Social Peace Service

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The Social Peace Service (SoFd) was an alternative service called for by Protestant Christians in the GDR , which was intended to create a civilian way of refusing military service in the GDR .

The development of the SoFd initiative

From May 1981, a chain letter spread the demand of an initiative group from the Protestant Weinbergsgemeinde Dresden for a “Social Peace Service”: “The People's Chamber may decide: A 'Social Peace Service (SoFd)' is set up as an equal alternative to military service and alternative military service . The registration, drafting and drafting for this takes place in accordance with the military service. The law on general conscription of January 24, 1962 is to be changed accordingly. ” The group of around 20 young people around the Dresden pastor Christoph Wonneberger emerged from the“ open social welfare youth work ”in the community. The appeal was signed by Christian Burckhardt, Christoph Wonneberger and Superintendent Christoph Wetzel. The ban on collecting signatures was circumvented in the form of a church circular . In the absence of reproduction possibilities, the letter was copied hundreds of times by hand or typewriter.

The request to send petitions to the regional synods of the Protestant churches in the GDR, combined with the request to support the unarmed "Social Peace Service" in talks with the state, was received. Unexpectedly, more than 12,000 petitions flooded the regional synods by the end of 1981. For the Saxon autumn synod alone, there were around 800 submissions with more than 2000 signatures. Erich Honecker rated this initiative in a telex to the SED district leaderships as "hostile to the state, the constitution and peace". With a damning statement by the Cottbus SED chief Werner Walde at the end of 1981 in New Germany , this position was also clearly expressed in public. There the Central Committee of the SED explicitly proclaimed that “our entire republic is already a social peace service”.

That is why the Ministry for State Security opened the operational process (OV) "Provocateur" in 1981 against Christoph Wonneberger and five of his closest employees, including the later Greifswald Bishop Eduard Berger . By 1986, five volumes of spy reports and action plans had been created. The aim of the secret service was to suppress these independent efforts for peace by means of uncertainties in the personal and professional life of the initiators. While the young people were still tinkering with confidence-building measures, the state was already planning to get the unpleasant competition for peace out of the way with rigid administrative means.

For this purpose, unofficial employees (IM) were smuggled into the group. One of these informers offered the group as a contact address. The pastor's son Sören Naumann, alias "Egon", was paid 400 marks per month by the secret service as IMB "Michael Müller". An IMB "Werner Lehmann" took over the contacts to the Protestant student community as the representative of the group , so that this connection was also under the control of the MfS.

At Easter 1982 the SoFd group planned a GDR-wide “Peace Star Tour” for all petitioners to the Dresden Kreuzkirche . 2000 young cyclists were expected. Individual talks between government officials and Protestant bishops to push back the initiative did not bring the desired success. Even Bishop Albrecht Schönherr declared in May 1982 at a meeting of the Heinemann Initiative in Rastatt that "... we do Christians in the GDR well that our peace testimony remains pure. We Christians remember with shame how few of us refused military service in the criminal Second World War and paid with our lives for it. Last but not least, the thought is terrible that in the next war Germans will shoot Germans and thus the judgment of the Second World War would be completed. "

The Saxon bishop Johannes Hempel forbade Wonneberger further planning for this major meeting in Dresden, but at the same time assured him that the "SoFd" issue would continue to be brought forward as a concern for the whole church. For the now 40 young people in the initiative, however, after the State Secretary of the Church Klaus Gysi played tapes from the national working meetings to the bishop: "We can no longer protect you!"

The 3rd supraregional SoFd working meeting in Dresden on the 28th-30th of December was therefore decided as a confidence-building measure towards the state. December 1981, for example, work assignments in state retirement and nursing homes. The wages were to be donated to a Warsaw children's hospital. A long-prepared “Peace Forum” in the Dresden Kreuzkirche took place on February 13, 1982, the Königswalde Peace Seminar on May 16 , and a “Peace Workshop” on June 27 in the Berlin Church of the Redeemer. In Jena , a "peace community" was formed around Roland Jahn , Dorothea Rost and Andreas Friedrich. On February 10, the typesetter Roland Brauckmann, who maintained the link between the initiatives, was arrested and sentenced in June 1982 to 20 months' imprisonment in a closed trial. The Berliner Konsistorialpräsident Manfred Stolpe , whose “differentiated attitude” was otherwise praised by Klaus Gysi, characterized this state approach as “shooting butterflies with howitzers”.

