Helmut Kintler and the German New Left's dark legacy emerge from post-war sexual liberation theories that allegedly justified pedophilia as political resistance. While Germany publicly repented Nazism, hidden currents allowed figures like Kintler to lobby the Berlin Senate for a 1960s–80s foster system pairing homeless children with abusers, a scandal confirmed by a 2020 report. This episode exposes how revolutionary rhetoric was weaponized to normalize child abuse, contrasting this systemic evil with the necessity of rigorously purging bad actors from any liberatory movement to prevent history's darkest repetitions. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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German Reckoning and Metaphor00:06:23
Cool zone media.
What's not Robert?
Okay, so we're back.
Sophie proving surprisingly able to overpower me and force me to delete the introduction that I had written for this episode about German pedophiles, which in retrospect, probably a good idea.
Our guest today, Margaret Killjoy, do you think it was a good idea that Sophie used such violence on me to stop me from expressing myself in a way that myself?
This is a really good example of why violence is often necessary.
Remember the org chart.
I think we can all agree on that.
Remember the org chart.
That's all I'll say.
Well, Sophie, when you make it about hierarchy, I'm going to now you want to get conflicted now.
Before it was on your side, I get it.
I get it.
Remember who's the nicest person you know?
Also me.
I mean, there are three of us, which makes this conversation a remarkably accurate depiction of like the conversation the United States is having right now about policing, you know?
And I, oh, since Sophie just dropped, we won the anarchist swan markers.
Wow.
I got kicked out of the zoo.
I know, I know, Sophie.
It's incredible.
But I came back so fast to eventually.
Rise of anarchy.
That's all I'll say.
What did you say behind my back, you coward?
I took a victory lap.
Speaking of victory laps.
Speaking of victory laps, after 1945, people who didn't like Nazis got to take a well-earned victory lap.
Now, as we discussed in our last episode, they also committed what I would say is a pretty hard to forgive act of dereliction of duty in leaving most of those Nazis alive, which is why folks like Joanna Harr, who we talked about last week, continued to have an influence in society until the 1960s.
As we talked about, like, and there's a lot of scholarship on kind of how the generation of Germans born during the war and the generation of Germans born right after the war kind of like reacted and responded to the Nazism of their parents and their grandparents.
And that is a complicated topic.
And we're going to be delving into kind of one facet of that today.
Because as we noted, you know, last week, one of the things that was complex about sort of the reaction to Nazism in German society is that there had been this very long-standing series of attitudes inculcated by child development experts, as well as, you know, just sort of widespread throughout other aspects of society that like children don't criticize their parents, right?
Except in therapy later.
Yeah, except in therapy later.
Well, that starts to be a thing in like the particularly in the 50s and 60s.
It's not really a thing kind of in the late 40s, immediately after the war, but once you get some distance, it's kind of like a dam breaks and people start to be more able to criticize the Nazi generation, right?
And this is kind of a this is a big moment.
It's kind of a shattering of glass moment.
And, you know, shattering glass can be necessary.
Sometimes you have to break a window, but also it's really easy to get cut.
And we are talking about the story that we will be talking about this week is unfortunately how a bunch of little kids got cut on the glass that was shattered here.
This is a good metaphor.
I mean, it's a terrible metaphor, but it's a well done.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I have a question about how Germany handled all this.
So like, I actually know very little about how the generation immediately after because Germany presents this like, we are so sorry.
We are forever sorry.
We will grovel for the rest of the world as compared to Italy, where, you know, my experience of talking with friends in Italy is that the fascists still in this, there are Mussolinis in parliament.
Yeah, like the fascists weren't even taken out of power.
They were.
Yeah.
They just had to change their party allegiance, but the individual bureaucrats and stuff like that stayed in power.
It seems like Germany had more of a reckoning, but then again, you have, so I'm curious.
And as we're, as we're watching with sort of the fact that Germany, if German police are now basically arresting a lot of Jewish pro-Palestine protesters for anti-Semitism, like this is not, you never want to be.
And I was criticized in the past because I have been supportive of, I think there are aspects of the German reckoning with the Holocaust and with Nazism that have been really good.
If you go to, for example, Saxonhausen, which is a concentration camp outside of Berlin, that is an example of some of the stuff they've done right.
It's extremely well maintained.
The people who like who work there to show you around are very knowledgeable, are very knowledgeable, not just about the operation of the camp, but about the process of fascist takeover and the Holocaust.
And that does not mean that Germany on the whole has done a good job of reckoning with its past because while there is this really big public contrition, there were also like all of a lot of the people who were not the first tier Nazis.
Most of those guys died or were imprisoned or executed.
But a lot of second and third tier Nazis remained adjacent to or in power.
There were a lot of generals that became political figures after the war.
Like it was not Germany did, for example, a much better job of reckoning with their history of fascism than Japan did because Japan just refused to and still does.
That is a valid criticism of Japanese society that was recently made partly by a guy with a homemade shotgun against one of the folks who was a big part of denying that history, Shinzo Abe, whose dad was like, we're getting very off topic.
But there have been some really good books written by Germans whose like parents were Nazis or grandparents were Nazis.
There has been a lot of scholarship on the different ways in which German society has tried to reckon with this.
And today we're going to be talking about one man's reckoning with his Nazi parents and his and the Nazi past of his nation, Helmut Kentler.
Prussian Streets and Trauma00:15:03
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Basically, initially, the last week's episodes were like going to be the introduction to this episode, explaining the backstory that was necessary to understand Helmut Kintler.
We wound up writing, I wound up writing 19 pages of backstory.
So like the degree of bastard this guy is is it took two episodes to set up his entry onto the scene.
He is a real mother of a fucker.
You did a Margaret.
You did a context.
Yeah, you have to.
There's so much that's necessary for this guy because what he does is so objectively nuts that it just seems like I feel like it's irresponsible to not try to really go hard on the context.
And I think now that we've talked about some of these earlier figures in like the history of German attitudes towards how you teach and raise children that led into and were part of like the Nazi period, now we can actually talk about Kintler.
And we mentioned him in episode one, right?
He is one of those kids who is raised on Daniel Schraber's techniques.
His dads are fans of them.
But yeah, I'm getting ahead of myself.
Kintler was born on July 2nd, 1928, which was historically one of the worst times to be born a German.
He picks the absolute shittiest time to be born German.
Although, like, if he was born two years earlier, he'd probably be dead.
He'd probably have died, right?
And it's also fair to note that since Germany was founded in 1870, roughly half the times you could have been born German were bad times to be born German.
So I don't know.
While it is true, again, as we noted in part one, that people can overstate the degree to which future Nazis were raised on Schraber's techniques, Helmut Kintler was specifically raised on Dr. Schraber's techniques.
And I'm going to read again that quote from Rachel Leviv's New Yorker article.
Kintler's career was framed by his belief in the damage wrought by dominant fathers.
An early memory was of walking in the forest on a spring day and running to keep up with his father.
I had only one wish, that he should take my hand and hold it in his.
Kintler wrote in a parenting magazine in 1983.
But his father, a lieutenant in the First World War, believed in rod and baton pedagogy, as Kintler put it.
So we see both.
That's some evidence of like, because his dad is specifically a fan of Schraber.
