WARNING!!!!!!!!!! THE FOLLOWING IS EXTREMELY GRAPHIC, DETAILING WHAT THE REPORTER WITNESSED WHILE MOVING WITHIN THE CHILD MOLESTERS' CIRCLE. THE FOLLOWING IS NOT FOR THE SENSITIVE AND MOST CERTAINLY NOT FOR CHILDREN!
PARENTS AND GUARDIANS, PLEASE USE THE FOLLOWING STORY TO UNDERSTAND WHAT GOES THROUGH A CHILD MOLESTER'S MIND AND UNDERSTAND HIS CAREFULLY EXECUTED PLANS TO BETTER PROTECT THE CHILDREN YOU LOVE!
PARENTS AND GUARDIANS, PLEASE USE THE FOLLOWING STORY TO UNDERSTAND WHAT GOES THROUGH A CHILD MOLESTER'S MIND AND UNDERSTAND HIS CAREFULLY EXECUTED PLANS TO BETTER PROTECT THE CHILDREN YOU LOVE!
Original source: Magazine Der stern
Written by Stefan Karremann for magazine Der stern
Link in German: http://www.regenbogenwald.de/news/aktuelles.htm
Amongst Child Molesters (part one)
They lurk on playgrounds, public pools and sports facilities: Men on the search for children. Stern-reporter Manfred Karremann submerged for over a year into the secret world of the pedophiles. In a two part series he describes, how cleverly the offenders get their little victims and how they gain the mothers’ trust with their trickery.
He spoke to the girl on the street in broad daylight. “What a dirty dress you got on there, your mom will be pretty mad at you!” And smiling reassuringly “Come on, we’ll wash it off real quick at my house”. The bewildered child, maybe 5 years old, leaned the bike against the house wall and came with him. To the light brown tiled bathroom of a two bedroom apartment. There the man undressed the little girl, who could not speak a word out of embarrassment. Commenting in detail Kurt W. explains how the video was made that he is showing me right now. His bathroom with the light brown tiles I’ve already seen, because the toilet is there. Next to the bathtub where he’s always bathing little girls.
For hours we sit in front of his computer monitor. Him on a scuffed gray office chair, me next to him in a red plush arm chair. It’s dark in his “home office”. Next to the monitor there’s only a little lamp. The blinds are down. So no curious neighbour could watch through the windows while W. shows me his child porn that he is offering to me for sale. Among them many originals he taped himself. He always romances over them, has to giggle, when he sees the pictures which he and his pals did take. Especially over the videos with the bathroom-trick. “Here”, he says, “that guy got real little children from the street and said: You wet your pants, then he washes and dries them.” Kurt W. knows obviously where and how the movies originated that he distributes. “Or here”, he says smiling, “so her skirt won’t get wet while washing, we tied it up, each time a bit higher.”
Kurt W. looks up from his monitor and winks at me. He is convinced that I am like him; a child molester. This word is declared taboo among his own kind. They refer to themselves as “pedo”. An abbreviation of “pedophile”, which means translated word-for-word “fond of children”.
He does not know that I want to publish what he is telling me – about the tricks he and his pals use to get to the children and about what they do with them, about the making and distribution of child porn which are named “kipos” (for kids porn) by insiders. I am considered “verified” in the child molester scene. Verified means: trustworthy, one of us.
For years I’ve been repeatedly researching in this scene. In the 90s I had the first contact to two or three pedophiles and expanded them with time. I “confided” to them, pretended to be a pedo who likes girls and boys. I told them that I am always on the road due to my job. That’s how I got more and more contacts in many German cities.
About a year ago, I totally submerged into the scene – for the magazine stern and the channel ZDF – drove with my trailer through Germany, making different appointments with pedos. With so called “premium-pedos” – dreamers who only live their tendencies in their fantasy, with men who have “mini-marriages” for years with children; but also with sex maniacs/offenders who are without any regard for children’s souls and bodies. There are supposed to be 60 000 pedos in Germany. I went to group-meetings, started “friendships” and was even allowed to take pictures without causing suspicions.
I did not want to report from the outside, but from the inside. I wanted to know what pedophiles and child molesters are thinking, how they go about it, what they do with their little victims and how they communicate amongst themselves. I wanted to clarify why parents so trustingly leave their offspring to grown-up men who pass themselves off as child minders or private tutors. Only when parents know the facts about the tricks and methods of these people, they can protect their children from them. Because the danger that springs from pedophiles lurks very often where parents assume them least of all.
