17 I Saw the Russian Tanks Coming

Günter Schulze—tall, soft-spoken, and unassuming—has been quietly behind all the important events which contributed to the reestablishment of the Church in East Germany after the Second World War and the reopening of the area to missionaries in 1989. It would be impossible to estimate the miles he has driven (and walked) in the service of the Church. During the time of our interview, he was serving as bishop of the Dresden Ward.

I was born on March 15, 1937, in Dresden and was placed in an orphanage. I was an illegitimate child. Apparently that was not a problem under Hitler, but it was still a scandal, and my mother had no financial support, so she had to go to work during the day, or we would have both starved. Apparently I did a lot of crying when she was away during the day, so I am told, and I was reported to the welfare office. They took me away from my mother and put me in an orphanage in Frankfurt-Oder.

My adoptive mother had been looking for a baby—this was before the war—and I was her third or fourth offer. I was so weak that when I was eleven months old I couldn’t even hold a bottle or sit up. I couldn’t eat by myself, so she told me. My new mother would have to have a lot of patience with me, but she took me anyway.

When I was one year old, I was given to my adoptive parents, and it was through them that I became acquainted with the Church. I was raised in the Church, and I was baptized in a river on March 18, 1945, when I was eight years old. The river was frozen, and it was very cold. We had to break a hole in the ice with an axe. I was baptized by Elder Karl Wöhe, who was the branch president in Dresden at the time. We lived at the time in Bischofswerda, approximately fifteen miles east of Dresden. Since there were no priesthood holders in Bischofswerda at the time who could baptize me, he walked from Dresden to Bischofswerda. This was just at the end of the war, the bridges had all been blown up, and no trains were running. He baptized Moroni Haas and me, and then he walked back to Dresden. This made a great impression on me as a young boy, that a man of his age would walk from Dresden to Bischofswerda and then back again just to accommodate us two boys. I learned a great lesson from this that has served me in my personal life.

I can remember as a child, when the war was over, riding from Dresden to Bischofswerda on a train, and the train was so full that we had to sit on the roof of the cars. Whenever we came to a viaduct or a tunnel word was passed back, and we had to lie down on the roof. Of course, the train was not traveling very fast, but still, you had to be careful.

The trains were always overfilled. One day a Russian soldier was sitting on the car with us, and he told me and my mother that Hitler was very bad but that Stalin was even worse. He was probably right as we are able to judge such things today. Saying something like that in those days was very strictly forbidden, and he was taking a big risk, but he was undoubtedly right.

Toward the end of the war, in 1945, we had to flee. We could hear the artillery in Bautzen, and we quickly loaded up our handcarts. I had a small handcart made from a box, and my mother had a larger one. We packed a little food and especially some warm clothes in two feather comforters, then set off with our handcarts for Putzkau. There were long lines of refugees, and we could still hear the cannons. Then we were taken as far as Königstein in army trucks. From there we and our handcarts were taken down the Elbe on a ship. We met our relatives at the ship landing in Dresden and went through the streets with our handcarts, about fifteen or sixteen of them, with a horse leading the way. We walked as far as Hainsberg, and then the horse had to pull all the handcarts up the mountain. There on the mountain I saw something that I will never forget.

It was during those final days of confusion. We lived high up on the hill, and one day I saw the Russian tanks coming up the Freital Valley toward Hainsberg. On the other side of the valley, I saw the German soldiers climbing up the mountain with their rucksacks full of ammunition on their backs. That was a spectacle I will never forget.

Later we returned to our home in Bischofswerda, riding on the roof of the train as I mentioned. The bridges in Dresden and in Klotsche were held together with wooden braces. When we got to Bischofswerda, we saw our house, burned to the ground. The Polish army coming through Bischofswerda thought they had found a uniform of Hitler’s SS officers in our house. It was actually a uniform of one of the people who worked as an undertaker and must have been similar to the uniform of the SS. Anyway, in their confusion, they thought that the SS lived in the house and burned it down and the houses next to it also. So, everything we had in the house was gone.