It's also evidence that like the kind of parenting advice that Herr is giving during the Nazi period predates her, right?
This attitude that like, no, we do not touch our children other than to hit them.
Right.
And that's such like, that is such an evocative memory for him to have of like, I desperately wanted my father to just hold my hand.
Just some sort of.
It makes me want to empathize with him, but I'm afraid to.
Yes.
You should be.
Although you have to, because like only by kind of empathizing.
Yeah.
This is part of the difficulty, right?
You have to empathize with Kintler to understand why he does the terrible things he does.
You have to understand, you have to empathize with like these generations of abused German kids.
And you have to do that while not using that to like forgive or mitigate the Holocaust because it doesn't.
But you can't understand how people are in the position where, well, they'll do that without understanding how they're raised.
It does impact them.
It's like you can't understand all of the horrible things the American, like that our country has done and does without understanding the degree to which Americans are desensitized to violence.
You know, like that's a factor.
It doesn't mitigate the bad things that we do, but it does influence how they work out.
One day there's going to be a, there's going to be a, if there's still podcasts 100 years from now, if so, dear 100 years from now will be.
I feel terrible for you.
They're going to be talking about America land of firearms.
Well, of course that happened.
Yeah, obviously.
Yeah.
Of course all of the horrible things that are about to happen happened.
Maybe, folks.
Maybe.
So, as I stated, Kintler's parents were huge fans of Daniel Schraber to the extent that they didn't just read his books.
They bought the merch.
When Kintler misbehaved, his father bought a or threatened to buy a contraption to like lock his shoulders into place, one of those nightmare devices that we talked about.
When Kintler talked out of turn, his dad would hit the table and shout, when the father talks, the children must be silent.
So he is very much, you know, raised the same way a lot of German children are during the pre and immediately, like the early Nazi era.
When he was 10, Helmut got to experience Kristallnacht from the perspective of a passive bystander.
Now, his father is one of these military officers who is not an immediate Nazi because Hitler's, I think he comes from that Prussian perspective of like, well, this is just some fucking corporal.
Like, why are we going to listen to what he has to say?
So his dad is not out in the streets.
His dad is not a brown shirt.
And in fact, when Helmut is like woken up in the night by the sound of broken glass and violence outside, he recalls seeing his father in a night dress on the phone.
Quote, in his loud, dominant voice, my father called for a police deployment because someone had broken into our building.
It was a longer conversation during which my father became ever quieter.
And ultimately, he timidly hung up the receiver.
He stood there like he had collapsed and quietly said to my mother, who had been standing next to him for some time, they're going after the Jews.
Now, that does not depict to me a man who is happy about Kristallnacht.
Right.
But as we will cover, this is also not a man who was willing to do a goddamn thing about it.
His dad is not a fervent Nazi, but he also he didn't have, he doesn't seem, he seems to have found the disorder distasteful, not to have had any sympathy with the Jews being victimized.
And this is evident in the fact that later that night, a Jewish family who lived in the same building below the Kintlers came to the Kintler's door begging to stay in their apartment for the night, right?
So that they would be protected from the mob.
And Helmut's dad just said, no, that will really not be possible here.
And then closed the door.
I can fucking hear it.
You know, like, oh, it's just, it's not going to work out.
Nope, that's just not, that's not how it's done.
Just not going to be possible.
Not possible for us to shield you, right?
Yeah.
And so here, again, I think Helmut's both in kind of the sort of childhood that he has, which is representative of older, like a lot of Prussian child rearing techniques and of the stuff Herr is saying, and in this experience, this is more the norm than having a dad who was one of the brown shirts, right?
Yeah.
And in some ways, kind of worse.
I almost feel like you're a worse person for being this guy or you're spineless.
Yeah, exactly.
Than one of the monsters in the streets.
It's not even that you're a worse or a better person.
It's that the monsters in the streets are out in the streets.
They are wearing their evil openly.
You're hiding in your house and trying to pretend that's not you.
Right.
And it's the conservative spineless as compared to the liberal spineless.
The liberal spineless would have said the same thing.
Oh, you can't come in.
But they would have like cried about it later.
Yeah, so that's it.
It's just too dangerous for my family, right?
Yeah.
It is, it is.
So it is perhaps not surprising that this is the moment in which little Helmut Kintler stopped respecting and perhaps even loving his father.
He claims it was a mix of reason.
He's not unreasonable up to a point, right?
Yeah.
And he claims it's not just what his father does.
It's seeing his dad power, not just kind of powerless, because his dad is powerless to stop the disorder and his dad also refuses to help this people.
And at the same time, his dad's in a night shirt.
And so Helmut sees his father's skinny, naked legs.
And quote, my whole father suddenly seemed laughable to me.
You know, this is apparently a very searing moment for him.
Yeah, because you have this like strong, I'm, I'm Nazi dad.
I'm this military officer.
Not Nazi.
He was an imperial German.
Oh, he's going to end up a Nazi.
He does end up a Nazi.
Yeah.
Future Nazis are.
You are right.
Yeah.
But that is, it's interesting to me getting these kind of this kind of context because you read about Kristallnacht and you can read in a bigger history book about the reactions of like families who are bystanders, like Helmut's family was.
But you rarely get that little bit of detail where like, no, it's not just the horror of what was happening and my dad's refusal to do anything to protect people.
It was also seeing his, his like weird naked legs that like made him human in this moment that made me no longer respect him.
That's such an interesting bit of context, I guess, that you don't really get about moments of historic import like this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Things did not get better for Helmut on the dad front from that point forward.
Helmut Kintler's dad was recalled to active duty when World War II, the big dub-w dose, started, and he became a senior officer working at Army High Command in Berlin.
So he is, you are right, now fully a Nazi.
Yeah.
Like Kintler later complained, quote, my father's authority was never based on his own accomplishment, but based on the large institutions in which he snuck into.
That rubbed off on him.
I also think that's an interesting way of like interpreting your father's life and work with a great apparatus.
I mean, I assume, I know that a lot of European and Eastern European, like the officer class is sort of an almost an aristocratic class.
Yes.
Yes.
You know, and so he's basically saying it wasn't true by like virtue of birth and like went to the schools and stuff.
Yeah.
And there were, there was a good version and a bad version of this guy.
I just said that like a lot of these Prussians who hated the Nazis, you know, just did it because Hitler was a corporal.
But like that former Hitler youth guy I talked about, his grandpa, who was one of these Prussian officers, died in a concentration camp because he refused to ever embrace the Nazis.
So like Helmut's dad is not making the only choice, right?
He is making the worst choice.
Yeah.
No, and that there were, that's, that's a good point that there were conservatives who genuinely were like, we, the Nazi thing is a step too far.
And you have a lot of like, like Catholic priests and stuff.
A lot of them were very conservative, but were entirely anti-Nazi and died for it.
You know?
And you also have, more common than that, even a lot of particularly conservative Catholics, a decent number who supported the Nazis because they were afraid of the communists.
And then during the Third Reich, started taking risks to fight the Nazis, right?
That's also a kind of guy who exists.
And that is, you know, that's a, at least you wound up at the right place, right?
Right.
Not soon enough to have averted the bigger problem, but that does happen for a lot of people.