From 1984 onwards, Heiko Lietz prepared and coordinated the GDR-wide annual peace meeting . In his "GDR-wide working and coordination group on the military service problem", which he organized and moderated until 1989, the SoFd impulse was further processed and disseminated. From 1987 the working group on human rights from Leipzig participated in this body.

In 1988 church institutions in Saxony-Anhalt unofficially set up a Diaconal Peace Service as a symbolic alternative military service in a church institution. But it was only during the Peaceful Revolution that the civil service ordinance, which came into force in March 1990, recognized the human right to conscientious objection in the communist part of Germany.

The development of peace prayers in the GDR

Despite the secret service persecution of the SoFd initiators, the exchange of information between the various regional non-governmental initiative groups, such as the Leipzig Saturday group , continued to function via personal contacts . Civil rights activists and later construction soldiers in the group played a key role in the systematic networking. Since further central coordination of the non-governmental peace circles seemed impossible due to severe government and church regulations, Pastor Wonneberger suggested a concept of decentralized peace prayers for the first time on February 8, 1982. The group decided to carry out further SoFd initiatives in the form of prayers for peace. In major cities of the GDR, peace prayers should be offered in centrally located churches at the same time, weekly on Saturday evening (later on Sunday or Monday). You had calculated correctly: in 1989 these peace prayers, as decentralized protests with Monday demonstrations, brought the SED dictatorship to collapse.

literature

  • Wolfgang Büscher, Peter Wensierski & Klaus Wolschner (Eds.): Peace Movement in the GDR. Scandica-Verlag, Hattingen 1982, ISBN 3-88473-019-3 .
  • Klaus Ehring (pseudonym for Hubertus Knabe ) & Martin Dallwitz (pseudonym for Ulrich Mickan): Swords to plowshares. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1982, ISBN 3-499-15019-0 .
  • Manfred Richter & Elsbeth Zylla (eds.): With plowshares against swords. Experiences in the Protestant Church in the GDR 1949-1990. Logs. Edition Temmen, Bremen 1991, ISBN 3-926958-73-1 .
  • Martin Hohmann: Swords to plowshares. The peace work of the Protestant churches in the GDR in 1981/1982 - illustrated using examples from the Evangelical Church in the ecclesiastical province of Saxony. Berlin-Verlag Spitz, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-87061-776-4 .
  • Anke Silomon: "Swords to Plowshares" and the GDR. The peace work of the Protestant churches in the GDR within the framework of the peace decades 1980-1982. Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 1999, ISBN 3-525-55733-7 .
  • Ehrhart Neubert : History of the opposition in the GDR 1949–1989. Ch. Links-Verlag, Berlin 1997; 2nd edition Federal Agency for Civic Education 2000, ISBN 3861531631 .
  • Eberhard Kuhrt, Hannsjörg F. Buck & Gunter Holzweißig: Opposition in the GDR. Inventory of the GDR reality in the 80s. VS Verlag, Wiesbaden 2008, ISBN 3-8100-3618-8 .
  • Thomas Mayer: Who does not give up - Christoph Wonneberger, a biography Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Leipzig 2014, ISBN 978-3-374-03733-9 .
  • Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk & Tom Sello (eds.): For a free country with free people. Opposition and Resistance in Biographies and Photos. Robert Havemann Society in conjunction with the Foundation to Process the SED Dictatorship, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3938857021 .
  • Thomas Rudolph , Oliver Kloss , Rainer Müller , Christoph Wonneberger (ed. On behalf of the IFM-Archivs eV ): Way in the uprising. Chronicle of opposition and resistance in the GDR from August 1987 to December 1989. Vol. 1, Leipzig, Araki, 2014, ISBN 978-3-941848-17-7 , ( preface as reading sample).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ New Germany from 21./22. November 1981, p. 3: “Contribution to the discussion by Gen. Walde at the 3rd meeting of the Central Committee of the SED "
  2. ^ Jena Peace Community
  3. ^ GDR-wide working and coordination group on the military service problem of peace specifically : Proposal for the establishment of a social alternative military service , digitized version of the leaflet.