Religious Apartheid: 1996 – Official Repression of Minority Religious Rights in Germany
In September 1992, the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the “Hamburg Sportsclub Barmbeck-Uhlenhorst” expelled children of Scientologists on the purported grounds that the club never interacted with any type of religious or political organization. Children of majority religions are encouraged to participate in this club.
Children of Scientologists throughout the country are confronted with a one-sided biased “Sect-Education” in their schools. Many of those children are intimidated and do not dare state that they or their parents are Scientologists due to the reprisals that would occur. To protect their children from harassment in government funded schools, some Church parishioners were forced to emigrate and establish their own private school in Denmark on the German border. The Danish Government has been severely criticized for not closing this school down by the Hamburg “Sect Commissioner”, Ursula Caberta, and members of Parliament in Germany are attempting to close the school.47
In December of 1994, a three-year-old child who had been accepted at a kindergarten of a Child and Youth Center in Stuttgart subsequently was denied the right to attend this kindergarten when it was learned that his parents were Scientologists. Instead, the Center’s attorney informed the parents that the child was unacceptable simply because of their association with Scientology.48 This decision and this letter were received shortly after the Baden-Württemberg Ministry for Culture and the Baden-Württemberg Interministerial Working Group issued a press release “warning” schools about Scientology and initiated its so-called “enlightenment” program as part of the curricula of all state schools to indoctrinate teachers and students on the “dangers” of Scientology.49
Violence Against Scientologists
The atmosphere of animus created by the government has led to violent attacks, bomb threats, death threats, damage and destruction of property, and other acts of hate directed at German Scientologists simply because of their religious beliefs. An explosive atmosphere exists and the German government has done everything to fuel it and nothing to defuse it even though it is reaching critical mass. Indeed, a Scientology organization in Hamburg received an ominous threat on Nazi stationery complete with imperial eagle and swastika from a group calling itself the “Propaganda Ministry Berlin and State Protection Department of the SS” demanding that Scientology leave Germany or suffer the consequences and chillingly boasting that Scientologists are being watched around the clock and that their home addresses are in SS archives.50
In November 1995, the President of the Church of Scientology of Germany received an anonymous death threat in the mail. In December 1995, the Hamburg Church received an anonymous letter which contained electronic components and black powder; upon examination by the police, it was determined to be a fake bomb. In December 1995, the Stuttgart Church was evacuated when police received an anonymous threat that a bomb had been placed in the Church. That night, the Church received 38 anonymous bomb threats sent by telefax.
Between February and June 1995, the Church of Scientology Hamburg and the Church of Scientology Munich each received 2 bomb threats.51 In April 1995, the Dianetics Center in Düsseldorf also received a bomb threat in a letter which included a swastika, “Heil Hitler” and the threat that a Neo-Nazi group intended to blow up the Center.52 In 1993 and 1994, 12 bomb threats were directed at Churches and Missions of Scientology throughout Germany.53
There can be no question that Government sponsored or sanctioned “Enlightenment” campaigns and resultant media campaigns depicting Scientologists as insects to be killed by the CDU’s Young Union, or as spiders, vampires, devils, drooling monsters, poisonous skeletons, brainwashed zombies, sect addicts, robots and members of the mafia constitute incitement of violence and inspire hatred of Scientologists as inhuman and evil creatures.