Helmut Kentler


Helmut Kentler was a German psychologist, sexual scientist, and professor for social education at the University of Hannover.
After his death, sexual-political positions in his writings were seen and criticized as trivialization of pedophilia.

Education and study

After graduating from high school Helmut Kentler wanted to study theology to become a pastor. His father, on the other hand, required him to have technical vocational training. So Kentler first completed an apprenticeship as a locksmith at the Lokomotivfabrik Henschel in Kassel and then got a place to study electrical engineering at the RWTH Aachen. After the death of his father he broke off his studies in Aachen. From 1953 to 1954 he trained as an interpreter in English and French. Afterwards he studied in Switzerland and in Freiburg im Breisgau Psychology, medicine, education and philosophy. Already during his studies he participated in a field trial with young workers, which he documented and reflected in his book about youth work in the industrial world. In 1959 Kentler presented his first book publication about it ; in it "Christian faith bond... still explicitly proclaimed", in later publications this was no longer the case. In 1960 he passed the main diploma examination for psychology.

Educational work for the Protestant Church, change to science

After completing his studies he initially worked as a youth education officer at the Evangelische Akademie Arnoldshain. Afterwards he worked from 1962 to 1965 as a research assistant and "first pedagogue" in the Studienzentrum Josefstal at Neuhaus am Schliersee. The theory of an emancipatory youth work, which he played a decisive role in developing, made him known nationwide.
The following year he was assistant to Klaus Mollenhauer at the PH Berlin. Afterwards he became head of the department for social pedagogy and adult education at the Pedagogical Centre Berlin and from 1967 to 1974 departmental director there. 1975 doctorate he received his doctorate in Hanover with the dissertation Parents learn sexual education, which also appeared as a book and reached a total circulation of 30,000 copies by the 1990s. In 1976 he was appointed as a university lecturer for the training of vocational school teachers for special education at the University of Hanover, where he taught until his retirement in 1996.

Activities

Kentler was one of the advocates of an "emancipatory" youth work and counts among the representatives of sexual education of the 1960s and 1970s. In his work as a court expert and expert on child and adolescent sexuality, he achieved recognition in professional circles. From 1979 to 1982 he was president of the German Society for Social-Scientific Sexual Research, later he was on the advisory board of the Humanistische Union. He was also a member of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sexualforschung.
For Helmut Kentler, theory and practice belonged closely together throughout his life. His insights into a theory of emancipatory youth work grew out of his work with adolescents and young adults during his studies and the five years he spent working in church educational institutions. He made it possible to experience in theory and practice what group pedagogy and what team work as a trusting and respectful cooperation of pedagogues with different professional competence and what insight into psychosocial connections means for the learning and emancipation process for young people and adults. This was an innovation for church educational work in the 1960s. In addition to his professional duties, he also worked in various fields of pedagogical practice in an advisory and teaching capacity, for example from 1970 to 1974 on the pedagogical advisory board of the first Wohngemeinschaft for Trebegänger and runaway Fürsorgezöglinge at Maxdorfer Steig, sponsored by the Berlin Senate.
During the student riots in Berlin, Kentler was temporarily active as a "psychological consultant for police issues". The sexual liberation attempts of Berlin students in communities and shared flats resulted in his advocacy of an emancipatory sexual education already at home, which was also scientifically reflected in his dissertation in 1975 and made him an expert in sexual education in the further course of his professional life.
At the end of the 1960s, in a model experiment, he placed several neglected 13 to 15-year-old boys, whom he considered "secondary mental defectives", with pedophiles he knew, in order to reintegrate them into society under their care and to allow them to grow into mature adults. Due to the criminal offence associated with it, he made this public only after its statute of limitations more than a decade later. Kentler hoped that the experiment would help the young people to regain social stability through the men. He was aware, that the adults would most likely perform sexual acts on the minors. The scandal was publicly debated in 2015 and the Senate Youth Administration then commissioned the scientist Teresa Nentwig from the University of Göttingen to investigate the incident and the responsibility of the authorities.
At a factional hearing of the FDP in 1981 he reported: "These people only endured these moronic boys because they were in love, infatuated and infatuated with them." In an expert opinion for the Senatsverwaltung für Familie, Frauen und Jugend he described the results of the 1988 trial as "a complete success". At that time he did not have to fear any criminal consequences because of the statute of limitations. He also maintained contacts with the former participants during his teaching activities in Hanover and, in an expert opinion for the Berlin Family Court in the early 1990s, recommended that one of the abused youths continue to stay with his paedophile foster father, whom he described as a pedagogical natural talent.
Kentler was single, homosexual and had three adoptive sons and one foster son.
At the beginning of the 1990s, Kentler, having previously lived in a "huge, tall apartment in an old building" in Berlin, lived in the Gartenhofsiedlung in the Hannover district Marienwerder.

