he was shut down not for being a known pedophile,

but because he just hadn't been assigned a new child for six months. At that time, Marco was 21, still living with his foster dad, who promptly then kicked him out when he stopped receiving a fostering stipend from the state. The dude who molested him for over 15 years, loving, protective parent, tossed him out like a piece of trash, completely unprepared for how to function in the world, thanks to his childhood, and for a while now he was homeless. It took him years to kind of like, you know, slowly kind of figure out how life is supposed to work.

Marco only had contact with Fritz two times after being kicked out. Once when Marco was in his mid-20s, Fritz called him, asked him if he had fed the rabbits. Sounded to Marco like the old man was suffering from dementia. He didn't care to find out for sure though and just hung up on him. Next time was in 2015. Marco received a call that Fritz was in hospice care, dying of cancer. By that time, Marco had a steady job and a wife who was pregnant with her first child. He had managed against all odds to build a healthy life for himself. Upon hearing the

news Marco drove to the hospice center, found his foster father's room. He opened the door to find the crippled old man lying on his bed crying out in pain. Marco stared at Fritz for less than five seconds, he said, just long enough to confirm like, oh yeah, he's dying. Then he slammed the door shut, walked away. For the first time in his life, Marco felt free. And now he and the rest of us are just left to wonder how the hell could this have ever happened. And so recently, what a weird, weird world we live in.

One undoubtedly full of so many good people, but also so many dirtbags. Dirtbags who can be part of the government, who can supposedly be working to help protect children, dirtbags who could be noted psychologists. I guess this story is another reminder that just because someone, you know, is deemed or something is deemed to be good by the so-called experts and just because something is deemed, you know, to be okay by society at large. That doesn't mean it actually is okay. That doesn't mean that it's right. Both individuals and cultures sometimes get what's right so, so wrong.

And just one more thing. What in the fuck, any fucking fucking fuck was going on with these fucking fuckwits? That's it for this edition. That insane edition of Time Suck Short Sucks. If you enjoyed this story. for this edition, that insane edition of Time Suck Short Sucks. If you enjoyed this story, I don't know if enjoy is the right word for that. If you were intrigued by that story, if you were horrified, check out the rest of the Bad Magic catalog.

If you want to be horrified by something else, beef your episodes of Time Suck every Monday at Pacific, Pacific time? Episodes come out at Pacific time. Yeah, that's, that's that's an important sentence. When did the episodes come out? On Pacific time? No, they come out at noon Pacific time. New episodes of the now long-running paranormal podcast, Scared to Death, come out every Tuesday at midnight. Thank you to Molly Jean Box for the initial research, for sharing the

fucking trauma, putting that together. Thank you to Logan Jean Box for the initial research, for sharing the fucking trauma, for putting that together. Thank you to Logan Keith, recording, uploading today's episode. Please go to badmagicproductions.com for all your bad magic needs and have yourself a fucking much better weekend than apparently all those kids were having. Add Magic Productions