Wolfgang Schnur

Wolfgang Schnur (8 June 1944 – 16 January 2016) was an East German civil rights lawyer.

He was closely involved with the Association of Evangelical Churches ("Bund der Evangelischen Kirchen" / BEK) and worked on many of the cases in which the BEK's leading figures were involved. He also became well networked, on more than one level, with the country's political establishment.

East Germany was a one-party dictatorship. During the 1970s and 1980s, the churches increasingly provided an outlet for alternative political views which, under a more decentralised system, would have been expressed through an effective multi-party parliamentary structure. Schnur was a founding member od the oppositional "Demokratischer Aufbruch" (loosely "Democratic Awakening" / DA) in October 1989. He was one of the "new party" leadership team's most attractive and dynamic members: over the next few months there was talk of Wolfgang Schnur becoming prime minister in a new genuinely democratic German Democratic Republic. In February 1990 he appointed Angela Merkel as a press spokeswoman, the start of a remarkable political career. Wolfgang Schnur's political career had peaked, however. On 8 March 1990 he rejected allegations that he had been a Stasi informer. On 14 March 1990, less than a week before East Germany's first (and only) free parliamentary election, it was reported that Schnur had resigned from the presidency of Democratic Awakening. He was expelled from the party the next day.

 

Life

Provenance and early years

Wolfgang Schnur was born in Stettin which at that time was in Germany. Stettin was a strategic port and as Schnur was born the city center and many of the surrounding residential and commercial districts were bombed by British bombers. Infection was rampant and very soon after his birth Wolfgang fell ill with Laryngeal Diphtheria. Wolfgang Schnur never knew his father: such vague and contradictory "facts" as have emerged about his paternity have been difficult to confirm and are likely to be, at least in part, incorrect. Wolfgang's mother, Erna Hermine Schnur had been born in Danzig on 24 July 1915. Schnur was her birth-name, so she was probably unmarried. At the time of Wolfgang's birth she was working as a domestic servant for a couple called "Piper". When, in the context of the ethnic cleansing of 1944/45, the Pipers moved to Lübeck, Erna Schnur went with them, leaving Wolfgang behind. She had already, in December 1941, given birth to Wolfgang's sister, Brigitte who had been taken from her mother within a few days and transferred to an orphanage. In the context of the chaos of the final part of the Second World War, records that may have been created concerning Wolfgang's paternity and first weeks of life do not survive, but it is known that once he had recovered from his Diphtheria he was moved directly from the hospital wing to the "Bergquell Children's Home" in Stettin, since "his mother did not want him".

By the time the Soviet army captured Stettin on 27 April 1945, inmates and patients from the children's home and the nearby children's hospital had been evacuated to the Island of Rügen a short distance to the west, where an abandoned barracks building was reassigned to accommodate them. The "Children's Barracks", as it became known, also accommodated the smaller infants. Meanwhile, following a redrawing of frontiers, Stettin had become part of Poland, ostensibly to compensate for the Polish lands now incorporated into the Soviet Union. Evacuation to the island meant that Schnur would grow up, classified as a "parentless child" ("elternloses Kind") in the part of Germany administered as the Soviet occupation zone. In April 1946 he was placed with foster parents at Natzevitz, a small village on the southern part of Rügen.

Martha and Rudolf Mummethei were so-called "new peasants", who had been allocated a parcel of land following the break-up by the military authorities of the great landed estates (and before the more long-lasting East German land reforms). Rudolf Mummethei had become a "milker" and Martha Mummethei, who before the war had worked as a domestic servant for one of the landowning families in the region, now ran the home and helped her husband with his agricultural work. Wolfgang spent his early childhood believing that Martha and Rudolf Mummethei were his parents.

