Two Anonymous Calls Changed Everything

I’m Claudia, I’m 70 years old. I grew up in the Black Forest. I’ve been married for 46 years, I have two daughters and three wonderful grandchildren.

And in 1995, we lived as a family in Rheinland-Pfalz near Mainz. There, I wanted to create a job that I could do from home, so that I could be there for my children. And so I founded an au pair agency. Then, as it was expected, I submitted my papers to get a permit as an employment agency, which I then received. Then, to introduce myself, I arranged for a very nice newspaper article, which explained what an au pair agency does. That was the nice part. But then, only a few days later, the same reporter called me again, as he received, from my neighborhood, two anonymous calls asking if he knew that I am a Scientologist. Hence, I had a newspaper article with the title “Agent Is a Sect Member.” About four weeks later, I received a letter from an official source, from the Ministry of Labor, that the permit, the previously granted permit, was being revoked because I am a Scientologist.

My husband and I then discussed what we should do and we decided that we would not tolerate this discrimination. And I had to go before three courts, a process that took several years, only to find out in the end that it was lawful for the Employment Office, the Ministry of Labor, to revoke the license because I was a Scientologist.

I got an invitation from the US Congress in Washington, DC, to express my experience with the discrimination of religious minorities in Germany.

I accepted the invitation and traveled to the US and there I spoke alongside other well-known Scientologists and I was asked what it is like to live in Germany with the discrimination connected to the revocation of my employment agency [license]. And on the one hand, it was really a relief for me. On the other hand, it was also an enormously sobering experience to have to go back to the country where I knew it was just going to continue like this. However, it was really a very, very exhausting and stressful time. And that’s what happened to us, and that’s just because we are Scientologists.