On the monitor I see a little girl with long brunette hair, assumingly 5 or 6 years old. First in a harmless scene: The kid draws a picture with crayons at the white round table on the balcony outside. He laughs into the cam and waves. The mother of the girl entrusted Kurt W. with her girl, first for a couple of hours in the afternoon, then more often even over the weekend. Because Kurt W. is a child care worker. “She’s in good hands then, her mom said.”
Kurt W. laughs while looking at the monitor. There you can see how he has a go at the little girl. “Oh yeah, my Natalie”, he sighs, “there she was still little, was homesick and I called her mother to ask what I should do because she cries. Then the mother told her: You stupid cow, you wanted to sleep there, now you stay there.”
Kurt W. has several criminal records. 1980 he was sentenced to 27 months because of continued sexual abuse of children, then to 5 years for child abuse and distribution of pornography and at last to 7 ½ years and again 2 years. Now he is free again. “State-disruptions” they call it in the pedo-scene. From his first “state-disruption” he was let go under the condition that he would “stay away from contacting minors under 14”.
Of course he did not stick with it. He continued to abuse children whom he took care of in his apartment as child minder and private tutor. While the clueless parents even paid him for it, he taped what he did with his “protégés” and sold the videos for lots of money.
Films, in which you see for minutes the genitals of little girls, zoomed in with the video cam. Customers, who are not satisfied with this, get offered something else from Kurt: Japanese Sado-videos for example, in which 5 to 6-year-old girls are raped. “You got those with the original audio.” Any “material” like this Kurt W. has never taped himself – too big would be the danger that a child could talk at home. As “experienced expert”, he knows how to do kids porn and how to make sure the little ones keep silent at home.
“Playful” you have to go about it, he says. To give the children the feeling that it’s their own fault or at least part of their fault, because they took part in it voluntarily. Then they shut up. Out of embarrassment. It worked just fine with both girls from the neighbourhood, about 5 and 8 years old, who were “taken care of” in his apartment several times a week for a couple of hours in the afternoon: First doing homework, then painting a little, a couple of computer games – and finally watching porn. In the bedroom. In the pedo-scene an old but all the more approved trick: Kurt suggests the girls to “re-enact” what they watched. The little ones find it funny at first, giggling embarrassed. And then they do it.
How “playful” he is going about it, he shows me in a movie. He instructs the two girls to lie on his black double bed. “Now start, do a somersault”, he commands. But that’s not it yet: “Now take off the panties, so they don’t rip”. The girls obey, trying to re-enact for the “uncle cuddle-Kurt” the scenes from the porn he showed them before. Until one of the girls starts acting up “I don’t want to anymore”, she says and turns to the side. Here Kurt immediately stopped taping. Out of experience he knows that it gets risky when you push kids in this state too much. “You will not tell your mom about that, right?”, he asks. “No”, one of the girls says “we would sure get a beating if she gets to know what we did”.
Scenes with 3- and 4-year-old children are flickering on the monitor. Kurt laughs, points at it: “The girl I’m holding there, the 3-year-old, my pal deflowered her with a stick.” Because his penis was too big. “After two, three days, when it did not bleed anymore” – he points at the monitor – “he fucked her.” If the mom did not notice it, I ask. No, he says. Kurt W. is amused: “She could not talk yet, it was paradise”. Why the kid could not speak yet at 3 ½ years old, he does not know – and he does not care either. Kurt W. often took part as a child minder at kids’ holiday courses. One time a colleague took him to the side. “She said: You give the kids a bit too much love, cut down on that a bit”. Kurt read good-night-stories to the kids: “Then the girls were lying with me in my tent and the pastor said: Oh, Mr. W. is again courted by the young ladies.” Kurt can’t stop laughing about the clueless pastor.
Business with kids porn is booming, especially on the download sites of the internet. Due to an estimate of “Innocence in Danger”, an international organization against child abuse, in 2001 about 70000 websites were on the net containing pedo-criminal contents; 2002 there were already 182000. About 4500 chat rooms are known, in which child pornography on pictures and films is traded. Due to Interpol the turnover worldwide so far was about 17 billions Euro.
The biggest hit against distribution of child porn was made by the German police a couple of weeks ago. The end of September 1500 cops raided 502 apartments and offices in the 16 states of Germany. They confiscated 745 computers, 35500 cds, 8300 floppy-disks and 5800 videos. 530 citizens since then are suspected to have owned child pornographic prints and pictures from the internet and in numerous cases distributed themselves. The youngest victim was only 4 months old.