When he was five or six they carefully explained to him that they were not his "real parents", and that his real parents were "probably dead". Later Schnur would describe his shock at the revelation and also his anger that his foster parents had only told him the truth after the Children's Office of the local Welfare Department had intervened on several occasions, instructing them to do so. For the next ten years, he grew up believing himself a "full orphan", unaware that his mother was still alive. Despite his conflicted emotions, on learning that the Mummetheis were not his "real parents", Schnur had a mostly good relationship with his foster parents, who treated him "as their own". Files nevertheless refer to his having run away at least once, and having been removed from his foster parents home on several occasions, which Schnur later attributed to his foster mother's nervous illness on account of a bad nose fracture and resulting "substantial social difficulties". In many respects, Schnur's situation was not so different from that of many of his contemporaries. War had created many orphans.

In 1951 he was sent to the junior school at a village in the area called Seedorf. Interviewed sixty years later his former teacher, Horst Bürger, still recalled his deep interest in politics. He was a "good student" and engaged fully in the activities and trips of the Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organisation and also stood out because of his contributions in school plays. He excelled in lessons and his teacher recommended, unusually in rural East Germany at this time, that he should be entered for the Abitur, which would have opened the way to university-level education. On 1 September 1959 he transferred to the senior school at Bergen auf Rügen in order to prepare for the exam.

Mother

At Christmas 1960 the sixteen-year-old Wolfgang Schnur discovered that he was not an orphan. His mother was alive and had been found living in the west.

The news came from Dr.Alfred Weckram, his former pediatrician at the little hospital in Bergen. The doctor also told him that as far back as 1946 his mother had posted a small "search advertisement" [in a newspaper]. The doctor showed him the "small ad". The doctor seems to have been operating on behalf of the East German tracing service. Schnur immediately became convinced that in the chaos of the final months of the war he and his mother had become separated against his mother's will. This is what he would write in an extensive autobiographical résumé that he provided to the Ministry for State Security much later, in March 1983. There could be no other explanation for the "search advertisement" from 1946. It was only much later that he learned from Erna Schnur's stepmother something of the difficulties that his mother had experienced during the National Socialist years. Erna Schnur was half Jewish and had herself spent the war years in Stettin, hidden by a succession of families in order to avoid being caught up in the Shoah. It was only with the arrival of the Red Army in April 1945 that she had been able to come out of hiding. (An explanation for her not having retrieved her child from the orphanage before leaving for Lübeck never emerged, however.).

By 1960 Erna Schnur had been living for fourteen years in Bad Homburg, near Frankfurt am Main. She was employed by the Waldkrankenhaus, a psychiatric hospital in the Köppern quarter of Friedrichsdorf, a couple of kilometers outside Homburg. Although she never married, she had told the tracing services in West Germany that the existence of her children should not be disclosed to her employers. In August 1961 (eight days before the sudden and unexpected erection of the Berlin Wall heralded a rapid intensification of east-west travel restrictions) Wolfgang Schnur booked himself time off work and set off excitedly for a joyful reunion with his mother, traveling via Berlin and passing through the Friedrichstraße passport control point without encountering any delays. Since Christmas mother and son had written to each other several times, but Wolfgang had not mentioned his plans for a visit. That would be a surprise. Since Christmas he had left school and embarked on an apprenticeship at the Stralsund shipyard. His school in Bergen had arranged the apprenticeship for him only after becoming convinced of his determination not to complete his academic course.

After crossing into West Berlin he stopped off at a Youth Camp where he was required to undergo a medical examination. A shadow in his lungs was identified. On 13 August 1961 the wall went up. On 23 August 1961 he was nevertheless able to leave the city, taking a flight from West Berlin to Giessen where he was accommodated at another Youth reception Camp, not far from his mother's home at Bad Homburg. When Wolfgang turned up, unannounced, at her front door, Erna Schur's reaction was not the one that her son had anticipated. There was no welcoming hug. She did not even invite him into her home. She was simply overwhelmed by the situation. She did, in fact, almost at once arrange for him to transfer from the Youth reception Camp in Giessen to an Internationaler Bund establishment in Homburg which specialised in preparing young refugees from East Germany for life in the west. Wolfgang was nevertheless desperately hurt that he had crossed the country in search of his long lost mother only to find himself an inmate of yet another institution. His relationship with his mother would never become close. Commentators have seen some of his more remarkable actions and character traits as evidence of a deeply seated search for an "alternative mother".

