– Nentwig had assumed that Kentler’s experiment ended in the nineteen-seventies. But Marco told her he had lived in his foster home until 2003, when he was twenty-one. “I was totally shocked,” she said. She remembers Marco saying several times, “You are the first person I’ve told—this is the first time I’ve told my story.” As a child, he’d taken it for granted that the way he was treated was normal. “Such things happen,” he told himself. “The world is like this: it’s eat and be eaten.” But now, he said, “I realized the state has been watching.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/26/the-german-experiment-that-placed-foster-children-with-pedophiles

Kentler befriended a thirteen-year-old named Ulrich, whom he described as “one of the most sought-after prostitutes in the station scene.” When Kentler 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,” Kentler wrote. Later, he noted 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.”
Kentler formalized Ulrich’s arrangement. “I managed to get the Senate officer responsible to approve it,” he wrote in “Borrowed Fathers, Children Need Fathers.”

For much of his career, Kentler spoke of pedophiles as benefactors. They offered neglected children “a possibility of therapy,” he told Der Spiegel, in 1980. When the Berlin Senate commissioned him to prepare an expert report on the subject of “Homosexuals as caregivers and educators,” in 1988, he explained that there was no need to worry that children would be harmed by sexual contact with caretakers, as long as the interaction was not “forced.”