Investigation launched over German Green party's support for paedophiles in the 1980s

Germany’s Greens, Europe’s most influential environmentalist party, have been obliged to open a detailed investigation into past policy and practice amid revelations that in the 1980s, its members actively supported paedophile groups which campaigned to legalise sex with children.

Evidence published by Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine suggest that in the mid-1980s, the party acted almost as the parliamentary arm of what the magazine describes as “ the paedophile movement.” Paedophiles joined together with other groups which suffered sexual discrimination including gays, lesbians and transsexuals when the Green party was officially founded in 1980. A paedophile group called the “Stadtindianer” or “City Indians” appeared with impunity at Green Party meetings where its members, some of them wearing war paint, called for “the legalisation of all tender sexual relations between adults and children.”

The paedophiles were given an officially recognised position in the Green Party. Their association, nicknamed the “Schwuppis” was affiliated to a Green parliamentary party working group called “Rights and Society”. Its members helped to create party policy. Their aim was to de-criminalise sex between adults and children. The letter head used by Schwuppi chairman, Dieter Ullmann used a picture of a middle aged man with his arm around a child. Pamphlets circulated within the party contained images of a young boy clad only in shorts standing in a children’s playground. The Greens appear to have taken the interests of paedophiles seriously enough to set up a so-called “Paedophile commission” whose task it was to further the interests of such groups.

Paedophile Greens subsequently campaigned for the legalisation of sex between adults and children under the proviso that no violence or force should be threatened or used and that the adult should not abuse any “dependent relationship” with the child to obtain sex. The paedophiles’ biggest political success was gaining regional party approval for a working paper which demanded the legalisation of non-violent sex between adults and children. It was ratified by a Green Party conference in the state of North Rhine Westphalia in 1985. The same year, one of the state’s Green politicians was arrested for raping his female partner’s two-and-a-half year-old daughter.

And a 1975 book by veteran Green Euro MP Daniel Cohn-Bendit has returned to haunt him and his party. In a passage in The Green Bazaar, he writes about his experiences with children in the early seventies when he was the only male member of staff in an alternative kindergarten in Frankfurt. “My constant flirting with the children started to take on erotic dimensions. It happened several times that some of the children opened my flies and began to stroke me,” he added claiming that he responded in “ different ways” and that their behaviour caused him “problems.”

Cohn-Bendit has categorically rejected allegations of paedophilia and insists that his words were a fantasy written by a man still in late puberty. He says they were designed to “provoke” the then prudish and sexually hung up post-war conservative establishment. “The bit about the children didn’t happen. It was just a male fantasy,” he told Germany’s Südeutsche Zeitung.

But the words have prompted the president of Germany’s constitutional court to boycott a recent ceremony in Germany where Cohn-Bendit was awarded a prize for his life’s work. And Cohn-Bendit now says that he will refuse to accept any more prizes for his achievements.

Claudia Roth, one of the Green Party’s leading politicians now says the Greens never advocated approval for paedophile sex in the federal parliament or in the party at national level. And, by the end of the 1980s, the paedophile movement had been ousted from the Green Party for good. Jürgen Trittin the Greens’ parliamentary leader admitted last week, that his party made wrong decisions about paedophilia. He described the 1980s demand for the legalisation of sex with children as “totally unacceptable.” The independent investigation commissioned by the party, will almost certainly bring more embarrassing disclosures to the surface.