Positions

Sexuality and Society

In Kentler's view, it is not enough that parents do not put obstacles in the way of their children's sexual desires; rather, parents should introduce their children to sexuality, because otherwise they "risk leaving them sexually underdeveloped, becoming sexual cripples". Parents would bear a high degree of responsibility here: "Parents must be made aware that a good relationship of trust between children and parents cannot be maintained if children are denied the satisfaction of such urgent and urgent needs as sexual ones." Early experiences of coitus are useful, because teenagers with coitus experience "demand an independent world of teenagers and more often reject the norms of adults".
One of Kentler's particular concerns was the reduction of sexual repression against girls: "Often the repressive education was so successful that they no longer feel any sexual pressure. A sexually open-minded boy then calls such a girl 'uptight', 'unfashionable' – he is probably not so wrong about that."
Based on the realization that children can have sexual needs even before puberty, he clearly distinguished their free satisfaction among peers or with adults from sexual abuse of children: "Sexually satisfied children who have a good relationship of trust with their parents, especially in sexual matters, are best protected against sexual seduction and sexual attacks. " Kentler warned the parents against making too much of a problem of also involuntary sexual contacts of children with adults: "The wrong thing to do now would be for parents to lose their nerve, panic and run straight to the police. If the adult had been considerate and tender, the child could even have enjoyed sexual contact with him. Kentler considered equal and non-discriminatory sexual relationships between adults and children to be hardly problematic: "If such relationships are not discriminated against by the environment, then the more the older one feels responsible for the younger one, the more positive consequences for personality development can be expected", he wrote in 1974 in his foreword to the brochure Zeig mal!

Activity as court expert

Kentler also acted as a forensic expert in abuse cases. In 1997, he declared about the almost 30 cases he had dealt with up to that point: "I am very proud that so far all cases I have dealt with have been terminated with the discontinuation of proceedings or even acquittals. Kentler did not attribute injustice to the sexual activity of adults with children, but only to the violence that may have been used. This, however, is atypical, since real paedophiles do not use violence, but on the contrary are "highly sensitive to damage to children". In 1999, Kentler announced a book publication about "the approximately 35 lawsuits against innocent people that I have accompanied as an expert witness," but then left the manuscript unpublished. In the same year he declared:

