Christians in East Germany

[Szdfan]

I grew up in West Berlin

A little off subject and on the other side of the wall, but I just saw this:
Documentary tells about East German pastor spy

“Church Under Observation” (Gemeinde unter Beobachtung) tells the story of how Knuth Hansen, a KGB spy, came to be pastor of Berlin Mennonite Church in Germany from 1980 to 1990.

Do you know anything about this?

Not this particular case, but it was extremely common that the East German churches were infiltrated by the Stasi.

I wanted to say a bit more about this. My family didn't have a whole lot do with Mennonites and Anabaptists in Germany when I was a kid. We were on friendly terms with the Mennonite congregation in West Berlin and good friends with a Beachy church plant, but I don't recall being actively engaged with Mennonites in the GDR. (Coincidentally, the current pastor of the Mennonite congregation in West Berlin is a friend from the Baptist youth group that I was a part of in high school).

Most of our contacts and friends with Christians in East Germany were Baptists and Lutherans. We spent a lot of time in East Berlin, frequently traveling over the Berlin Wall to visit friends and participate in church. Some of my earliest memories involve the Berlin Wall.

The scenario that the documentary Ohio Jones linked to -- a Mennonite pastor who was an informer for the Stasi and KGB was extremely likely. The GDR was a highly surveilled state with an active internal spy system run by the Stasi. One of the chief tools of surveillance was a vast network of informers. In 1989, at the end of the GDR, there were an estimated 189,000 "unofficial collaborators" (inoffizieller Mitarbeiter) from all walks of life reporting to the Stasi on their families, coworkers and neighbors. Some estimates state that 1 in 66 East Germans was an informer.

The churches in East Germany were prime targets for surveillance and infiltration. Not only were they the opposition to the Socialist worker's state, they were also one of the few truly independent spaces in that country. During the 1980s, they hosted activists from the East German political reform, environmental and anti-nuclear movements. The 1989 protests in Leipzig that snowballed to the fall of the Berlin Wall centered around weekly "peace prayers" at the St. Nicholas Church. In the fall of 1989, people gathered at the church Monday night for weekly prayers, leading to spontaneous protests following the services.

During the 1990s, the "Gauck Commission," led by former Lutheran pastor and anti-communist Joachim Gauck examined the Stasi files . This commission was tasked managing the former Stasi archives and reconstructing files destroyed by the Stasi before their headquarters were taken over and occupied by civilians in January 1990. Under the Commission, these archives became accessible to the public and names of informers were leaked out or made public. People who were named as informers included church members, pastors and leaders.

The former Stasi archives are extensive, but also incomplete. I've heard former East German friends mention active church members who stopped coming to church after the Berlin Wall fell and wondering whether they might have been informers.

My Dad -- who was not a card-carrying socialist, but sympathetic to socialism as a political and social alternative to US dominance -- was critical of the Gauck Commission. He felt that the public release of names was hurtful to former East Germans who may have been forced or manipulated to inform on others. He did, however, obtain his own Stasi file. Unfortunately, since the Stasi destroyed the files of foreigners first, there wasn't a lot in it.

We were aware before Dad obtained his file that the Stasi was interested in recruiting my Dad to be an unofficial collaborator. Dad travelled frequently between West and East Germany. He had lots of contacts and relationships with East German Christians. We know that the Stasi had approached friends of my parents and pressured them to introduce them to officers, but as far as we know, those introductions never happened.

Since most of Dad's file was destroyed, we didn't learn much more once he obtained it. We know that the Stasi assigned Dad a handler (name redacted), and that's pretty much it.

So the legacy of the churches in the GDR are complicated. On the one hand, it is a legacy of resistance to a hostile regime. The churches refused to capitulate to the East German government and sought ways to be communities of Christ in a hostile society. However, there is also a legacy of collaboration and infiltration, perhaps, because it was impossible otherwise.

[Ken]

The dynamic between east and west Germany kind of fascinates me.

We had a German exchange student nearly a decade ago and she has basically become part of the family and continually visits and we stay in touch.

She was from a working class part of West Germany (Dortmund) and I found it interesting to hear the pretty derogatory way that she and her friends would talk about east Germans. Sort of like how urban Northerners in the US speak about the hicks in the rural south like Mississippi.

[mike]

It wasn't a matter of faith as far as I remember, but I remember from a lot of years ago the book/film Night Crossing about those two families who crossed from East to West in a homemade hot air balloon.

[Szdfan]

The dynamic between east and west Germany kind of fascinates me.

We had a German exchange student nearly a decade ago and she has basically become part of the family and continually visits and we stay in touch.

She was from a working class part of West Germany (Dortmund) and I found it interesting to hear the pretty derogatory way that she and her friends would talk about east Germans. Sort of like how urban Northerners in the US speak about the hicks in the rural south like Mississippi.