Pedophiles are to be found in all social classes. In the German pedo-scene I got to know men living on welfare and mathematicians, teachers and doctors, child minders and sports coaches. Not by accident for sure the biggest part of professions are related with children. The likes of pedophiles – women are absolutely scarce in that scene – tend from the girl who is 5 or 6 years old (in exceptional cases also 9 year olds) over to boys who are 6, 9 or even 12 or 13 years old. Usually the pedo-sexual relationship ends when the little one is “hormonally contaminated” (scene-slang). It means: when first signs of puberty, for example pubic hair, are showing. The people who have these tendencies are called “core-pedophile” by experts, totally normal in the scene. Only the gay ones usually make compromises with the age upwards – “girl lovers” or core-pedos never tolerate older age.
Pedophiles have no interest in grown women or men. Konrad brings it to the point: “It does not matter how many hot women or older girls walk past you at the public pool, you don’t look at them at all, but as soon as a little boy shows up?...” Konrad is a “boy lover” and describes “his type” as follows: “A slim, great boy, a nice bulge in the pants, very exciting. The body I prefer: long and nice thighs, slim, not skinny and a cute firm ass.”
It’s normal in pedo-circles that “girl lovers”, men who sexually are only interested in girls, pick younger children than the so called BL’s, the “boy lovers”. The BL’s usually recruit boys not before they have reached the age of 7 or 8 and sometimes keep them up to 11 or 12, up to puberty.
Pedophiles who prefer toddlers “don’t care about the gender at first – these offenders are more interested in a certain age, not in a certain gender”, says Richard Karl Moerbel, police director at the Federal Criminal Police Office Germany.
Not too long ago they could arrest a 19 year old man coming from Eastern Europe and who worked at the daycare at a south German university. “The colleagues from the FBI pointed us to child pornographic material which was supposed to be in Germany”, so Moebel, “our research resulted in finding that this material was put on a computer at a South German university.” Now the child minder is in detention awaiting trial and will be charged for distribution of child pornographic material in 32 cases. The man worked before in an orphanage and wanted to go work in the Netherlands for a foster home. “He has admitted to have had sexual feelings when touching and changing diapers of babies”. The number of such offenders is rising. “Sarcastically you could name this as a trend to changing tables”.
“Baby lovers” are hardly found in the pedo-scene, they usually don’t talk about it. Exceptions prove the norm: Axel B. has visited the “self-help group” for a long time in Berlin, said, he could watch videos with 1 to 5 year old little ones for hours”. Admitting “baby lovers” are ogled at warily, but accepted in the local groups. One Berlin citizen says “who sits in the glass house should not throw stones – so to each one their own pleasure”.
Monthly meeting of the group Munich in Schwabing (Bavaria). An introduction ritual like they have it at the Alcoholics Anonymous. “Boy lover” Norbert says “I’m Norbert and I like caressing the naked upper body of boys aged 8 to 18”. Laughter in the room. Norbert is new. New also seems to be “girl lover” Roland, a quiet grey-haired man in his forties: “I am Roland and I like girls, age down no limits”. Insiders know that Roland would also do very little girls. Most of the 15 men here are short-spoken. “Uli, girls”. Or “Berthold, boys.” That is those who are not here for the first time.
Some of them have already had their own “state disruptions”. No one wants to make that experience again. Walter is 60 and says “It’s hell.” The men being in jail charged as child molesters don’t dare to come out of their cells. Child molesters are “scum” to other inmates and they always have to be prepared for brutal attacks.
Because they fear police raids, the men always speak in the third person when they talk about sexual encounters or “witty anecdotes”. “It can always happen that there’s a snitch”, says Thorsten, in his thirties, who likes boys. Only after the meetings they talk openly to each other at the Italian restaurant next door. Or at the secret meetings where only “verified” pedos are allowed to go. The criteria for allowance has been discussed before: “Three people with knowledge of people decide and they reassure the group: Yes, he is clean.” They want to talk without fear in their so called self-help-groups. About the things that define a pedos life: Loneliness and depression, dealings with police and justice, experiences and problems concerning the relationship with children.
It’s not about “self help” in these groups as it would be the case at AA, because Pedophilia does not count as a disease in the group. It’s about “that we get together and strengthen each other, because people with our tendencies are only strong when we know lots of people who think like us”. In the groups they exchange hints and tricks, how to live without being bothered by the police or the justice system.
