Our Offices Were Vandalized

My name is Anja. I was born in Nuremberg, so I’m a Franconian. I found Scientology in 1990 and I got married four years later and raised three children.

So, I worked in a family business, we held seminars and professional training, and I first experienced major discrimination in 1991, when a big article was published in Stern magazine. After that, we lost many clients who then just wanted to distance themselves because they didn’t want anything to do with Scientologists. Or, I remember we had seminars, we booked seminars in hotels and, for example, we had an event scheduled for 8 p.m. and I think an hour and a half before, the hotel called us and said, “Ah, we’ve found out that you’re Scientologists. We don’t rent hotel rooms to Scientologists.” So, it really was the plan to make our lives difficult and basically to crush us.

I also remember there was a month-long campaign from the Young Union [political youth organization]. We had our company in a small town and, in the surrounding villages, they then—in the evenings, in the gyms or in the schools, they had panel discussions against us, against Scientology and our company. Usually 500 to 800 people attended. We asked if we could join the panel. They said, “No.” It was a full month-long campaign against—to take our customers away or simply to shut the company down.

One more thing that topped it all was on New Year’s Day, we went to our offices, which were in an industrial area, and the entire office building had been broken into and was completely vandalized—really deliberately. There were doors that hadn’t been locked, kicked in. The glass panes were all smashed. There was paper—everything was in chaos, really demolished. But they didn’t take anything. Then the police arrived and recorded everything. They said, “If they didn’t take anything, they must have brought something.” That was the case. A radio was placed there. Of course, there was a bug in the radio. Well, when I tell it like this, it really sounds like a crime novel. But it was really a campaign to make life difficult for us. For example, we had sold a house where we had lived privately. And two years later, the buyer called us and said to my husband, “Did you know that the whole house was bugged?” Because they had renovated the walls and found the bugs. And that means they were just eavesdropping on us. I find it really, really shocking, or even sad, that in Germany, specifically in Germany, with all its history, something like this is possible again. That the constitution can simply be trampled on like that, that people are discriminated against just because they have a different faith.