Your assessment is correct. Thirty-five years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Eastern Germany is still treated like they’re hillbillies. The region lags behind the West economically. It’s one of the reasons why far-right radicalism has taken ahold in the former GDR.

[Szdfan]

It wasn't a matter of faith as far as I remember, but I remember from a lot of years ago the book/film Night Crossing about those two families who crossed from East to West in a homemade hot air balloon.

I saw the movie many years ago.

Somewhere on YouTube there is video of two brothers rescuing their third brother from East Berlin with two ultralight aircraft.

[ken_sylvania]

It wasn't a matter of faith as far as I remember, but I remember from a lot of years ago the book/film Night Crossing about those two families who crossed from East to West in a homemade hot air balloon.

I saw the movie many years ago.

Somewhere on YouTube there is video of two brothers rescuing their third brother from East Berlin with two ultralight aircraft.

I have so many questions? Did they rescue his torso in the one and his appendages in the other? Or some kind of a sling between the two that he was carried in?

[Szdfan]

It wasn't a matter of faith as far as I remember, but I remember from a lot of years ago the book/film Night Crossing about those two families who crossed from East to West in a homemade hot air balloon.

I saw the movie many years ago.

Somewhere on YouTube there is video of two brothers rescuing their third brother from East Berlin with two ultralight aircraft.

I have so many questions? Did they rescue his torso in the one and his appendages in the other? Or some kind of a sling between the two that he was carried in?

So this is from German TV in 1989 where the brothers were interviewed. Unfortunately, it’s in German, but it features video of the flight and of the ultralights.



Also, the television set is like the most 80s thing ever.

[Szdfan]

If anyone is interested in the subject, this is a review of the book, God’s Spies: The Stasi’s Cold War Espionage Campaign inside the Church by Elizabeth Braw.

https://thebridgehead.ca/2021/08/27/how ... evolution/

Braw tackles the hitherto untold story of how one of the Warsaw Pact’s most effective intelligence agencies thoroughly infiltrated the East German church, amassed countless pages of material on nearly every single churchman—and still failed to prevent the protests that emanated from the churches and in a stunningly short amount of time facilitated the collapse of the GDR. It is a riveting spy story with compelling lessons for our current historical moment.

Note: It’s not untold. I was reading books about this in the late 90s.

Unlike their counterparts in the KGB and other Warsaw Pact secret police forces, the Stasi generally did not utilize violence in their covert war against the churches. Instead, Stasi officers like Wiegand worked to domesticate pastors, theologians, and church workers utilizing a complex set of incentives: money; trips abroad; getting their children into better schools; promotions; even cigarettes or Western goods like lamps (the request of one bishop.) Another tactic involved catching clergy in compromising positions—financially or sexually—and subtly blackmailing them into cooperation. A handful, Braw found, even collaborated due to their loyalty to the GDR, which none had any reason to suspect would collapse so imminently.

Aleksander Radler, a theologian working in Sweden who actually helped Braw’s father with his doctoral defence, was working for the Stasi. Gerd Bambosky, an Easter German pastor, infiltrated Western organizations smuggling Bibles behind the Iron Curtain in minivans retrofitted with secret compartments. Bambowsky worked with Open Doors, Licht im Osten (Light in the East), and the British Bible Society, bringing in books and literature and turning it all over to his handlers—including, once, a letter from an elderly woman in Moscow thanking him for her Bible. The KGB destroyed a secret printing press in Latvia that Bambowsky located. Western charities, Braw notes, were “unknowingly filling Stasi and KGB storage rooms with religious literature.” The books were pulped; many intended recipients were arrested.

Often, Stasi recruits were just starting off in theological school, and would not become useful until years later, when their careers had advanced (often with a little help from their handlers.) This was the Stasi’s version of the Long March through the Institutions.

It’s an interesting review with some interesting observations about the decline of the East German Church following reunification.

[barnhart]

If I recall correctly former German Chancellor Merkel grew up in E. Germany because her father was a pastor who chose to move there from w. Germany because he wanted to serve where it needed the most.

[Szdfan]

If I recall correctly former German Chancellor Merkel grew up in E. Germany because her father was a pastor who chose to move there from w. Germany because he wanted to serve where it needed the most.

That is true. Her father was a pastor and moved to the GDR when Merkel was an infant because he felt called to serve there. Merkel is the first former East German elected Chancellor.

We were good friends with a Lutheran pastor and his family who did the same thing. They moved to East Berlin from the West in the 50s because they felt called to. His daughter also became a Lutheran pastor and married a Vietnamese student who had served with the NVA during the Vietnam War. My dad is godfather to their oldest son.