Eckart Giebeler

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Eckart Giebeler (born October 13, 1925 in Berlin ; † March 2, 2006 ibid) was a German Protestant pastor, from 1953 prison chaplain with the rank of major of the MdI , author and editor. From 1959 to 1989 he was an unofficial employee “Roland” of the Ministry for State Security (MfS). From 1966 to 1990 Giebeler was the only full-time “clergyman in prison” in the GDR .

Live and act

Giebeler first studied at the Church University of Berlin in the American sector and later moved to the Paulinum in the eastern part of the city. Through a relative who worked in prison chaplaincy, he decided at the beginning of his theology studies to work in the future in caring for the sick or prisoners. Giebeler worked as vicar from October 1, 1949 under the part-time prison pastor Werner Marienfeld, later under his successor Lahr in the pastoral care of the Brandenburg-Görden prison . After Lahr was replaced in March 1950 at the instigation of the MdI , the prison chaplaincy was transferred to Vicar Giebeler, who, unlike Lahr, was heavily involved with state power. Giebeler's inauguration and ordination took place on April 7, 1950 in the church hall of the Görden prison. At the same time, Giebeler became a provincial pastor in Plaue . The Ministry of Justice appointed him in 1950 as a clergyman for the Brandenburg youth work center on the Havel .

In the years 1950–1951 he worked in the Plaue local committee of the National Front . In 1951 Giebeler joined the CDU block party . In 1951, against the will of the leadership of the Evangelical Church in Berlin-Brandenburg , Giebeler was employed as a state-commissioned radio preacher at the Berlin radio and the state broadcaster Potsdam. In the run-up to the “referendum against the remilitarization of Germany” scheduled for June 3, 1951, Giebeler issued a public statement on June 1, 1951, which was printed with his picture in several Brandenburg newspapers. In it he expressed u. a .: ... Peace struggle is a Christian duty. The Brandenburg priests vote “YES”. On the day of the vote, he gave the morning sermon on the state broadcaster in Potsdam and clearly positioned himself for the referendum. In the same year he took part in the World Festival of Youth and Students in East Berlin and traveled to the Federal Republic on behalf of the National Council of the National Front of the GDR. At the beginning of the 1950s, Giebeler belonged to the group of pastors close to the SED around the theologian Gerhard Kehnscherper . At a get-together at the Potsdam District Council on December 30, 1952, he was rewarded with a voucher.

On February 6, 1953, Giebeler was accepted into the civil service as a full-time prison chaplain in Brandenburg-Görden. He was employed by the MdI with the rank of major and retired from the service of the Evangelical Church, which refused a church appointment for the two prison chaplains. At the same time as Giebeler, pastor Heinz Bluhm was taken on as a prison chaplain for the Waldheim and Luckau penal institutions . There were three state prison chaplains in the GDR: Giebeler, Bluhm and Hans-Joachim Mund . After the head of the pastoral care of the People's Police, Oberrat Mund, had fled to the Federal Republic in January 1959, the responsibilities of Giebeler and Bluhm were redistributed.

On May 29, 1959, Giebeler signed a handshake with the head of the department, Captain Kieback, under the code name IM “Roland” as an informant for the MfS. He had already sent reports to the MdI beforehand. Giebeler's information to the MfS concerned both church employees and dignitaries as well as prisoners and prison staff.

After the Bautzen prison chaplain, Bluhm, became seriously ill, Giebeler took over his duties on a provisional basis from November 1966. On June 15, 1967, the MdI decided not to fill the vacant position at Bluhm. This made Giebeler the only “clergyman in prison” in the GDR . In addition to the Brandenburg-Görden penal institution, where Giebeler was based, he was also deployed in the Luckau, Hoheneck, Halle, Waldheim, Torgau, Cottbus and Bautzen I and II penal institutions.

On June 6, 1979, the BZ published under the headline “Our pastor is an SSD agent” the accusation of a former prisoner from Görden who had been ransomed in Germany against Giebeler of being an officer of the MfS. This was argued with the fact that Giebeler was the only prison chaplain in the GDR with key power and, in contrast to the Catholic priest, was also able to hold one-to-one conversations with prisoners, that Giebeler had passed on conversations and matters entrusted to him to the management of the penal institution and the clergyman as well had been accidentally addressed by a member of the Stasi as “Comrade Hauptmann” in the presence of prisoners. The next day the headline appeared in the Bild newspaper . The Berlin-Brandenburg Consistory described the report in a letter as defamation, and there was no public reaction from Giebeler himself or from the church.