Not Helmut, though.
His dad survives the war and is utterly broken by the Nazi defeat.
He's just one of these guys who is never a functional person again after Germany just gets smashed for this.
At this point, he has lost two world wars.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And was one of these guys who was raised.
He was raised in the post-Franco-Prussian war generation of like Germany is going on its way to being the great world power.
And he is, he's just can't exist.
A decent number of guys.
This is kind of the death of a lot of Prussianism, right?
Yeah.
So yeah, Helmut is 17 when the war ends.
And again, as a 17-year-old in Berlin, he would have seen some shit.
When his dad came home, he later recalled, I never again obeyed him and I felt terribly alone.
So it's both, he knows what his family's done was wrong.
He knows he does not for a second have any moral difficulty divorcing himself from his father.
But this also is traumatic, right?
cutting your family off even when they are the Nazi, like very much Nazis, meeting Hitler on a regular basis, Nazis, is still traumatic because like you're still alone, you know, you have nothing and you have nothing in this country that has been completely flattened by war.
Helmut's reaction was not uncommon for the children of the generation that voted Hitler into power and largely waged his wars and committed his atrocities.
Helmut and his fellow countrymen starting in the late 40s would be the first of their countrymen to wrestle with the issue of what it meant to be German in the post-Hitler era and what had that whole mad period revealed about the German psyche.
In short, everyone starts asking the question, this really, really kicks off in the 50s, what the fuck was wrong with our parents, right?
Yeah.
Helmut grew into a scholar, becoming both an electrical engineer and a theologian.
And then after his father died, starting to study psychology, medicine, and philosophy.
He's a polymath.
He became an advocate of emancipatory youth work, a community support activity in which young people were given opportunities to learn informally by doing different useful tasks in their community.
This is going to break my heart.
Oh, it is.
Whenever there's an adult involved in youth liberation, I'm always a little like, I've heard about this kind of guy.
Not every guy, but I've heard about this kind of guy.
He is one.
Yeah.
As he grows older and keeps stacking up degrees, his interest in child rearing deepened, and he began to see Nazism as the result of a sickness that had been spread initially by Dr. Schraber, the focus of our episode, first episode last week, right?
Because he's raised on Schraber, right?
This is where a lot of the idea that Schraber was the foundation of a lot of Nazi culture comes from, is guys like Helmut who are raised on him.
Wilhelm Reich's Sexual Revolution00:11:44
And he is overextending his experiences onto the whole nation, but also he's evidence that it's not an insignificant factor, right?
A great deal of Schraber's exercises had existed to prevent sexual immorality.
And this happened to coincide with the fact that the Nazis, at least the ones who survived the Night of Long Knives, a lot of them were seen as prudes.
Now, this is not entirely accurate, right?
As we talked about in previous episodes, Nazis were actually like very pro-sex in ways that made a lot of conservatism comfortable.
And the initial thing that happens after the Nazis fall is there is this wave of sexual conservatism that sweeps German society because a lot of these religious conservatives are kind of the people who are influential first after the Nazis' fall.
And what you're going to see with Herzog's generation is reaction to that wave of sexual conservatism after the war ended that gets kind of, in some cases, erroneously conflated with Nazi sexual conservatism.
There are aspects of this that are historically valid, as in the gay rights movement starts to take off in Germany with members of Helmut's generation, right?
And that is a reaction to the Nazi crackdown.
But there's also this belief that the Nazis were prudes about things like the female orgasm and contraception that are not really accurate, right?
Historian Dagmar Herzog writes, there was more detailed discussion of the best techniques for enhancing female orgasm under Nazism than there would be in the far more conservative decade of the 1950s.
But this is something that like historians can prize apart now.
It's not something that would have been immediately obvious to people like Helmut Kintler.
So there's this, again, this conflation with the post-war conservatism and Nazi sexual conservatism that manifests in a general reaction against sexual conservatism, right?
This is actually one of the things that makes historians so cool and interesting is that a historian 40 years later sometimes has a better way of understanding something than someone who grew up in that space.
Yeah.
You have to think for Kintler, you're growing up, you're seeing these Nazis who are certainly very much prudish about certain things.
And Kintler is homosexual, right?
He grows up to understand that about himself, and the Nazis were very repressive about that.
Yeah.
And also, the people who take over after the Nazis are super conservative.
And to a kid like Kintler, you know, a teenager, a young adult, it's the same adults more or less who are in power, right?
That were in power under the Nazis.
So it all kind of comes together for you.
Even though kind of what you're seeing is a lot of the conservatives who had, you know, been willing to work with the Nazis get power after the Nazis are out.
You know, and we're not just talking about like leading the country.
We're talking about like on like neighborhood level, city level, whatnot, like a lot of those people who were, you know, more religiously conservative than guys like Himmler are able to kind of make their, like push their, their attitudes towards sexuality.
It's more conservative.
It's kind of Helmut's dad's style.
It's the non, it's not the first through the gate Nazis.
It's the generic conservatives who were good Nazis, who therefore their ideology became influential after the war because the more radical Nazis are all smashed.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
And it's interesting.
I want to read another quote about like the prudishness that kind of echoed in German society after the Nazis are forced from power, written by Aviv in the New Yorker.
The post-war years in West Germany were marked by an intense preoccupation with sexual propriety, as if decorum could solve the nation's moral crisis and cleanse it of guilt.
One's own offspring did penance for Auschwitz, the German poet Olav Munzberg wrote, with ethics and morality forcefully jammed into them.
Women's reproductive rights were severely restricted and the policing of homosexual encounters, a hallmark of Nazism, persisted.
In the two decades after the war, roughly 100,000 men were prosecuted for this crime.
Kintler was attracted to men and felt as if he always had one leg in prison because of the risks involved in consummating his desires.
Sure, a lot of people can empathize with that particular feeling.
He found solace in the book Korydon by Andre Guide, a series of Socratic dialogues about the naturalistness of queer love.
This book took away my fear of being a failure and of being rejected, of being a negative biological variant, he wrote in a 1985 essay called Our Homosexuality.
But nothing could be done to remedy his relationship with his parents.
They no longer loved me, he wrote.
So it's very frustrating how empathetic this guy is right now.
Yeah, no, exactly.
This is going to be heartbreaking.
I really am sorry.
No, I'm prepared for it.
I'm building my emotional wall where I don't care about Helmut.
So Helmut comes to the conclusion, like a lot of leftists, and he is a leftist.
He is a leftist academic of his era, that sexual repression had been a large part of what led to Nazism.
And if sexual repression led to Nazis, sexual liberation must be the antidote.
Now, this is going to bring us into a little bit of a digression because you cannot understand popular left-wing post-war attitudes towards sex and fascism in Germany and elsewhere in the West without understanding a fellow I do like to talk about Wilhelm Reich.
Reich was.
Yeah, everybody loves Reich.
He's a fun guy.
Yeah.
Oh, I'm excited because I actually don't know that much about him and he comes up all the time.
We talked to his kid once for a cracked article that was very fascinating.
Reich was a psychoanalyst who developed fascinating and increasingly obscure theories about sexual energy.
He's one of these guys who is both a serious and respected academic and also a crank.
