It’s not every day that a major European political party has to apologize for having supported pedophilia, but two weeks ago, the German Green Party had to do just that. For the past year and a half, investigators commissioned by the party have been probing its past associations with pro-pedophilia groups, and their report has been shocking to many Germans. It found that the German “pedosexual movement,” which advocated the legalization of “consensual” sex between adults and children, found a surprisingly warm reception in the party in the 1980s.

At a news conference on November 12, one of the current heads of the Green party, Simone Peter, told reporters that she is “deeply sorry” for her party’s past stance, and “apologized once again to all victims of sexual abuse that might feel trivialized.” The scandal has prompted widespread debate in the German media, both about the culpability of the Greens and the country’s treatment of pedophiles. Over the past several decades, Germany has acquired a well-deserved reputation for open-mindedness when it comes to sex. Now the Greens’ revelations have spurred a crisis on the German left and shown that the country’s sexual tolerance comes with a historical baggage all its own.

The current scandal dates back to last year’s federal election, when a German researcher revealed that one of the party’s leaders, Juergen Trittin, had signed off on a 1981 local party platform arguing that sex between adults and children, in some cases, be legal. Trittin quickly acknowledged that he had made a mistake, blaming it on an oversight—but conservative political opponents were quick to describe the Greens’ actions as “repulsive.” This came on the heels of other revelations—which had prompted the report in the first place—that another senior Green Party figure had once written about his “flirtations” with children while working in a kindergarten. Largely as a result, the party only received a disappointing 8.4 percent of the popular vote.

Although it is little remembered these days, the move to legalize pedophilia in the 1980s went far beyond Germany. In the United States, the Childhood Sensuality Circle and, more notoriously, North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) advocated (with little success) for legalized pedophilia, and other countries, including the Netherlands, Canada and the UK, had similar movements. But the movement fared exceedingly well in the unique political climate of West Germany, where the Nazi past made the left especially sensitive (and, in some cases, susceptible) to arguments about individual freedom. “It was a widely-held belief in West Germany that sexual freedom was a way to prevent authoritarianism,” says Stephan Klecha, one of the researchers who worked on the report. “That debate about fascism was very German.”

One popular reference point, both in West Germany and elsewhere, was the writings of Wilhelm Reich, a leftist Austrian psychiatrist who died in 1957. An influential pupil of Freud, Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism argued that the rise of authoritarianism could be tied to the “suppression of the natural sexuality of the child.” And West Germany had another prominent symbol for the movement: an anarchist journalist named Peter Schult, who remained a figure of reverence on the left despite the fact that he openly described himself as a “pederast.” In 1976, he was convicted of bringing a young girl home with him with the intention of sexually abusing her.