Reception

Kentler did not hide the fact that he placed young people with pederasts he knew, he reported about it in his book Leihväter from 1989. After the magazine Emma had reported about it in 1993, he was shouted down by feminist activists at an event in Hannover in 1993 and received a punch in the face from a listener.
Jan Feddersen praised Kentler in an obituary in the Tageszeitung' of 12 July 2008, as a "meritorious fighter for a permissive sexual morality". Protestant-church authorities expressed a similar opinion. In an obituary the Study Centre for Protestant Youth Work pointed out Kentler's controversial positions, but nevertheless acknowledged his impulses for "institutional structure and professional socialisation" and the attempts to make homosexuality socially acceptable in the church. While the Working Group of Protestant Youth in Germany immediately removed the obituary after a synod motion, the Kentler Study Centre defended Kentler without addressing the misconduct for the protection of children from sexual exploitation, which was broadly presented in the motion. Rather, Helmut Kentler "has had a lasting influence on the conceptual development and the student research project in Josefstal to this day".
The Humanist Union pays positive tribute to Person and life's work of Kentler. In her obituary it says: "A lighthouse of our advisory board has gone out. Like no other, Helmut Kentler embodied the humanistic task of an enlightened sex education, and he was also a role model for public science. His habitus combined the qualities of competence, authenticity and closeness in a rare way, with which Kentler impressed his readers and listeners alike... Since he immediately aroused sympathies, many have confided in him."
Ursula Enders, the founder of the victim support association "Zartbitter", criticizes Kentler as a man with pedosexual-friendly positions. Stephan Hebel assessed in an editorial of the Frankfurter Rundschau in March 2010 a passage from Kentler's foreword to the 1974 brochure Zeig mal! as an "open call to paedophilia"; similarly Alice Schwarzer expressed herself in the magazine Emma'. The Protestant authors Andreas Späth and Menno Aden also sharply attack Kentler in their book Die missbrauchte Republik – Aufklärung über die Aufklärer. Due to an article by Ursula Enders in Emma in 1997 "at the last minute" Kentler was prevented from receiving the Magnus Hirschfeld Prize in 1997. He should receive the prize mainly for his commitment in the ecumenical working group Homosexuals and Church.
In Die Zeit in October 2013 Adam Soboczynski critically examined Kentler. Soboczynski explained that Die Zeit had offered publication opportunities to the "pedophile-friendly scientist" at the end of the 1960s with a lack of sensitivity based on the connection between anti-fascism and sexual liberation, as Kentler had claimed in reference to Wilhelm Reich. Georg Diez criticized this text in his column on Spiegel online:
Soboczynski had neither taken Kentler seriously nor really analysed him. His text stands in the series of obsessive, confused settlements with the 68er-movement, he makes hardly provable, "tightly screwed assertions", for example that sexual liberation was regarded as an anti-fascist project.
In 2013, the political scientist Franz Walter from the Göttingen Institute for Democracy Research, who at the time was investigating the former position of parts of the Greens and FDP on pedophilia, assigned Kentler a key role in German networks of pedophile activists.

Allegations against Kentler

It is clear that Kentler used his position to turn children over to a powerful pedophile network disguised as research.
In 2015, after public pressure, the Berlin Senate Administration commissioned a study from the political scientist Teresa Nentwig of the Institute for Democracy Research in Göttingen on Kentler's pedosexual "experiment" conducted in Berlin in the late 1960s with the support of the Youth Welfare Office. In this context the Berlin Senator for Education Sandra Scheeres called the "experiment" at that time a crime in state responsibility. Affected persons, who had contacted the responsible senator in 2017, expressed their disappointment about the low support. In 2017/18, Nentwig was also commissioned in Lower Saxony to research the effects of Kentler. Kentler also dealt with young people with behavioural problems in Hanover, also had contacts with the youth welfare office in Hanover and on their behalf was supposed to provide scientific support for the first care of a lesbian couple, but this did not come about because the couple decided to withdraw from the care for personal reasons. Whether Kentler himself was sexually assaulting young people, such as his foster and adopted sons or his tutoring students, is still an open question.
In January 2018 the Leibniz Universität Hannover announced that it had initiated further investigations into Kentler. "I am downright shocked that at that time the executive and the judiciary let themselves be swallowed up by it," said President Volker Epping at the New Year's reception. "I am also completely irritated that the professional community of this acting Kentler did not comment, did not cry out!" Only after the completion of the project "The Role of the Sexologist in the Discourse on Pedosexuality – for example Helmut Kentler", which was funded by the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture, did the university realise the extent of the case. The aim of the further investigation will be to examine the circumstances of Kentler's doctorate, appointment and work until his retirement. This also includes the behaviour of the university, faculty and department with regard to his person. For a proper processing of the case, contracts are awarded to external, independent persons.
On 15 June 2020, a report prepared by scientists entitled "Helmut Kentler's Work in Berlin Child and Youth Services" was presented in Berlin. In this context, the Berlin Senator for Education Sandra Scheeres promised those affected by abuse financial compensation by the State of Berlin.

Works (selection)