Juergen Lemke, psychotherapist in the Berlin facility “Child in the centre” has researched on those group dynamics intensively. He takes care of offenders who are sent to him from the jails: “The men communicate and reassure themselves in these so called self-help groups. It’s as if you would take a bunch of foxes who like to hunt in the goose barnstable - put them somewhere together so they can exchange their experiences on how to hunt and catch the geese the best way.”
All over Germany most pedo self-help-groups, which can be found in almost every major city, are organized under the roof of the AHS, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Humane Sexualitaet (Project Team Humane Sexuality) with their seat in Giessen (state of Hesse). The “Pedo AG (project group)” in the AHS wants to awaken more understanding for pedophiles in our society and fights at the same time for exemption from punishment of sexual relationships between grown-ups and children – if they “consent”. They want the right not to abuse children, but the right for children to have their own sexual self-determination.
The “AG Pedo” in the AHS meets twice a year, usually in youth hostels. For example April of 2003, in the youth hostel Mainz. There I got to know Lukas. He lives, like all other participants, over the weekend in the youth hostel. I accompany him to a playground next to the youth hostel, in the Volkspark Mainz. Lukas is in his thirties and from Austria. He has black beard and wears a blue jacket that is way too big for him. Lukas seems to always be grinning when he watches little girls or walks after them over the playground. He is a “girl lover”. In front of the swings he is trying to get a glimpse, watching between the legs of the little girls. He is fixing his gaze on a girl about 7 or 8 years old. Again he is grinning. “She looks like my little Persian, got to know her when she was 8.” And he regrets: “Now she is already 11.” Too old.
We are standing in front of the slow pick up train which makes its rounds through the park and now stopped. Lukas gazes fascinated at a little black-haired girl. Her Turkish parents don’t seem to notice it. Lucky for them that they don’t know what Lukas is dreaming about: “To not only kiss a 3 or 4 year old girl on the mouth, but to also stimulate here a bit, touching the clitoris, into such a little slot? When she looks at you then from above – so cute, so beautiful.”
He talked himself into an erection as he already did twice before this afternoon. “Something’s growing again, my pants are tight, I have to go and work that off”, he says, grins and walks fast to the toilet at the Café in the park.
At the youth hostel the “AG Pedo” meets in two groups. Talking about how you can assert your demands in this petty bourgeois society. Because, so they say in the scene magazine “Der Knüpfer” (the Knotter) free after Rosa von Praunh.. “Not the Pedo is perverted, but the society which he lives in.” “Us Pedos”, one participant says seriously, “are being chased like the witches or the Jews back then.”
At night a comfortable get-together at the bar of the hostel. The talks get more and more privately. Thomas, a shy man in his forties comes from Berlin. He asks the question if the 8 ½ year old boy he takes care of at home really wants the sex with him or if he is just doing him a favour. “But”, so his conclusion, “in the end it does not matter”. The circle laughs short and loud. The fact that Thomas mentions the boy is 8 and “a half” is no coincidence: Amongst pedos the child is not only 5, 8 or 11. Every half year counts. I make an appointment with Thomas in Berlin.
Chasing dwarfies (Part two of “amongst child molestors)
They are organized all over the country, have their territories where the children play. And they are going after them – with perfidious scams and methods. Stern reporter Manfred Karremann submerged for a year into the secret world of pedophiles . In the second part of his series he describes how the network of the offenders works.
Berlin. I made an appointment with Thomas. I met him at the meeting of the “AG Pedo” at the youth hostel in Mainz. In the main capital Thomas takes care of the little son of a student. She put an ad in the homosexual category “equal and equal” of a city magazine. Saying she is looking for a gay man to watch her boy from time to time. Thomas knows why: “Because she is not looking for a guy she wants to marry, but just one who will watch her son.” Thomas grins: “It could not be easier, I think. I thought I don’t see right: Is that a joke? A new way to catch us?” The little ad could have been a trap. That she got herself a pedo in her house, she does not know. “Of course she doesn’t know anything about it”, says Thomas, “but we are already close friends.” Right according to the pedo-motto: “Not with the mother – but also not without the mother.”
Thomas watches the little one when his mother studies at the university. We are meeting at the Hackesche Markt where he just picked up the boy from the train station. Dani has short dark hair and immediately talks to me. Thomas has to bring Dani home, I accompany them. Thomas carries the school bag, asks the child how the day was. He has a way with children, I think to myself. Just like the most “boy lovers” do. They hardly ever lecture the kids, let them do what they want, build up trust.