Those two things exist simultaneously within Reich.
In the wake of World War I, he noticed that a great deal of his patients acted physically in ways that seemed to mirror their closed off and guarded emotions.
And this led him to the idea that people's past trauma was not just present in their mind, but locked in their body too.
I'm going to quote from an article on Reich and the Guardian here.
What Reich was seeing was not a hysterical symptom to be decoded, but rather a kind of clinching and clamping that pervaded a person's entire being.
A tension so impenetrable it reminded him of armor.
He thought it was a defense against feeling, especially anxiety, rage, and sexual excitement.
If experiences were too painful and distressing, if emotional expression was forbidden or sexual desire prohibited, then the only alternative was to tense up and lock it away.
This process created a permanent physical shield around the vulnerable self, protecting it from pain at the cost of numbing it to pleasure.
Over the next decade, he began to work with his patients' bodies, first verbally and then by touching them, an act totally prohibited in psychoanalysis.
To his amazement, he found that when he worked on these regions of tension, the habitual expressions of fright, the clinched fists or rigid bellies, the feelings lodged there could be brought to the surface and released.
Patients remembered long ago incidents of shaming or unwanted invasion, experiencing the fury or despair they'd been unable to feel at the time.
This emotional release was often accompanied by a pleasurable rippling feeling Reich called streaming.
No, this is, I mean, this is what people are into this kind of stuff now.
Yes, this is very real.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's wildly ahead of his time.
He's a hundred years ahead of his time on this kind of stuff.
Yeah.
Like that he is he has reached a powerfully important understanding about how trauma and memory work, right?
Now, Reich is not an abusive grifter.
I wouldn't call him that, but you could also see how an abusive grifter could take advantage of this idea, and many have in the generations since to traumatize people, right?
Especially since one of the things Reich's going to do that may or may not kind of a mistake in some ways that he's going to do is he ties that feeling of release to the orgasm, which he feels is how the body naturally releases tension in order to cleanse itself of that armor.
And again, one of the ways.
It's one of the ways.
He does this thing that a lot of people do is he does overextend the importance of specifically the orgasm to these kinds of physical release that can be a part of healing from trauma.
But he's not wrong that this can be a release that helps you heal from trauma, right?
It's better than like Graham Cracker Man, who's like, yes, whenever people are like, why are men so angry all the time?
And I'm like, maybe it's because they never masturbate.
Maybe it's because they never masturbate.
And they don't, you know, sex can be helpful in dealing with trauma.
If it's not for you, that's also perfectly normal.
It isn't always helpful, right?
Yeah.
And again, one of the issues here is not that Reich is because Reich is by kind of overextending this, he's making some errors, but he's doing a thing that is normal, right?
Where you realize something and then it takes you a while to kind of dial in the degree to which that's actually part of the factor.
But he has made a real realization.
However, you can see how, like, if you start teaching that you can heal your emotional trauma with orgasm, a lot of very similar kinds of problematic dudes are going to use this idea as ammunition to make sex cults, right?
This is, you can't, I don't blame Reich for that.
Yes, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yes, I have been to enough tantric retreats that I have met like 17 of that guy.
Yeah.
Reich was among the first intellectuals who came to the conclusion that sexual liberation was a necessary precursor for improving mankind.
He coins the term sexual revolution in 1930 to describe the utopia that we could have of people got over their poisonous old-timing ideas about sex and embraced it without shame as the healing method that it was.
1930 is where we get the term sexual.
That is how far ahead Reich is on some shit.
And he's German, right?
Yeah, he is extremely German.
He moved to Berlin in 1930.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They were.
That's what's so the places where really bad stuff is about to happen is sometimes the place where all of the most advanced thinking about a lot of stuff is also happening.
And he moves to Berlin in 1930 because it is basically a paradise for sexual experimentation, right?
It is also full of Nazi thugs and about to be fuller.
And of course, Reich is one of the people who has to flee the country when Hitler takes power.
He spends the early Nazi years writing a book called The Mass Psychology of Fascism that cites the patriarchal family unit that had existed in mainstream German society as effectively a recruiting tactic for the Nazis.
Reich, who is a pretty obsessive guy, does credit more to sex than it could realistically achieve.
The Guardian's Olivia Liang points out that no less a mind than Michelle Foucault critiqued this in a 1976 book on the history of sexuality.
Quote, he's not a famously anti-sex guy, that Foucault.
He is not anti-sex.
Problematically pro-sex in some ways.
Yeah.
This is from The Guardian.
If the orgasm is so powerful, Foucault asks, why is it that the vastly expanded sexual liberties of the intervening years have failed to dissolve capitalism or topple the patriarchy, despite all Reich's ardent predictions to the contrary?
And that is one really good critique on the overextension of this that Reich does is like, well, the actual sexual revolution generation are now the boomers and like you need a class analysis in order to have a successful revolution.
Like, it can't be the only thing, but it's got to be in there.
And orgasms certainly aren't enough on their own.
No.
Now, at least part of the reason why we don't have this revolution that Reich presents is that a lot of the dudes, Helmut Kintler chief among them, who took Reich's theories about the healing power of sex and necessity of sexual revolution, decided to apply it not just to themselves and their fellow adults, but to little kids.
Selling Orgasms as Ads00:02:59
Yeah.
This is where things get really bad.
What if before things get really bad, we have a little palate cleanser?
Little ad break?
Sure.
Yeah, just so we feel good about everything in the world, you know, we can spend our money on stuff.
We'll move from our friend Wilhelm Reich to whatever these ads are, which hopefully will sell you an orgone generator.
Talk about that in a second.
If you are a founder or a freelancer or the friend who always says, hey, you know what?
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Now, everybody over here, oh, it's one of my other favorite places.
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In 1998, my life was forever changed when I took on the role of Charlotte York on a new show called Sex in the City.
Now I get to sit down with some of my favorite people and relive all of the incredible moments this show brought us on and off the screen.
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Breaking Windows of Ideology00:16:03
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We're back.
So Reich is, you know, an interesting fellow.
His post-war career is going to yield to him increasingly getting into pseudoscience.
He builds these things called, he comes up with this idea of like this like sexual energy basically that you can solidify out of the atmosphere called Orgone.
And he builds these accumulators that like you sit in all sorts of wacky stuff.
He's not a bastard, but anyway, he dies in a prison cell.
Yeah.
Oh, good.
A Kate Bush song, Cloud Busting, I think.
Isn't that about Willem Reich?
Cloudbusting.
Yeah, that's something Reich did.
One of the most awkward first dates I've ever been on my life, this guy was like, come on over and let's watch a movie.
And then I get to his place and he's like, I don't have a couch.
I only have my bed.
But I picked a movie out and it was this black and white movie that was like a hippie sex cult doing a like pornographic fiction movie about Willem Reich.
Oh boy.
I kind of want to see that.
I know.
In any other context.
That way.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, folks, if you want to show a new friend a weird hippie sex cult movie, do it in like separate chairs, you know?
Like strive to create a comfortable environment for that kind of thing.
Yeah.
That guy, if you're listening, I forgive you.
We're still friends.
As I said, Reich dies in a prison cell.
His books are burned in the U.S. in the only federal government-sanctioned book burning in U.S. history, specifically Reich's books.
