Spectre
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Spectre (Polish: Widmo) was a post-1989 paedophile group based in Poznan, Poland.
Pre-history
After the Second World War, a man later known as Wasaty – a committed communist – pursued a career within the diplomatic bureaucracy of the Polish People's Republic. When a Dutch delegation including Edward Brongersma visited Poland in the 1970s, he made contact with the left-wing senator, briefing him on Warsaw's gay, mostly pederast, underground. The contact likely did not last, and was probably only renewed after 1989.
Fascinated by a boy choir from Poznan, he used this underground network to seek contact with people close to the choir, thereby becoming acquainted with a young man from Poznan later known as Dzieciokoch (a literal Polish rendering of "paedophile"/"childlover"). He frequently invented pretexts of official Party duties to his superiors in order to visit the city, in reality attending the choir's concerts. Poznan had once been home to five boy choirs, though by that time probably only three remained.
Disenchanted with the trajectory communism was then taking, he resigned his official post during the 1980s and settled permanently in Poznan.
1990s
Poznan had its own pederast underground; by the 1990s, a distinction between gays preferring legal teens and boylovers had emerged, though not a divisive one. The city emerged as a centre for the distribution of European child pornography imported from Germany.
In 1994, a group of five men (Wasaty and Dzieciokoch included), having heard a rendering of Bach's St Matthew Passion under the direction of the choir's newly appointed conductor, resolved that the time had come to establish a formal organisation. Inspired by achievements in the Netherlands, and harbouring a degree of sympathy for the communist era amid the harsh capitalist transformation then under way, they adopted the name Spectre. Wasaty was appointed chairperson, while Dzieciokoch took on the role of logistician, responsible both for organising meetings and for coordinating materials from allied groups in Germany and the Netherlands.
Until Brongersma's death, contacts between Spectre and the Dutch groups remained reasonably close. The language barrier, however, kept the group from engaging directly with English-language thought, save where translated into Polish, as with certain libertarian anarchist ideas, and it relied largely on German sources.
The manifesto, written in the mid-1990s, would, should the original surface, stand as the earliest modern paedophile manifesto. After Wasaty's death, who had wished to bring the group into public activism, Dzieciokoch took over and adopted a far more cautious line, heeding Brongerma's warnings of the movement's imminent collapse, a concern shaped in turn by the former senator's own experience of the Dutroux affair of 1996.
In 1997, during a performance of Mozart's Requiem given in the Netherlands by the Polish Nightingales, Brongersma remarked to Dzieciokoch that he was too weary of life, and that the Requiem might as well have been performed for him. No extant recording of the event confirms Brongersma's presence; nevertheless, the account is rather credible – at least one further active politician, from the conservative party, is known to have attended.[1]
Following Brongersma's death, centre of the paedophile movement slowly shifted from Amsterdam and Copenhagen to Berlin. Polish contacts with the Netherlands abruptly ceased. The group concentrated its efforts on maintaining ties with the Berlin chapter of the AG–Pädo, being geographically closer to Poznan.
Early 2000s
From the 1990s onward, Spectre organised its meetings to coincide with the international boy choir festivals held annually in Poznan by the Polish Nightingales. Of these gatherings, only a few minutes of the proceedings remain.
In 2002, the group received warnings from the AG–Pädo concerning a possible infiltration. This intuition proved correct: that same summer, the German journalist Manfred Karremann infiltrated the Berlin chapter of the AG–Pädo, leading to its disbandment. The meeting scheduled for the summer of 2003 was intended to address Spectre's next steps, the group having suddenly found itself isolated from the wider movement. A return to the Dutch contacts was to be proposed, particularly in light of the coming out of Marthijn Uittenbogaard and Norbert de Jonge. For reasons unknown to Newgon's informant, however, this was the first annual meeting not to take place.
A month later, Wojiech Krolopp, director of the Polish Nightingales, was arrested and charged with sexual offences against boy choristers. This sent a shockwave through the group still concerned with the possibility of infiltration. A policy of total anonymity was adopted, and any aspirations towards activism were abandoned for good. The group was henceforth to be concerned with nothing more than peer support, and personal international contacts were explicitly forbidden. New members were to be recruited through the internet forum of BluFik, and, after its closure, through the new forum run by Misiaczek, a young man from Poznan who most probably never affiliated himself with Spectre.
Misiaczek affair and Lex Misiaczek
Misiaczek's blog was noticed by Poland's largest newspaper,[2] sparking a moral panic. For several years, the Polish parliament had attempted to ban paedophile propaganda, finally succeeding in 2010 with a total ban carrying a penalty of two years' imprisonment. This was the first such ban in the world, and was explicitly followed by Slovakia, and, on somewhat different grounds and at the judicial level, by the Netherlands. The morale of Spectre was significantly lowered. No communal outings to the concerts were organised, although many of the members attended the concerts of the three choirs on their own initiative.
2013
In the winter of 2013, the meeting was to address recent developments in the discourse on paedophilia, including scandalous statements by the Polish episcopate on children's willingness to engage in sex, a new book by a Dutch journalist on child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in Poland, the death of Wojiech Krolopp, and the situation of Martijn, among other matters. However, the agenda was overtaken by a book published by journalist Martin Kacki on the (sexual) history of Poznan's boy choirs. The remark by one of the former choristers, that Poznan was saturated with paedophilia, struck the members with something close to dread. What followed, as the minutes themselves bear out, was an extremely heated and sorrowful discussion – one marked, it seems, by real grief – at the end of which the group resolved, with evident sense of injustice, to disband.
References
Further reading
Kacki, Martin (2013). Maestro. Agora.