For many pedos it is not just a burden to sometimes listen to the big sorrows of the little man and to react according to it. Exactly because of this they become a real friend to the child. If only there wasn’t the other side of the medal. Because the good friend is so nice, the child hazards the consequences of sexual abuse – also to not lose the affection of the grown-up. Thomas thinks it’s absurd: “It’s consensual. The boy does not want to be talked to while at it and he enjoys it”, he claims.
Sometimes he only massages the boy, says Thomas, sex is not always happening. He does not even use a condom, comes to my mind. Thomas did tell me that he was HIV-positive. If he did not fear he could infect the little one with Aids, I ask. “No”, says Thomas, “it does not transmit that easily. I am not into sexual intercourse that much anyway, and he is not forced to take my dick in his mouth, only I put his in mine.” The mom, who we told and warned, does not believe this up till today. A phenomenon that is found very often.
A couple of days later I see Thomas at the Pedo-Wednesday-meeting in the centre of Berlin. As I enter the bar that was set up as meeting point over the phone, two men are seated at the table. They ask questions, in-between they are chatting away. One says “Some day you will get to know all, stick with the Wednesday group. They are shielded; you only get in there through a person you know, so we don’t put ourselves a snitch in there. In that group there are only verified people.” Nine men are there tonight, all between 20 and 60 years old. Most here like boys, only one “girl lover” is among them. Everyone tells how they are. Gerald, an oddball guy around 40, admits that he was lonely and suffered from depression. The subjects goes over to “gay hooker” prices, locations, conditions. But all that does not comfort Gerald – he does not want sex without love.
That’s why he envies Konrad, who has “a real relationship”. Konrad, a short man with a crooked nose, mid-fifties, is proud of “his” little one, that’s how he calls him. He talks about the last weekend with the 10 ½ year old Julius. For almost 3 years he claims they were together.
After the official part we move over to another bar. Not everyone is there. I sit down next to Konrad. He romanticizes over „his“Julius, with whom he spends most the weekends in his little apartment for over two years now. “It’s like kind of a mini-marriage, we have together”, explains Konrad. I want to know how he got to know the boy. Konrad tells. How he met Julius at a playground, which was actually the “territory” of another pedo. How Julius then stayed away and how he searched the whole area looking for the boy. How one day he ran into him again, how they went swimming together and went to the go-kart track together and every night he brought him back to the playground.
And then Julius told him that he talked to his mother. “She ordered me over the very next day”. Konrad, who was pretty scared of this encounter, told the mother the lie about the own son he has – of course he does not have a son. “I told her that I am over a bad relationship and that I have not seen my child in so long and that Julius reminded me so much of my own son. She immediately showed understanding for it.”
Konrad talks without taking a break. “She must have already asked herself: What would a guy his age want with such a young boy? But she has her own way of life, always some lover from some bar. One time when I was out with Julius, she called me and said her boyfriend is destroying everything in the apartment and if I could keep Julius with me overnight.” Konrad grins: “I had a shitload of luck, she literally shoved her son into my bed.” Ever since then Julius was allowed to stay over for the weekend.
Konrad starts thinking: “Actually you can only get a boy from that kind of social class just like that, where no one asks. What does the little one have at home, what in the world should he do there?”
Julius comes from a broken home in the big story house ghetto Berlin-Marzahn. The mother seems to drink too much, says Konrad. Then Julius is happy when he can escape the screaming at home. Fortunately there is Konrad who is always waiting for him. He does not bitch. He picks him up from school on Fridays and listens to his sorrows – which obviously no one else cares for. Konrad always does cool things with him, treats him like a grown up.
As an exception I am allowed to accompany Konrad with “his” little one for a day, because Konrad is downright jealous. At noon we wait at the elementary school Berlin-Marzahn. Konrad is already excited, he looks forward to seeing the boy. As Julius gets into the rented Mercedes, Konrad gives him a hug. I sit in the back seat. Julius has to stop at home to drop his back pack and to get some clothes. We take the elevator up to the 13th floor where Julius lives during the week. The apartment is decorated staidly; a German song is playing on the radio. Julius mother is divorced, unemployed and has to feed three hungry kids – Julius, his older brother and the older sister.