What does he get in prison for?
Smut peddling, basically.
Is the argument about his stuff?
Yeah, especially again.
Yeah, it's about to be again.
Yeah, well.
So Helmut Kintler found Reich's work on fascism resonant because it is.
In 1960, he got his degree in psychology.
He expressed excitement that he could now work, quote, as an engineer in the realm of the manipulatable soul.
And this is where we should start getting our sinking feet, that sinking feeling in the pit of our stomach about Kintler.
That is not what you should see yourself as as a psychologist.
You aren't, that's that's a bad thing to want to be manipulating souls.
No, and I'm generally pro robe and cloak, but if you are a psychologist, you probably are.
That's like actually the only job where you're not allowed to wear cloaks and robes.
Yeah.
So out of a desire, in his words, to turn his passions into a profession, he gets a degree in social education.
His dissertation is titled Parents Learn Sex Education, and it is essentially an application of Reich's ideas about sexual energy to child rearing.
Some of this was reasonable.
Kintler begged parents to tell their children they should not be ashamed of feeling sexual desire, right?
Quote, once the first feelings of shame exist, they multiply easily and expand into all areas of life.
This is responsible advice.
And in giving it, Kintler fits right in with this new generation of post-war German left-wing liberals who see deep sexual roots in the evil of the Nazis.
Rachel Aviv writes, quote, in 1977, the sociologist Klaus Thebelweit published Male Fantasies, a two-volume book that drew on the diaries of German paramilitary fighters and concluded that their inhibited drives, along with the fear of anything gooey, gushing, or smelly, had been channeled into a new outlet, destruction.
Kintler argued that ideas like Schreber's had poisoned three generations of Germans, creating authoritarian personalities who have to identify with a great man around them to feel great themselves.
Kintler's goal was to develop a child-rearing philosophy for a new kind of German man.
Sexual liberation, he wrote, was the, quote, best way to prevent another Auschwitz.
Now, this is not just problematic.
It's very common on the left, right?
Historian Dagmar Herzog, who wrote that book, Sex After Fascism, that again, if you're going to read one book on sex and Nazism, that's the one, describes how absolutely widespread this thinking is among post-war leftists.
Members of the West on our own shows had to talk about leftists who are like otherwise somewhat interesting, who had some real wrong ideas, whether or not they acted on them around this kind of stuff.
Yes, indeed.
And this is like the heartbeat at the center of like that problem.
Yeah.
Here's a Herzog.
Members of the West German New Left student movement, along with many of their liberal elders, defended activism on behalf of sexual emancipation on the grounds that sexual repression was not merely a characteristic of fascism, but its very cause.
As one author put it, it would be wrong to hold the view that all of what happened in Auschwitz was typically German.
It was typical for a society that suppresses sexuality.
Another argued that brutality and the lust for destruction become substitutes for bodily pleasure.
This is how the seemingly incredible contradiction that the butchers of Auschwitz were and would become again respectable, harmless citizens is resolved.
Or as another phrased it even more succinctly, in the fascist rebellion, the energies of inhibited sexuality formed into genocide.
I think it was anti-Semitism.
I think it was anti-Semitism.
I think it was national.
A lot of things, nationalism, these fears of like the memories of the famine and World War I that led to, that provided fertile ground for this belief about useless eaters that have to be pruned away, right?
A lot of things actually went into the Holocaust.
This is, I think what's happening here, part of what's happening here, right?
This conclusion that Auschwitz was a result of sexual repression is a result of like two interwoven, really problematic things that we all still deal with today.
One of them is that belief that like whatever it is that you are personally into insulates you from the worst possible things in society, right?
Because I am sexually liberated.
I can't become a Nazi.
And the other, the most dangerous thing in the world is the belief that whatever you are currently doing because you like it is the solution to saving the world, right?
I enjoy having sex with my friends.
Having sex with my friends will solve Nazism, right?
Yeah, totally.
Podcasting, however, that's true.
That is the only thing that can safely.
Yeah.
Now, you see, Margaret, I base my conclusion that podcasting will save us purely on the fact that having read my Hitler, I know the only thing that can convince people of anything is the human voice, right?
So, podcasting, great method for changing society.
Well, that's what's so interesting about citation is you can always justify whatever it is.
Yeah.
You know, like we could take a thing and be like, this is why it's inherently anti-fascist to do model train collection.
I think that's a lot very closely to Robert's statement.
Where were you going there?
And then you got there.
Congrats.
I always get that.
This is dangerous for everyone, right?
For example, property destruction, breaking windows, that kind of shit can and have been part of successful liberatory movements.
But also, some people who like breaking windows convince themselves that's the sum of what is necessary to achieve their political goals.
Right.
On the same token, you have a lot of liberals who feel very comfortable going out and voting and donating money to the DNC who have convinced themselves that's all that's necessary to solve our fascism problem.
It's the most dangerous idea that you can convince yourself of is that whatever you're doing is the thing that everyone needs to be doing to solve our biggest problems, right?
The thing that you're currently comfortable doing is the solution.
And if people who aren't doing that are wrong is a big part of it.
Because if you find out how to make the thing that you're already doing work towards emancipatory society, great.
Yeah.
And I'm a believer that both voting and breaking windows probably contain parts of solutions that are that could potentially be parts of solutions.
And also both famously part of the rise of Hitler.
Both part of the rise of Hitler and part of the success of the civil rights movement, you know?
Exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, sexual mores and repression in pre-World War II German society are worth studying as they relate to the Nazis.
I hope I'm not, I think it's very worth studying, but Kintler and his colleagues, there's a desperation in their desire to apply this kind of unified cum-based theory to the war crimes of their fathers, right?
They weren't getting off enough.
And if I get off enough, I don't have to worry about being a Nazi like my dad, right?
And Kintler's work is partly a refutation of his own father.
One of his first published articles is a study on adultery that described it weirdly in ways the Nazis wouldn't have totally disagreed with as positive, right?
Right.
Again, Kintler's probably not up on some of the obscure Himmler-esque attitudes, some of the shit in the SS magazine about how adultery is healthy, but he comes to the same conclusion, which is interesting.
Fucking Freud would have loved this guy.
Oh my God.
Obsessed with his father and fucking kids.
We haven't gotten to the fucking kids part, but you've got to be a bitch.
You know what's coming.
God, that was not.
That was unintentional.
That was really seriously not intentional.
It wasn't.
You know, it's genuinely.
Yeah, yeah.
That was genuinely.
It's a reaction.
Yeah.
Near the end of the 1960s, when Hitler was growing in influence and a lot of these discussions, or when Kintler, sorry.
I was like, wait, he's bad.
He does have to be this guy.
Could your name be closer to Hitler?
It's okay.
Every time you say Herzog, I'm imagining Werner Herzog doing whatever it is they're saying.
My head canon is that Dagmar and Werner had a fling.
I know very little about her, but I feel like she and Werner would have been into each other.
And then we could get a documentary about it called Herzog on Herzog, which I think does exist, but in a different form.
Now, near the end of the 1960s, when Kintler was growing in influence in the German new left and a lot of these discussions are going around, German educators are also creating experimental daycares.
