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The title may sound stunning, and unbelievable, but it’s true.

It’s also appearing in the main media elsewhere.

Berlin’s leftist daily Online Tagesspiegel here reports comprehensively on the German Green Party’s troubled past involving it’s earlier advocacy of pedophilia and practice by some of its former leading members, see background here, here, here and here.

Green Party Chairwoman Bettina Jarasch has just publicly apologized for what she calls an “institutional failure,” Tagesspiegel writes, as a commission report on the matter has been presented.

“On behalf of the Berlin Greens, we ask for foregiveness,” said Jarasch.

The Tagesspiegel adds:

In the Berlin state association of the Alternativen Liste, the forerunner organization of the Green Party, there was massive sexual abuse of children.”

The Greens’ advocacy of pedophilia rights was part of the party’s platform in the 1980s and early 1990s as it pushed neo-liberal ideas like “free and open relationships”. It still remains unclear as to why the Germany’s top environmental party took so long to issue an apology.

1000 child victims of sexual abuse

The number of victims is not known. However one Green Party Berlin parliamentarian and author of the report, Thomas Birk, in March mentioned “up to 1000 victims”, though he said the figure was “speculative”. The report itself gives releases no figure.

Current Green party official Daniel Wesener said that there were at least two repeat offenders who were tolerated within the party, one was convicted in 13 cases.

Currently the child sex abuse within the Green party is now under investigation by a special commission. The Green Party leaders pledge their full cooperation and to provide compensation to victims who step forward.

According to the Tagesspiegel, the investigation shed light into an “abuse network” within the forerunner of the Green party, Alternativen Liste, which included at least three leading figures who set up a “youth center” in Kreuzberg recreational center.

According to witnesses, they abused numerous youths who had been recruited at elementary schools.”

Today Green Party officials insist that the abuse, however, did not take place within the party structure itself.

Though some media outlets such as the Tagesspiegel reported on the story, much of the German media has been pretty mute on the topic.