Since November 25, 1981, Giebeler enjoyed the status of an Inofficial Employee in Special Use (IME). The last report of the IM “Roland” to the MfS was on November 13, 1989, the subject was the Catholic prison chaplain of Görden. A last conspiratorial meeting took place on November 23rd, at which a meeting with a new commanding officer was scheduled for December 14th, 1989, but this did not take place. In his more than 30 years of spy activity, IM “Roland” delivered reports that filled 15 files with approx. 300 sheets each. Before the dissolution of the MfS, the older reports were shredded, only the most recent folder remained. Between 1983 and 1989, in addition to his regular salary at the MdI, Giebeler also received payments of 20,500 GDR marks from the MfS.

After the fall of the Wall in 1989, the allegations against the prison chaplain Giebeler were taken up again; several pastors approached Bishop Gottfried Forck about Giebeler's strange role. The consistory held the allegations to be baseless, Giebeler himself refused to allow the Gauck authorities to examine him with indignation. Giebeler, who had declared before the fall of the Wall that after reaching retirement age, he wanted to continue his service at least until he was 68, remained active as a prison chaplain from 1990 even after the dissolution of the German People's Police , now with the approval of the Evangelical Church in Berlin -Brandenburg in the service of the Brandenburg Ministry of Justice.

In his 1992 autobiography Behind Closed Doors , Giebeler presented himself as an “officially appointed Protestant pastor of the largest prison in the GDR” and also told how he had rejected an attempt by the Stasi to recruit spies. At the same time he distanced himself in it from his official brother Hans-Joachim Mund , whom he held to be a member of the Evangelical Michael Brotherhood and the SED as well as his activity as a prison chaplain in the penal institutions for political prisoners in the rank of senior councilor of the People's Police.

In the course of researching an ARD documentary about the care of political prisoners in the GDR, Giebeler's work as IM “Roland” was uncovered by the filmmakers Andreas Beckmann and Regina Kusch and on October 8, 1992 - one day before the broadcast Brandenburg Ministry of Justice presented. On October 9, 1992, Giebeler was summoned to the ministry, where he signed the immediate termination of his employment. He then asked a Church committee to investigate the allegations. The Deutsche Allgemeine Sonntagsblatt published an article about Giebeler's work as IM “Roland” after the documentation had been broadcast.

Giebeler himself denied any knowledgeable activity as IM “Roland” for the MfS. In 1994 he explained in a conversation with the authors von Gott in Bautzen. The prison chaplaincy in the GDR that he only wanted to help the imprisoned and denied having brought prisoners into arrest or harmed them. Eckart Giebeler died in 2006.

In 2013, the Evangelical Church Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia confirmed after an internal investigation that Giebeler was working as IM Roland for the MfS and that since joining the state prison chaplaincy, he had no longer been a pastor of the church, but had been an employee of the MdI .

Awards

Works

  • (Ed., With Heinz Bluhm) The bright glow , Evangelische Verlagsanstalt Berlin
  • Behind closed doors: Forty years as a prison chaplain in the GDR , SCM R. Brockhaus, 1992, ISBN 978-3417110043

literature

  • Marianne Subklew-Jeutner: Shadow Play: Pastor Eckart Giebeler between Church, State and Stasi , Metropol Verlag, 2019, ISBN 978-3-86331-498-9
  • Christian Halbrock: Evangelical Pastor of the Berlin-Brandenburg Church 1945–1961: Official Autonomy in the Guardian State? , Lukas Verlag 2004, ISBN 3-936872-18-X , pp. 204-205
  • Peter Schneider: The major in the black gown. The part-time activities of Pastor Giebeler in Der Stacheldraht No. 4/2014 p. 6
  • Andreas Beckmann, Regina Kusch: God in Bautzen. The prison chaplaincy in the GDR , Ch. Links Verlag 1994, ISBN 978-3-86153-066-4

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christian Halbrock: Evangelical Pastors of the Church Berlin-Brandenburg 1945–1961: Official Autonomy in the Guardian State? , Lukas Verlag 2004, pp. 204-205
  2. ^ Event review “Die Farce” with Elisabeth Graul in the memorial library in honor of the victims of Stalinism on July 8, 1993
  3. ↑ Andreas Beckmann, Regina Kusch: God in Bautzen. The prison chaplaincy in the GDR , Ch. Links Verlag 1994, ISBN 978-3-86153-066-4 .
personal data
SURNAME Giebeler, Eckart
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German pastor and clergyman in the GDR penal system
DATE OF BIRTH October 13, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH March 2, 2006
Place of death Berlin