This started in 30-some towns and cities.
And these experimental daycares are both, there's some good ideas going around, and they are also as fucking problematic as it is possible to be.
Aviv writes, quote, children were encouraged to be naked and explore one another's bodies.
In 1976, the magazine Das Blatt argued that forbidden sexual desire, such as that for children, was the revolutionary event that turns our everyday life on its head, that lets feelings break out and shatter the basis of our thinking.
So, you see, we've made the jump here from the initial idea, children should not be shamed if they're curious about their own bodies or about sex, which is fine, to children should be encouraged to get naked and touch each other at daycare, which is a bad idea.
And from there, we go to it's okay if adults are attracted to kids because having any sexual taboos is counter-revolutionary.
Yeah.
Uh-huh.
Now, what has happened here, what's hinted at by that, and what is actually happening here is that a chunk of pedophiles have gotten into the German left and have injected their fetishes, draped in revolutionary and scientific terms, into the ideological bloodstream of the German new left.
Now, that doesn't mean that these pedophiles don't legitimately have some left-wing ideas.
I say legitimately that they really believe them.
It means they are purposefully taking their attraction to children and trying to turn it into something political.
This happens from people who are not pedophiles as someone who's like polyamorous.
I have seen some poly people who've tried to make the argument that like it's an inherently revolutionary activity.
No, it's not.
There are polyamorous cops out there, right?
Like it's, it's, it, it's fine, but it's not revolving.
Like, being gay is not inherently revolutionary, you know?
Like, it can be if your society is inherently like repressive of homosexuality, but as we have seen with cop pride parades, space can be made within an authoritarian regime for that sort of thing.
They're pretty good at that.
That's kind of capitalism's thing: uh, figuring out how to incorporate all of the things that are trying to fight it.
Yeah, that's what makes it so much stronger than straight up fascism, right?
That's the honestly, that's why it's, it's, it's got the lasting power.
Fascism is an idea that will always come back, yeah, but like, yeah, capitalism is uh overall stuck around a little bit more sturdily.
It's this like married this kind of neoliberal idea about like, yeah, privatizing, you know, everything public.
And it, it's this, the thing that always frustrates me is when like folks on the left will talk as if like the crumbling of this system is inevitable.
I much prefer to look at it as like, well, no, we are trying to defeat like a fucking kaiju.
And so far we have like fucking pellet guns.
Yeah.
It's tough.
It's a challenge.
Well, I mean, that's because like, I mean, like, so Christianity started off as sort of this almost anti-capitalist thing of its time.
And then they were like, oh, but the second coming's like right around the corner.
And then thousands of years later, people are like, oh, the second coming is right around the corner.
And the collapse of capitalism was predicted by Marx and because they thought it was going to come in like 10, 20 years.
Yeah.
It has been 150 years.
Like the millenarian thing.
The millenarian thing.
Yeah.
It's anyone who tells you success is inevitable for reasons other than like a pragmatic plan to achieve it, you should take with a grain of salt.
So anyway, back to the pedophiles.
So I keep trying to distract us from like, oh, let's cut on this other pedophiles want, Margaret.
Yeah.
Let's hear about the nightmare daycare.
I do want to note this problem of like pedophiles injecting their pedophilia into weird leftist discourse is not unique to Germany.
You and I did episodes on the Illuminati, where we discussed how Discordian Carrie Thornley, an influential leftist and possible Kennedy assassin, once molested a child, not because he was attracted to that child, but because he felt politically that radical free love meant that he was not a good revolutionary if he didn't do it.
Yeah.
And I don't say he wasn't attracted to the kid to mitigate it.
I think what he did is worse.
Like, again, it's one of those like we were talking about earlier.
I don't know, better and worse when it's something so bad or maybe meaningless terms, but I find it more personally disturbing that someone would convince themselves that this is politically necessary.
The idea that pedophilia, specifically the breaking of the taboo against sex with a child by an adult, was a kind of revolutionary act that could free someone of their social indoctrination was somewhat foundational.
to the new German Green Party, which still exists today and mixed activists from every major left-wing movement of the day.
And unfortunately, that lumped the oppression of children's sexuality in with the oppression of gay people.
As a result, it was not uncommon for prominent Green Party members to recommend abolishing the age of consent.
We see this with libertarians.
And by the way, Christian conservatives have been the most successful at this, which is why you can marry children as young as 14 in most U.S. states.
Yeah, as long as it's heterosexual, it's all fine by Christian conservatism.
But I would describe it actually, if I'm going to be fair, what you have there is the same thing you have with these pedophiles cloaking their desire to fuck kids in left-wing.
Trafficking Roots in Conservatism00:04:04
These are pedophiles cloaking their desire to fuck kids in Christian trapping.
Absolutely.
It is the same kind of thing.
And this is why you have to be on guard for this sort of shit, for the bad actors among your own number.
Otherwise, horrible things like the story we're continuing to tell will happen.
Now, everything here is bad, but it is also not all the result of actual pedophiles because a decent number of, we might say dumb, definitely naive German progressives went along with this because these arguments for what effectively is pedophilia were published in respected left-wing journals and magazines, right?
Around the time Kintler was doing his study on adultery, Hans Gies, a respected sexologist in Hamburg, argued that seeing sex was not inherently bad for children.
Likely true.
Most, most, like, through most of human history, you all lived in the same room, right?
Like, it wouldn't have been weird to have been present for that.
But then went on to argue that pornography, quote, presented without prejudices as a pleasure-filled social activity, should be given to children, which is a problem, right?
Yeah, I know, yeah.
The idea that, like, yeah, if your kids walk in on you and your wife having sex, that should not be seen as traumatic to the kids, does not inherently lead to, thus we should show porn movies to kids in the park.
Right.
Oh, God.
This is all pretty interesting stuff.
It's easy to see how like some of the roots of this started in reasonable things and were twisted.
Eventually, Helmut was asked to lead the Department of Social Education at the Pedagogical Center in Berlin, a research institute run partly by future Chancellor and Nobel Prize winner, Willie Brandt.
That's right, baby.
The institute had been funded with international backing to reform the way that educational systems functioned.
Kintler, comfortable in the counterculture, found himself drawn in this new role to a chunk of the populace who are much in need of help.
Drug addicts, child prostitutes, and poor children who often wound up exploited in one chunk of the underworld or another.
Again, there are a lot of these kids.
There are a lot of poor orphan kids in West Germany for one reason for another.
There's a lot of these like child prostitutes who are, you know, addicted to drugs living alone on the street.
This is a subset of the populace who desperately needed attention.
But Kintler's open...
Different kind of attention.
Yeah, because Kintler's open-minded nature is going to lead him to accept certain terrible things as Aziz rights.
Kintler befriended a 13-year-old named Ulrich, whom he described as one of the most sought-after prostitutes in the station scene.
When Kintler asked Ulrich where he wanted to stay at night, Ulrich told him about a man he called Mother Winter, who fed boys from the zoo station and did their laundry.
In exchange, they slept with him.
I said to myself, if the prostitutes call this man mother, he can't be bad, Kintler wrote.
The logic there.
I know.
And it's like, I get why people are like, trust kids.
And you're like, that is, there's, there's, that's true to a degree.
