Marco had been living with Henkel for a year and a half when Sven moved in. The police had found him in a subway station in Berlin, sick with hepatitis. He was seven years old, begging for money, and he said that he had come from Romania. Noting that Sven had “likely never experienced a positive parent-child relationship,” the youth-welfare office searched for a foster home in Berlin. “Mr. Henkel seems to be ideally suited to this difficult task,” doctors from a clinic at the Free University of Berlin wrote.
The two boys took on different roles in their new family. Sven was the good son, docile and loving. Marco was more defiant, but at night, when Henkel came into his room asking to cuddle, or waited for him while he brushed his teeth before bed, he had to comply. “I just accepted it out of loyalty, because I didn’t know anything else,” Marco told me. “I didn’t think what was happening was good, but I thought it was normal. I thought of it a little bit like food. People have different tastes in food, the way some people have different tastes in sexuality.” If Sven’s bedroom door was open and he wasn’t there, Marco knew what was happening, but the two boys never talked about what Henkel did to them. “It was an absolutely taboo subject,” Marco said.
One night, Marco took a knife from the kitchen and slept with it under his pillow. When Henkel approached his bed and discovered the blade, he withdrew quickly, called Helmut Kentler, then handed the phone to Marco. “There’s a devil behind my wall,” Marco tried to explain. Kentler had a calming, grandfatherly presenceMarco’s teachers recommended that he see a child therapist, who was supposed to meet with him for two hours a week. But the therapist said that Henkel was holding Marco “prisoner”—Henkel always sat close by, in an adjacent room. Marco remembers that, once, after a session began without Henkel’s realizing it, he barged into the room and hit the therapist in the face. When a school psychologist referred Sven for counselling, too, Henkel would not allow him to take any psychological tests, according to records. “Not with me!” he shouted. “If you all want to make a ‘case’ out of [Sven], then do it without me.” (Sven seemed upset by the outburst, asking Henkel, “Does that mean you want to give me away?”)
In a letter, Kentler advised the youth-welfare office that, if a psychological assessment had to be done, he would perform it. “Insights beyond my findings are not to be expected,” he wrote. He acknowledged that Henkel could appear “harsh and hurtful,” but “I ask you to consider that a man who deals with such seriously damaged children is not a ‘simple person,’ ” he wrote, in another letter. “What Mr. Henkel needs from the authorities is trust and protection.”
When Marco was nine, his mother petitioned a district judge in Berlin to allow her to spend more time with him. Marco’s father told the youth-welfare office that he could not understand why Marco was growing up in a “strange family,” deprived of an Arabic education. He also “made massive accusations against the foster father’s behavior,” a caseworker wrote. But Marco’s mother had signed an agreement stating that she would “always be guided by the best interests of my child,” and that determination was made by the youth-welfare office.