First His Friends Disappeared. Then His Business Suffered.

My name is Gunther. I grew up in a small wine village in the Weinstraße. And, from the beginning, I was very active in the community, whether it was in the Catholic Church, with many duties, or at the singing club and so on. When, in 1989, my wife and I decided to become Scientologists, this news spread very quickly in the village. And we experienced that people in the village withdrew from us.

In 1991, at the high school where our 13-year-old son was at the time, there was a big event in the local gym against Scientology. The school board had hired a so-called sect expert, who of course spread lies about Scientology. You can imagine that there were a lot of people from our village. And that was actually the breaking point for us, where the community turned away from us. It went even so far that our long-term friends, who we knew from kindergarten, also turned away from us in the form that they forbade communication with them. That of course hurt relatively badly.

The years after that were characterized by insults, defamation. One night, the façade of my home was ruined by the inscription “Scientology pig.” And I don’t know who did it, even today. I made a report to the police back then, but the proceeding was ended after half a year without results.

There were various articles in economic magazines, such as the WirtschaftsWoche or also on the TV program Plusminus from ARD, where my company and I were named and they warned that I was a Scientologist and therefore my work was untrustworthy. As a consequence of this, three of my customers, at that time, canceled running projects, effective immediately. That the acquisition of customers was difficult afterwards, one can only imagine. In this respect, I cannot express the damage in money, but it was immense. That hit me hard.