It's one of those things, too.
There are people who get angry when you like use the term child prostitute and they prefer child sex trafficking victim.
I don't think that's accurate here because these kids are a lot of them living alone independently on the street.
This is how they make money.
Right.
Right.
I've had friends when I was a teenager.
I had friends who were homeless squatter sex workers.
And I don't know who you would say is trafficking them because there's not a pimp in most or every instance, right?
This is, it's if you like, I agree, any adult having sex with these kids is raping them, right?
Yeah.
They are living alone, right?
They are not necessarily being trafficked.
So I don't know what else you call them, but a child prostitute.
Like this is, this is a really ugly thing to talk about, which is why people don't often enough, but it is a thing, right?
But yeah, this is probably a bad way to lead into an ad break, but here you go.
Kids Raping and Exploitation00:02:20
If you are a founder or a freelancer or the friend who always says, hey, you know what?
What if I started that?
This is for you.
I'm telling you, I had nothing to my name.
I didn't know a single person in New York.
And somehow I'm dressed by Oscar DeLorenda walking down that red carpet.
This month, we sit down with entrepreneurs and creators who actually did it, who turned this scary leap into a business, a paycheck, and a life they are proud of.
Direct center of our happiness or our regrets is whether or not we're taking action on the things that matter to us.
They're not selfish.
They're so important.
They actually lead to our greatest contributions because when we're living fulfilled, we actually show up better everywhere.
We lead better.
We're better friends.
We're better relationships and collaborators and all those things because we have passion about the things we're doing.
If you're trying to build something of your own this year, join us in these conversations that will make you braver and smarter with your money.
Listen to Dos Amingos as part of the Michael Tura Podcast Network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Now, everybody over here, oh, it's one of my other favorite places.
The Twilight Gazebo.
Sunset Gardens.
Twilight Gazebo.
What's next?
Dead Man's Grove?
Mom, could you please try to be a little bit positive about this?
From Kenya Barris, the visionary creator of Blackish, comes Big Age, an Audible original about finding your way in life's next chapter.
This audio comedy series follows a retired couple's reluctant relocation to Sunset Gardens, a flirting senior community that is anything but relaxing.
Starring comedy legends Jennifer Lewis, Cedric the Entertainer, and Nici Nashbettz.
Through its blend of outrageous comedy, Key Party Anyone, and touching revelations, Big Age explores what it means to grow older without growing old at heart.
Go to audible.com slash big age series to start listening today.
I'm Kristen Davis, host of the podcast, Are You a Charlotte?
In 1998, my life was forever changed when I took on the role of Charlotte York on a new show called Sex in the City.
Now I get to sit down with some of my favorite people and relive all of the incredible moments this show brought us on and off the screen.
Like when Sarah Jessica Parker shared that she forgot we filmed the pilot episode.
State Capacity for Abuse00:12:29
You forgot about it?
In the very least, forgot about it.
And when the show was picked up, I panicked.
And Cynthia Nixon reveals if she's a Miranda.
We both feel confident about our brains.
Ah, that's kind of where it ends.
Plus, Sex in the City Superfan Megan the Stallion doesn't hold back on her opinions of the show.
Carrie will literally go say New York on fire and then come back and type about it at the end of the day.
Like, like half of it wasn't her fault.
Listen to, Are You a Charlotte on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts?
We're back.
I hope, I don't know, the Toyota Motor Corporation or whatever was happy about that.
Lead it.
Better things to spend your money on.
Nope.
Never mind.
Oh, fuck.
So Kintler took from this idea, right, that there is these kids like Ulrich who are in a desperate situation are choosing to be molested by this person, Mother Winter, because they get food and their laundry done, right?
Rather than seeing that as like, wow, that is a more desperate situation than I can conceive of being in, where like you might see that as you're like a choice that you should make, right?
Because there's absolutely no support for you in the system.
Rather than seeing it that way and seeing what Mother Winter is doing as deeply, profoundly evil and exploitative, Kintler concludes that what Mother Winter is doing is the best case scenario for a child like Ulrich.
He noted, quote, 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.
Now, Kintler.
We could have like non-pedophile men look after him.
He could just like feed and clothe and put up children who are homeless without the sex.
Like the state has the capacity for this.
I know, but then every single time there's any group, illegal or legal, that does this, like the Catholic Church is a perfect example of this, you know, where it's like, oh, take people in and care for them.
And then, oh, you've created an institution that allows for people to take advantage of that to both with Catholic priest abuse of often like marginalized kids and with stuff like the Magdalene laundries in Ireland, right?
Like, yes, this, this is a thing that happens all over the place.
Yeah.
Kintler's conclusion from the case of Mother and Winter and Ulrich is that he should seek to normalize situations of abuse like this through a like to make that something the state actually supports.
And in fact, he gets a member of the Berlin Senate, which ran his institute, to approve making this situation permanent.
And basically, Ulrich is set up as a foster child with Mother Winter.
Like the state formally endorses this relationship.
Ulrich, as far as we know, I haven't found anything where we can get Ulrich expressing themselves here, right?
And Ulrich is obviously a profoundly abused and traumatized child.
It's possible that Ulrich did see this as a better option than other situations he'd lived in.
That does not excuse what Mother Winter is doing or Dr. Kintler's behavior or what the Berlin Senate approves.
It was Dr. Kintler's job and his human duty to see that this situation was unacceptable and to use his influence to find a situation for Ulrich that kept him safe and fed without being molested.
But a key belief held by Kintler and an unfortunate number of sexually progressive Germans was that children could consent.
And as long as the sex was not violent or physically coercive, there was nothing wrong with it.
This inspired him to write an essay, Borrowed Fathers, Children Need Fathers, where he bragged about placing Ulrich with his abuser.
And he used this as a case study to get the Berlin Senate to approve and fund a program to place abandoned children with pedophiles.
Oh my God.
I wanted to be very clear about something.
This is not a case where Kintler tricks them into letting him match children with pedophile foster parents or a situation where they felt these men would avoid raping these children and become responsible guardians.
The entire idea here was that pedophiles would be paid with sex to take care of homeless children, right?
That is the, that is the understanding.
Many of these boys are disabled and a lot of them were addicted to substances.
And Kintler's argument, this is what he wrote, quote, these people, meaning the pedophiles, only put up with these feeble-minded boys because they were in love with them.
What's funny is...
Like basic feminism that was going around at this time could have easily, you know, being like, oh, because a lot of women in a traditional heterosexual patriarchal marriage are forced by financial necessity to leave their abusers.
And like that was also an available analysis that was going around at the time.
You could have used that analysis instead.
I hate to hand it to second wave feminism, but at least they had that part fucking figured out.
And in fact, that is what punctures this wave of pedophile stuff eventually.
It takes so much longer than it should have.
Yeah.
But yes, that is like where this goes.
And I should state, if somebody ever expresses to you that like they think abandoned children should be fostered with pedophiles because no one else will love them, it's okay to kill that person.
On a moral level, I can't speak legally.
Not legally.
But the second Kintler wrote this, I think it would have been okay to beat him to death with a candelabra.
So that's my opinion.
The Berlin City Senate felt differently.
