God's Spies by Elisabeth Braw;

Author:Elisabeth Braw; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, Co.

11

FURTHER ADVENTURES IN BIBLE SMUGGLING

On the morning of August 18, 1976, Oskar Brüsewitz—a dissident pastor in Rippicha, some two and a half hours southwest of Berlin—asked his daughter to play a hymn for him. He then put on his cassock, drove to the nearby town of Zeitz, and parked in the town square. On top of his car he placed a poster protesting the government’s harassment of Christian youth. “The Church in the GDR accuses Communism! Repression of children and youth in schools,” it read. Then he poured gasoline over himself and set himself on fire. As passersby tried to save him, he ran toward the assistant bishop’s office, while two police officers removed his protest signs.1 Some three hundred residents witnessed Brüsewitz succumb to the flames. He left behind a farewell letter to his fellow pastors: “I loved you all. Oskar. In several hours I will discover that my redeemer lives.”

The regime was shaken. The idiosyncratic pastor was taken to the hospital, thought unlikely to survive. He had been popular with local children and teenagers but not at all with the authorities. Some church officials and pastor colleagues thought that Brüsewitz was mentally unstable. The Church Bureau even suspected him of being a Western agent provocateur.

During one of my conversations with Joachim Wiegand about his star agent Detlef Hammer’s value, he mentions Brüsewitz. “Somebody like Hammer has a completely different connection to me, to us,” Wiegand explains. “Hammer told us all the dirt that was going on in the church. Thanks to him, we knew exactly what Bishop Krusche in Magdeburg had in his files. We knew everything about him. Krusche had a complete Brüsewitz file in his cabinet. We couldn’t act on that information as it would have exposed Hammer, but we had the information; we knew that Brüsewitz was mentally unstable. When he burned himself to death there was a big brouhaha, but the truth is that he was having problems with the church as well, not just with the government.”

Major Western news outlets immediately reported on the self-immolation, which appeared inspired by Czech student Jan Palach’s death seven years earlier. From Honecker to Wiegand, anxiety spread: Would more dissidents humiliate the government by setting themselves on fire?

On August 22, Brüsewitz died of his injuries. That presented the diocese with an acute dilemma. Brüsewitz had been an infuriatingly difficult man, but he had died fighting oppression and deserved recognition. Besides, the whole world was watching. Numerous West German newspapers and TV stations had already announced that they’d report on the funeral and inquired about the date.

IM Günther kept the Stasi in the loop. “The aim is to shape reporting in such a way that it’s not seen as incitement against the GDR,” he reported, summarizing the diocese’s internal discussions. Church representatives would give no media interviews. West German news media had been understanding, IM Günther reported, but the Christian Democratic Union—one of West Germany’s largest parties—was not. It had already told the diocese it was planning to make human rights violations in East Germany an issue in the upcoming national elections.

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