The mom is happy to see Konrad. A good friend of the family. Hugs, “Hello Konrad”, “Hello Monika”, kisses on the cheek. After a short chat we say good-bye. Konrad says “Cya, till Sunday then.” Julius kisses his mother on the cheek.
We eat at MacDonalds, then go to the go-kart race track and then to a former airport facility given up, where the boy is allowed at the steering wheel. With 100 km per hour, Julius races over the place, sitting on Konrad’s lap, who obviously enjoys it very much. I am in the back seat again. Konrad turns around and grins. At night the two go home, to Konrad’s apartment in Berlin-Charlottenburg. There I am a couple of days later. On a self-made measure of length Konrad reads Julius growth, since the boy was 8. “My big boy, he grows older, I gotta live with it.” In the apartment is only one bedroom – a tiny room with mattresses on the floor.
“Soon I had to put in a suppository being ordered by the mom”, tells Konrad. “I had wet pants without even doing much for it. So I needed to get rid off the pressure. Julius laid in bed at night and slept. There I tested out, with caressing. And some time I did my stupid shit and stained the poor boy without him noticing it. That was bad, but so hot.”
One day that was not enough for him anymore. “I snapped at it in the shower, like…” Konrad makes a gesture with his mouth like a fish getting air. It stayed with the random snap – until now. “I wanted to get rubbed from beginning to end, but that he hasn’t done ever before.” Konrad says “And some day I will nail him, but we’ll add a couple of years first for that.”
On his living room desk, in the middle of the room, is the computer. If Julius is not on it, Konrad goes online. In special chat rooms he is day and night connected with others like him. In the “boy-forum” for example are problems discussed with kids and the police and whenever they can, sexual encounters are being described.
“When the pedophiles are exchanging online, they have to count on the fact that also always a cop from the BKA is sitting at the monitor”, says Richard Karl Moerbel, director of the Federal Criminal Police Office Germany. “Sooner or later we get to trace them down, when they are telling their internet and pedo-friends online about what they did or when they exchange kid porn back and forth.” Every pedophile has a nick name, which he also uses on the internet, so the snitch from the police cannot identify him.
That such nick names like “whimsical tomcat” or “greenbear” are supposed to be a problem for the cops, BKA investigator denies: “BKA officers are reading when they chat in the pedo forums. To most nick names we can put a real name.” The working department Internet at the BKA has been expanded with personnel in the mean time.
I want to know from Konrad what he thinks about sexual self-determination of kids. He is honest: “Who knows what the heck goes on in such a small head? How much can a kid be confirm with it? We like to whitewash everything, because the kids did not explicitly say no. But did they actually say definitely yes? I think, us pedos only see it the way we want to see it.”
In June of 2003 Konrad was arrested when he wanted to visit a couple of friends in the Leipziger Street in Berlin. The guys just had little boys for visit in their apartment again and were being observed by cops for a while already. Konrad just walked right into the middle of the raid. In front of the house two cops grabbed him and cuffed him.
Already the next day Konrad was free again. The cops had Julius interrogated and asked the mother some questions, too. Some kind of misunderstanding, Konrad told her. He only had massaged the belly of Julius and had touched “it” by accident. That’s why Konrad could arrange with her. Meanwhile he had made a road trip with her and the boy to Hamburg. “For the stress the mom got a new dress and now everything is okay again”, Konrad is happy. In a couple of weeks the trial against him and the other men will start.
Some of the men who were arrested in June in the Leipziger Street, I met in spring already. The contact, who put in a word for me, was Konrad. Konrad had told me that the men belong to one of three Berlin pedo-circles and organize kids’ sex parties, “they do spin the bottle and strip poker”. Real mini-orgies were going on there. To Konrad himself too risky, “there are several boys at once, chatterboxes, that can real fast turn on you.”
On a Sunday night we go to see Zac in his apartment. He’s about 1 m 80 tall and dyes his short hair blonde. Sascha and Stefan are there, too. As I get there with Konrad, they are looking at pictures on the computer – kids at fair, impressions of the weekend. “Zac is clever”, Konrad told me, “as soon as he gets to know a boy, he is looking right away for contact with his parents. The parents were totally convinced after talking to him, that he actually teaches the boys.” Zac, the “boy lover”, who knows his clever way with the parents, tells me about his “Alien-Scam”: “I told the boys that I am an alien and to save mankind I needed a boy and a girl. With the girls it was obvious, but with the boys I had to look if IT was real, it could have fallen off, right?“ I do not get where he is going with this.