For the next few years, he stayed in the area. Between August 1961 and October 1962 he was able to support himself as a youth worker. The tasks were not so different from some of the activities in which he had been involved with the Young Pioneers. In October 1963 he was able to collect a western Middle School completion certificate. He was not unduly troubled by the political differences that had by now developed between east and west. There were people in charge who set the rules, and you did what you did within those rules. He was appointed, in May 1962, to the vice-presidency of a Youth Social Work forum in Hesse. In the longer term, he decided to build a career as a journalist, and he applied successfully for a traineeship with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which started in September 1962. The paper was keen to send him to East Berlin to gather material on politics, economics and sport. However, Schur was nervous about the idea, fearing (with good cause) that after his extended stay in the west he might find himself convicted of Escaping from the Republic ("Republikflucht"), a crime which under Paragraph 213 of the East German criminal code would normally lead to a prison sentence.

Stasi

The meeting at which he had signed up had taken place in a "secret apartment" ("konspirative Wohnung") near his home somewhere on Rügen, and this apartment, made available by the elderly lady who lived in it and who was herself an IM, now became his Stasi contact location. His first operation - probably a test mission - announced itself in the form of a letter from a young woman in Hamburg who wanted to visit him on the island. He had originally met Marlies Bähr at a large FDJ east-west social event in East Berlin the previous year. Schnur wrote back just four days later, recommending a holiday apartment which the municipality rented out to holiday makers. When he reported back to his Stasi handler it was agreed that the authorities would arrange the Miss Bähr's holiday themselves, and a room was booked for her at a little guest-house in Binz. Marlies Bähr arrived and a "holiday romance" ensued although, as his handling officer's surviving report approvingly attests, his genuine infatuation did nothing to compromise the excellent quality of Schnur's "espionage" work with respect to the young women. Over several days, as they danced, walked, flirted and just sat and talked, he subjected her to a sustained and intensive interrogation which, it appears, she barely noticed, in order to evaluate her true feelings and motives in respect of political matters and her personal life. Officers who read his detailed reports of the social interaction between himself and Marlies compared him to an "uninterrupted continually running tape recorder". That quality is apparent from the level of detail in a succession of Stasi files covering Schnur's activity over the next 24 years. Marlies was a student at the (US-funded) Free University of Berlin. His Stasi handlers became satisfied that she was not an American spy, and they shared Schnur's conviction that she must have picked up a large amount of knowledge about East German students who had emigrated – after 1961 "escaped" – to the west.

The opportunities were all too obvious. Marlies was just the person to convince "Torsten" about the superior freedoms available in the west, and to help him plan and organise an "escape to the west" on his own account. Marlies Bähr was of limited interest to the Stasi as a potential intelligence source, but as a possible route into the closed circle of FU students around Detlef Girrmann (and others) helping often desperate East German citizens escape to the west, she could be invaluable.

At the end of her holiday, Marlies Bähr was more unsure than ever of what to make of "Torsten". As he reported to his handlers, she had made clear that she had no wish to engage with him in any more discussions about politics. Possibly he had "gone too far". But she was happy to tell him what she knew about escaping from East Germany to the west. She knew it was very dangerous. To do it he must be 150% sure that it was what he wanted. She had heard of East German escaping via Turkish ships in the Mediterranean after managing to get themselves included on government-sponsored Mediterranean youth-holidays on an East German ship. But she very strongly counselled him to do everything he could to find a legal route for any escape to the west before involving himself with the illegal methods. "Torsten" was not successful in getting her to disclose whatever she knew about the "Fluchthelfer" (escape helpers) among her university contemporaries. He reported that she knew "nothing concrete" about that side of things. But Schnur's handlers were more interested in using Marlies to enable "Torsten" himself to become involved with the "traffickers". She introduced him to "Hendrik", a student at the Technical University of Berlin to whom "Torsten" confided that he still feared arrest, following the unpleasantnesses at the "Free German Youth Wilhelm Pieck Academy". Hendrik did not want to know the details, but he was indignant on Torsten's behalf and understood the point at once. He knew a man.... Somehow "Torsten" very soon broke off contact with both Marlies and Hendrik, but the exceptionally comprehensive and detailed nature of the reports of his various meetings that Schnur submitted to his handlers continued to impress. His progress may well still have been held up through suspicions generated on account of his connections with the west, but he was nevertheless given a succession of further assignments to investigate and report back. On his home base at Rügen he was employed as an "omni-directional radar" to identify and investigate possibly negative or hostile elements among the young people on the holiday island.