Kintler wrote that they supported his vision because they wanted to maintain the city's reputation as a bastion of freedom and humanity.
Kintler used his contact with Mother Winter to meet members of the Berlin pedophile scene and set them up as foster parents, building a network that was to become the center of years of research.
We don't know much about the process by which the government approved of all of this, aside from the fact that they did, because as a spoiler, Margaret, all of the documentation on this was deliberately destroyed afterwards.
Can you imagine why anyone would want to destroy the documentation about the pedophile fostering program?
Weird.
It's almost like they knew what they were doing was wrong.
Yeah, they certainly did at some point.
Now, Kintler himself later in life would claim to have explored this idea in only three homes.
Now, this is untrue, according to a 2020 report by the Berlin Senate, which concluded that the Senate ran foster homes or shared flats for kids and pedophiles in multiple parts of West Germany.
What years are we talking about?
We are talking about like the late 60s, I think, up through, or the early 70s, up through the 1980s.
Yep.
Okay.
Yeah.
Here's from the Berlin Senate report.
These foster homes were run by sometimes powerful men who lived alone and who were given this power by academia, research institutions and other pedagogical environments that accepted, supported, and even lived out pedophile stances.
So this is going on from like the 1970s through the late 1980s.
Like by the time all of this stuff cut, like some of this is going on through the 90s.
Some of these kids are still in these foster situations.
Yeah.
Like this is, this lasts so much longer than it should have.
And that 2020 report by the Berlin Senate notes, these foster homes were run by sometimes powerful men who lived alone and who were given this power by academia, research institutions, and other pedagogical environments that accepted, supported, or even lived out pedophile stances.
So it's important to note that the Senate was not merely hoodwinked by Kintler himself.
Some members of the Senate are, it's believed, essentially some people in the Senate were part of this network of foster parents, right?
There were people in local government who were doing this, right?
And most people who may have had issues with it or questions kept quiet, right?
Because icons in the field of educational reform said this was a good idea.
And who were they to argue?
There's this thing where, like, sometimes you try to people work backwards around this.
They're like, what is the ideological reason to be against pedophilia?
No, my ideology works the other way.
I start from the point of view of don't fuck kids.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
And it turns out there's a really good anarchist argument for that, right?
Yeah.
Like if you have issues with a hierarchy because it's abusive inherently.
Right.
But if it was completely incompatible to be against that and have my ideology, I would change my ideology.
If you run the math and it leads to put homeless kids in places with pedophiles, start change your math system.
Yeah.
If your reaction to finding out that homeless kids are sleeping with pedophiles because it's the only way that they can get food and clean laundry, and you are in a position to actually change government policy and you don't both go after that pedophile and use the resources you have to feed and clothe those children, you have just engaged in like Nazi level evil.
Like there's no other way to describe what Kintler's doing.
You have systemized the abuse of children.
Yeah.
Yes, exactly.
Exactly.
That's actually the thing that is really interesting to me about this episode is I was sort of expecting to just kind of get like, here's a pedophile who individually did this thing.
Nope.
The systemization of it actually is what ties it into all the stuff you brought up as context in the beginning is like, because you were taking even the like stern, be shitty to your kids as a stern guy.
And then it was systematized.
And that is when it became even more evil.
And the same thing is happening here.
It's interesting.
It's bad.
It is.
It's very interesting.
And I think we'll close part one by, you know, the question, you have to ask the question when you hear about this program.
Well, what happened to these kids?
Right.
And you know, probably not going to have a happy ending in most cases, but it is still worth hearing anyway.
In the case of Ulrich, Kintler gives, again, this is part of how he's a bad academic, right?
All he gives us about this kid is that after four years of living with this pedophile, Ulrich felt he had been, quote, taught to survive.
He got sober, which Kintler noted as a victory, but remained, quote, a suffering person.
Wonder why?
It's hard to imagine.
And it says a lot that this was considered Kintler's like, well, this is a win.
He's no longer doing drugs or committing property crime, right?
He got molested with the support of the state, but he's not doing drugs or committing property crime.
So we got a win here, chopping this up and call him dub.
I am far more okay with drugs and property crime than I am.
The state or pedophilia.
Yeah.
If the kid had stayed on drugs and just been given a flat, you know, like God.
Maybe it would have gotten clean.
I mean, I'm pro people getting clean.
I am pro-people, but I'm not an anti-drug user, you know?
Yeah, I'm certainly not.
God, this is just so comprehensively vile.
Yeah, no, I keep trying to come up with ways to talk about everything except the worst part of it because my brain is like trying to...
Anyway, because it's almost, it's almost hard to fathom, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Kintler concluded that his experiment was a success.
He stated that his goal with this program was that these boys be taught to live proper, unremarkable lives, and that these men would do so much to help their boys because they had a sexual relationship with them.
Right.
And I find something, it's next to like the evil of like endorsing this system of pedophile abuse of foster children, but like it's so evil that his goal is like, these kids are so broken.
Anything horrible we have to accept is worth it if it leads to them leading unremarkable lives.
Yeah, right?
That's all they can hope for, these poor kids, is to have unremarkable, sober lives and maybe getting repeatedly raped by pedophiles will get them to that and that'll be a win, you know?
Yeah, like anyway, Margaret, that's the end of part one.
How are we feeling?
How are we doing?
Plugging The Sapling Cage00:03:54
You really set me up to plug my young adult.
I wrote a book that doesn't have any of that stuff.
It's weird, but yet there are caretaking adults who take care of teenagers in it in ways that are unrelated to that entirely.
Yeah.
I have a book called, I just went straight into my plugs.
I feel like I have a book called The Sapling Cage that will be kick-started starting June 10th, and you can sign up for an alert about that by going to Kickstarter and searching The Sapling Cage or Martyr Killjoy.
And I have a history podcast where I kind of do an inverse of this.
Although it's funny because I'm like, oh, I do an inverse where I talk about cool, cool people did cool stuff.
That's the name of the show.
But usually it's the people fighting against the bad stuff.
And we don't always win, but we do have fun along the way when we fight the bad things.
Yeah.
That's true.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So fight the bad things.
And Robert, don't we have a new podcast, a weekly podcast on CoolZone Media?
Do we?
Have we ever done a weekly podcast?
Sophie, that seems groundbreaking.
Do we?
It is just us.
It is just us.
Yeah, no one else has ever come up with this idea, right?
This is correct.
It is called 16th Minute of Fame, and it's hosted by one Jamie Loftus ever of her.
Yeah.
The Jamie Loftus.
You know, the same Jamie Loftus who may have committed a series of murders in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
New York Times is best-selling author, Jamie Loftus.
Yeah.
And possible murderer.
Just like Malcolm Gladwell.
Wow.
Are we expanding this?
This really got this guy.
Oh, no.
Malcolm Gladwell did kill a guy.
Look it up, people.
Anyway, check out Jamie's podcast.
Yeah, check out Jamie's podcast, 16th Minute of Fame.
By the time this episode's out, there should be three episodes for you to enjoy.
So check them out now.
And sign my petition to finally hold Malcolm Gladwell accountable for his crimes.
Wow.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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From Kenya Barris, the visionary creator of Blackish, comes Big Age, an audible original about finding your way in life's next chapter.
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