GERMANY
Spiegel
In the 1980s, some members of Germany’s Green Party advocated the legalization of sex with minors. Now the party wants to come to terms with this dark chapter via an independent review of internal documents — some of which show that the influence of pedophiles on the young party was much stronger than previously thought.
He is a boy, roughly 10 years old, with a pretty face, full lips, a straight nose and shoulder-length hair. The wings of an angel protrude from his narrow back, and a penis is drawn with thin lines on the front of his body.
The 1986 image was printed in the newsletter of the Green Party’s national working group on “Gays, Pederasts and Transsexuals,” abbreviated as “BAG SchwuP.” It wasn’t just sent to a few scattered party members, but was addressed to Green Party members of the German parliament, as well as the party’s headquarters in Bonn.
Documents like this have become a problem for the Greens today. Some 33 years after the party was founded, it is now being haunted by a chapter in its history that many would have preferred to forget. No political group in Germany promoted the interests of men with pedophile tendencies as staunchly as the environmental party. For a period of time in the mid-1980s, it practically served as the parliamentary arm of the pedophile movement. …
It’s embarrassing for the Greens. No other party depends as heavily on the claim of being on the right side of morality. The Greens also played a leading role from the start — as prosecutors — in the debate over abuse within the Catholic Church, emphatically demanding answers to allegations of sexual abuse of children. And, of course, a Green Party parliamentarian, Antje Vollmer, was also a member of the Bundestag’s round table to address the abuses that took place in mainly church-run children’s homes in the 1950s and 1960s.
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