Zac enacts a contact talk: “What, are you a boy? I don’t believe you! Says the boy: Yes I am a boy. Then I say: That you gotta prove first! Then the boy: Yeah, look here, I have short hair! No, I say, you just cut them off!” Eventually, says Zac, the genitals have to be verified. He demonstrates how the boy takes the pants down. “And then I say: Now that is not real, hey, I need to verify that again! That always works.” The circle laughs.
The tricks and scams of the pedos, to get in touch with kids, vary and go according to season. The summer is ideal. Most of the time several men go together to public pools or to the lakes around Berlin. “First you have to check out all the people there”, says Konrad, “the families, you gotta know, who belongs to who. Then you do the old trick with the drinks: If boys walk by, I open the cooler and get cold coke out. I ask who wants a bottle, cause I don’t feel like carrying back home with me.” Besides that every pedo has his standard equipment with him: a bag of toys, ping pong and badminton rackets, bocce balls or frisbees.
At Zac’s apartment I start talking to Sascha. He is a computer scientist, beginning of his forties. A shy man of small stature. He was active in the pedo-organization “Krumme 13” (crooked 13), which demands more rights for pedos. Sascha has a two-bedroom apartment in the Leipziger Street. It’s the apartment that was raided this year in June by the cops. Before the cops came there, I was there. When I rang the bell a little tired boys’ voice said “Hello?” I tell him I want to see Sascha.
The tired voice belongs to Felix. Felix is a fragile looking blonde boy of 13. He is the “little one” of Floh, a computer scientist from Vienna. When Felix was younger, he was the BF (boyfriend) of Erwin, an English teacher, who I met before. Erwin gave Felix to Floh.
The apartment is decorated poorly. A hamster cage is in the narrow hallway. The little kitchen is simple – stove, fridge, sink, table, two chairs. The two rooms of the apartment have mattresses on the floors. Except for a little couch table and two arm chairs, the only furniture in the apartment. And of course there are several computers in each room, next to the mattresses.
Felix sits on Floh’s lap who obviously smokes pot. The kids are allowed, too, to have some drags from time to time. Five boys are the guests this weekend. Toni, 9 years old, Leon and Kevin, both 11, and Sandro and Felix, already 13. Toni is a pretty boy, just like a “boy lover” likes them: slim, long legs, soft skin and pretty eyes. “Toni is our nestling here”, says computer scientist Sascha. The kids have been coming for over a year to this apartment.
Here they are allowed to do everything. Staying up till 2 am and playing on the computer, smoking, drinking a bit of alcohol, and cursing. When they are not here, they go to the movies or the public pool with the men. In exchange they are supposed to be “cuddling” with them. Leon shows me a condom in the hallway before he throws it in the toilet. “It’s mine”, he says.
More pedos show up. Among them Zac, the fat blonde with the Alien scam. He gives me his card with the phone number. The card for grown ups. For kids he got different ones: funny, yellow cards with a teddy bear and colored hearts on it. Below that the sentence: “If something is wrong at home – I gave Zac a call on the phone – telephone?” He distributes the cards to boys he talks to. Zac is of course not his real name, but his nick name.
Child abuse is hard to prove, because they come voluntarily to the apartments of the pedos. Just like the boys here. They were talked to downstairs playing soccer: “If you’re bored, just come upstairs, we got computer games.” That was about a year ago.
On a Friday in June the cops raid the apartment. Four men and five boys are there when the swat team runs down the door. Zac has his nose beaten. At the same time the cops raid several other apartments. Almost everywhere they find what they are looking for.
After the men are brought into the police van outside, the cops also accompany the kids to the police cars. They have to go to the police stations, making statements against the pedos. The parents are called, but have to wait outside the room on a bench – for hours. Because the kids keep silent. For now. Until the mother of one of the boys promises, she won’t get arrested if he talks. First he talks, then the other boys. Before, they asked the cops: “How long do they stay in jail?” The cop assures them: “For a very long time”. Kevin is calm then: “Till then I’m big enough to defend myself when they want to harm me.” Next day two of the suspects are already free. Konrad, who was also arrested in front of the house and Zac, who has a band aid on his broken nose. Cops said that there was no danger of absconding or danger of suppression of evidence.
In the middle of the night my cell rings. The head of the Berlin Pedo-group is on it. “We are here in a bigger circle and talk about the thing that happened. We have a suspicion and it would be good if you came over.” I drive to the address in Berlin-Kreuzberg. And I am scared. They are looking for the snitch who gave information to the police. I can convince them not to be suspicious of me.
