One of the individuals most actively inciting the bigotry against Scientology is a Hamburg civil servant called Ursula Caberta y Diaz, a hatemonger repeatedly debunked, even by courts. While a member of the Hamburg Parliament, Caberta demanded that constitutional rights for religious minorities be abrogated and that “special courts” be established to deal exclusively with members of such movements. She called for the confiscation of all property and assets belonging to these individuals and urged the government to deny them banking facilities. These measures, had they been implemented, would have placed the Hamburg Parliament back in the 1930s, when Nazi legislation systematically stripped the Jews of their rights to ownership and eventually citizenship.
In 1991, Caberta pressured the Hamburg Senate to establish a “Working Group on Scientology” in the Ministry of the Interior. The then Minister of the Interior, Werner Hackmann, who had supported Caberta’s bid to create this office, appointed her as its head. Hackmann’s failure to curb racism among Hamburg police led to his resignation in September 1994, after it was discovered that he had deliberately failed to discipline police officers under his command who had viciously beaten up detainees because they were black.
In 1991, as part of her hate campaign and with nothing to substantiate it, Caberta filed a penal complaint against the Church. The state prosecutor who investigated Caberta’s allegations could find no evidence in support of her accusations. When he said as much to his superiors, he was promptly taken off the investigation by Caberta’s sympathizers, and the next higher prosecutor, the senior state prosecutor, was placed in charge.
During his three-year investigation, the senior state prosecutor made use of all his vast investigative powers and resources, liaising with police offices across the whole country and interviewing every key detractor of the Scientology religion in Germany. He found that there was no evidence to justify taking any action.
Further, the prosecutor found one of Caberta’s key witnesses against Scientology in prison, serving a sentence for fraud, forgery and grand theft. This person’s credibility was even further destroyed when the results of a psychiatric examination became known which branded her a chronic liar and suffering from hallucinations. Yet, despite being fully aware of these facts, Caberta had continued to use her as a springboard from which to launch allegations against the Scientology religion.
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German Minister of Labor Norbert Blüm is a rabid anti-religionist and propaganda monger who improperly wages a hate campaign against members of the Scientology religion. He recently participated in a demonstration in egregious violation of the duties of his government office. |
The final result of the prosecutor’s investigation was that not a single detractor he interviewed could produce one iota of evidence to support his allegations. After an extensive three-year probe in which the prosecutor cast his net throughout the whole of Germany in the hope of finding material evidence he could use against the Church, he was forced to admit that absolutely no facts existed to support Caberta’s claims. In June 1994 he unequivocally dismissed all charges against the Church of Scientology.
Yet, the campaign of government-instigated propaganda, fanned by merchants of hate, continues.
This campaign has led to German members of the Church of Scientology being regularly excluded from participation in activities to which even non-Germans are entitled. Their children have been expelled from schools. They have been refused banking facilities, prohibited from performing their art, forbidden to rent public buildings, blacklisted, economically boycotted, coerced to abandon their religion, threatened, ostracized, disenfranchised, slandered and vilified once their association with the Scientology religion has been made known.
Germany’s reputation as a democracy which protects the rights of its citizens has been eroded and memories of Nazi Germany’s shameful persecution of minorities in the years before the Holocaust have been awakened.