After politics

In October 1990 the two versions of Germany were formally reunited. In 1991 Wolfgang Schnur set up a law firm in Berlin. In 1993, however, he lost his practicing certificate on account of his "unsuitability" ("Unwürdigkeit") and for "Mandantenverrat" (serious breach of clients' trust). The ban arose out of accusations (which Schnur always denied) that in his reports to his Stasi handlers he had breached his duty of professional confidentiality towards clients, especially dissidents planning their escape from East Germany and those objecting to military service on grounds of conscience. It was confirmed by the High Court the next year.

On 15 March 1996 he was convicted at the Berlin District Court on two counts under §241a of the Penal Code. §241a was added to the West German law during the early years of the Cold War, in 1951 and was deemed to have applied across the reunified country even in respect of events predating reunification. It defines as a criminal offence the action of placing someone else in danger of political persecution. Examples given of political persecution include the suffering of admonition or of damage to life or limb by violent or arbitrary measures such as deprivation of liberty or of economic disadvantage in the workplace. The case against Schnur involved Stephan Krawczyk and his wife Freya Klier, a dissident couple who were high-profile East German authors who had experienced difficulties with the authorities before 1990. The difficulties had culminated in the two of them being unceremoniously expelled to the west in 1988. Wolfgang Schnur had been their lawyer. He had also been, they believed, a friend of longstanding, and they had trusted his advice uncritically. In the 1997 case against Schnur was presumably launched on the basis of investigations involving the Stasi archives. The court determined that Schnur had breached §241a when he reported to his Stasi handlers his suspicion that Stephan Krawczyk had been in contact with western television companies. He was further convicted because the court determined that he had reported to the Stasi his suspicion that Freya Klier, who is an author, had hidden in the loft of the house where she was living a manuscript that was clearly critical of conditions in the German Democratic Republic. On conviction Wolfgang was sentenced to a total of twelve months in jail, but the sentence was suspended on the condition that he should comply with the conditions of a probation order issued as part of the sentencing process. Schnur appealed the judgement, citing an intervening decision in another case to argue that §241a had not applied in the German Democratic Republic at the time of the events giving rise to the charges, but on 27 November 1996 the court rejected his appeal.

The circumstances of the §241a case gave rise to a further conviction in September 1997, this time accompanied by a DM 1,320 fine. Schnur was found guilty of having disrespected a judge whom he had accused of antisemitic acts in the course of heated pleadings.

 Between 1990 and 2000 there were also criminal cases involving allegations of financial misconduct. By the turn of the century Wolfgang Schnur was living in diminished circumstances with his latest wife and their two year old son in a poorly maintained "grey villa" in the Hessenwinkel district on the eastern edge of Berlin. At this stage he was describing himself as an investments and projects consultant, although according to one unsympathetic journalist his only client was a family in Niedergörsdorf who were committed to creating Europe's largest museum of agricultural machinery. The consultancy was not proving lucrative. He had acquired the house in which he lived under complicated circumstances before reunification. More recently he had sold it to a cousin, from whom he was renting it, but he was still by now badly indebted. His new wife had been deeply shocked when he had told her about his former double life.