Also at a meeting the next day at a bar in the Kurfuerstenstreet, I get grilled again. Because I was new in the circle around Sascha. Another pedo-head from Hamburg calls and asks if he could do something for me. Already the snitch hunt is going over the internet.
The kids are scared. Because they talked and the men are free again. “Kevin only sleeps in our bed and wakes up every morning covered in sweat”, tells me his mother later on. She is bitter. “I never would have thought that this was going on”, she says with tears in her eyes. “Besides all the anger, the hatred and the grief, I blame myself because I did not realize what was going on.”
“That this was happening to us”, also says Leon’s mother, “I could not imagine. There were always several boys there. And I randomly asked Leon: What are you actually doing there? That these guys were child molesters - I would have imagined those guys a total different way.”
Hans-Juergen from Munich, a 60 year old Latin teacher, likes older boys starting at 11, rather 12. He’s not interested in the little ones. He was sentenced last month to two years without probation because of grave sexual abuse. Even though he did not have a criminal record. He touched an eleven year old in his apartment in his pants from behind – the boy ran to his mother crying and she pressed charges against him.
After the trial the neighbours hit on his kitchen window with an iron stick. Everyone in the block already knew that a child molester lives here. Hans-Juergen then moved. He has appealed the sentence, the trial will be some time next year. Till then he will be free, because he has a steady address and because there is no danger of suppression of evidence.
Hans-Juergen was the one taking me to the public pool in Munich. “I had such nice memories there, specially in the showers”, he said, “and when nothing works, at least there’s some eye candy.” The Westbad is “hip” for the pedo crowd, just like the Nordbad, the Aqualand in Cologne or the SEZ in Berlin. Hans-Juergen discovers that Saturday afternoon six other “colleagues” at the pool. “Little-Girlie-Waldi”, how he is called among insiders, even sticks out to me, because he plays for hours with little girls in the non swimmer pool section.
Later on, Waldi shows up in the family Sauna, to stare at naked little girls. Because kids, boys and girls, most of the time on Saturdays go to the family sauna, the pedos are right there, too. “Kids are only allowed in the sauna with grown-ups”, it says on the door. The other way around would be better. Hans-Juergen and his pal Alwin sit in the sauna, looking for “Zwergerl” “(dwarfies”) as they call little boys in Bavaria. “Did you see the Zwergerl in the sauna? He smiled at me the whole time, I just had to wrap a towel around”, says Hans-Juergen smiling.
Also outside they hunt. Hans-Juergen has ping pong rackets and Frisbees in his blue bag. When we stand at the ping pong table, a boy looks over. “He is there without the parents”, Hans-Juergen whispers. “You want to play with us?”, he asks the boy. He is nodding happily.
Of course Hans-Juergen has to show the boy how to play right sometimes and how to hold the racket. And he grabs him around the hips from behind. Later on Hans-Juergen tries to make a date with the boy. A pattern how I know it from the pedo scene: a contact, a supposedly innocent touch on the butt by coincidence. To see how the “dwarfie” reacts.
The pedo scene literally exploded and expanded with the help of the internet. Guenther Ilsen, investigator in Duesseldorf speaks of “a quantum leap, another dimension”. Many, who have suppressed their pedo tendencies so far, realized by using the internet: Oh, there are so many more, they think like me and there are even groups who meet.”
Guntram from Cologne is a typical example for such a „sleeper“. “I was married for 25 years, I even have boys myself”, he tells me at the meeting of the Cologne pedo group. Guntram likes real little girls, around 4 or 5 years old. “There was a tiny bit going on with my niece, of course, but overall I denied my tendencies. When I saw on the internet, wow, there are so many others who are like you and they are even meeting, I separated from my wife.”
Till shortly, says Guntram, he had a very nice relationship with Melanie, she’s 5 ½. “That is love, my first real and deep love”, he said. Him and Melanie even played with dolls in the kids room and she was allowed to be in his apartment once. “The dad is a pal of mine.” Guntram was happy to see Melanie’s first school day. Now her mother forbids him any kind of contact. “She must have seen my contributions in the pedo forum”, he suspects.
Fall 2003. All mothers and dads were given notice or were warned, against many men there are investigations going on. My cell phone which I only used for this research undercover is turned off. OFF. FINALLY.
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