Germany to Put Scientology Under Surveillance Germany to Put Scientology Under Surveillance
June 7, 1997
By ALAN COWELL
BONN, Germany -- The German authorities decided Friday to place the Scientology movement under nationwide surveillance for one year, their sharpest action yet in a long battle against a group they say is bent on undermining their democratic society.
The decision, which critics called authoritarian and impractical, means that Scientologists' mail may be intercepted, their phones tapped and their offices infiltrated by undercover agents posing as adherents. The organization said it would contest the decision in court.
By making public a surveillance operation that by its nature is generally covert, the German authorities seem determined to maintain pressure on Scientologists and limit their activities.
Earlier this year the U.S. State Department prompted outrage in Germany by listing previous German actions against Scientologists in its annual worldwide report on human-rights abuses.
Scientology, which is not recognized as a religion in Germany, was founded by the American science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard in the 1950s. It promises its adherents an elevated state of consciousness through a process called "auditing."
But the German authorities maintain that it exploits its followers for financial gain, subjects them to ferocious internal discipline and exerts heavy psychological pressure on people who want to leave the organization.
German officials say the country's Nazi past makes them especially concerned about the perils of groups that start small and then mushroom, as the Nazi Party did in the 1920s.
In the past the Bonn government's surveillance operations have been largely focused on extremist political groups, like the Red Army Faction on the far left, and neo-Nazi groups on the far right.
The Scientology movement, in a series of newspaper advertisements in the United States and Europe, has said actions by some German groups -- like banning the jazz pianist Chick Corea from performing, because he is a Scientologist, and boycotting a Tom Cruise movie on the same grounds -- amount to a witch hunt.
Some German commentators said the authorities' move Friday would backfire, feeding the campaign by Scientologists in the United States who have likened Germany's attitude to their followers to Hitler's persecution of Jews.
After a meeting of the interior ministers of Germany's 16 states, Manfred Kanther, the national interior minister, said there were indications that the Scientology movement sought "to move against state and society in an absolutist manner."
A statement by the state interior ministers said there were "real indications of efforts against the basic liberal-democratic order" and thus grounds for surveillance.
The move fell short of the outright ban sought by some states -- particularly predominantly Roman Catholic Bavaria and also Baden-Wuerttemberg and Thuringia, where the local authorities have already placed the movement under observation by agencies designed primarily to combat political extremism.
Major German political parties, including Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Christian Democrats, bar Scientologists from membership.
Kanther said the year's surveillance would establish whether the organization -- which does not receive the same tax breaks in Germany as in the United States -- was simply an "unpleasant group," a criminal organization or an association with anti-constitutional aims.
Guenther Beckstein, the Bavarian interior minister, said there was growing evidence that the Scientology movement in Germany was seeking to infiltrate supporters into the police and other official institutions and exercised pressure on its adherents.
The Scientology movement says it has 30,000 members in Germany, but Kanther put the figure at 70,000.
Scientologists held protests against the decision in Stuttgart and Bonn on Friday and condemned it as constituting "a new form of the thought police" in the Orwell novel "Nineteen Eighty-four."
The opposition Green Party called the decision authoritarian and said other European countries displayed "an explanatory, civilized way" of dealing with the movement. Some German commentators said the move would permit Scientologists to depict themselves as persecuted martyrs.
Officials at the federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Cologne, the main body monitoring political extremism, said the decision would be difficult and costly to enforce.
The officials, who insisted on anonymity, said that their office had no agents trained to infiltrate Scientology and that there was a danger that untrained agents might even be absorbed into the movement and "turned" as double agents.
U.S. Studying Move
WASHINGTON -- The State Department spokesman, Nicholas Burns, said Friday that the Clinton administration was unclear about the details of the German decision on the Scientology movement.
"It's our understanding -- and we have a very incomplete understanding, actually, of this decision -- that the ministers directed state and federal law-enforcement agencies to develop a plan to implement these recommendations," Burns said.
"We will examine the details of this decision carefully," he said. "But since I don't believe our embassy in Bonn or our German experts here at the State Department have had sufficient time really to look at this in detail, I don't think it's appropriate for me to give you a detailed comment. Among friends, you don't shoot first and ask questions later."
But Burns added that the United States supports freedom of religion and has criticized Germany on the Scientology issue in recent human-rights reports.
Another U.S. official, who insisted on anonymity, said, "It's not good news that the Germans are taking this action."
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