As fortune would have it, one family never came back to Bischofswerda but went on to America. That was my mother’s half-sister, Sister Haas. She was the mother of the boy who was baptized the same day I was. So, we had a roof over our heads once again. We had a few dishes and a pad to sleep on.

In 1946 the first welfare goods came from America. My mother was the Relief Society president, and since there were no priesthood holders around, the entire shipment was stored in our tiny apartment. When we wanted to go into our bedroom, we had to crawl over sacks of grain. That part was not so pleasant for me, but we were happy to have something to eat and happy we could help out many other people with these things. Cooked wheat, peaches, and good milk were delicacies in those days.

I remember a visit from Brother Fritz Lehnig and Brother Byrth, the first district authorities from Cottbus. I remember the authorities from the district spent a night with us. We took some mattresses from the beds and put them on the ground so that we would have more room. Everyone slept on them, men and women, in a long row.

One thing essential for my progress, for my education in the Church, was the advice given me by Sister Martha Scharschuh, who was the Primary leader at the time. Back in 1947 or ’48, she told me I should learn to play the piano. We needed an organist in the Primary. At the time, my mother didn’t have any money to give me for piano lessons, so I wrote the letters of the notes on the keys of the piano and learned to play “Scatter Sunshine” and “We Love You, Dear Father, in Heaven Above.”

When my father came home—he was released early from a POW camp because he had edema and malaria—we were able to get him into a hospital. We had somehow gotten our hands on a large container of coffee and were able to bribe a doctor with it so we could get father into a hospital for treatment.

I had been learning to play the piano, so this is what my father did for me. After his recovery, he went into the forest, and with the permission of the forest ranger, he rooted out tree stumps. My mother and I then helped him get these large stumps out of the forest. We brought them home, sawed them up, split them, and then we sold sacks of firewood. I don’t remember what we got for a sack of firewood, but with the money my father bought me a used piano. Anyway, in this way, I learned to play the piano and became the branch organist and also accompanied the choir in the branch. That gave me a great deal of pleasure.

In 1949 my parents officially adopted me. I could no longer remember my real mother. I had only known her briefly, and I couldn’t remember what she looked like. When I was nineteen years old, I went on a mission. I didn’t know how to teach a discussion. Once I had given a talk; my mother had written it out for me, pages long, and I had to memorize it. If I stumbled over one word, I was in trouble. I was very naive and very uneducated, but I had a wonderful man for my first companion. He instructed me and trained me so that I soon became acquainted with the basic principles of the Church. I learned how to conduct a meeting and how to teach a lesson. Of course, while I was on my mission, I had to continue playing the organ or piano in the meetings because organists were very rare. I also played for the missionary meetings and conferences. It was always expected of me, but I was very happy to do it.

Shortly after I came home from my mission on May 10, 1958, I took a young wife to the marriage altar. This was on May 31. I had become acquainted with her in Bernburg, where I spent nine months as a missionary. While I was there, I said nothing to her or to her mother or her grandmother. Her father had come home sick from the war and had died in 1948. When I left Bernburg, I said, “I want to finish an honorable mission, but I will be back. Take good care of Hannelore for me.” They didn’t take me seriously, but I meant it, and she is still with me today.

So, we began to make our way together, and it was very difficult. When I was released from my mission, I could not find work because I had missed out on two years of training while I was gone. It took six months to find a job. In the meantime, my wife went to work at a flour mill in Bernburg handling sacks of wheat and flour and managed to earn a few Groschen [coins] which kept us alive. After a year, our Olaf came along, the second year our Berndt, and the third year our Elke.

After my release from the mission, I was the branch president in Bischofswerda for three years, until 1961. The next ten years were bitterly hard. It was a serious situation for us. We had very little money and three children, but we always paid our tithing. There was one time we couldn’t afford to travel to Görlitz to conference. It was simply impossible. Afterwards, I was asked why I hadn’t been there. It was very embarrassing for me to have to say why, but there was no way we could have gone. That was not our custom, to miss a conference.

My next calling was in the district MIA presidency, and then I was called to a leadership position in music for the entire region. We organized and built up a youth choir, which brought a lot of joy to many members in the region, and we also brought many investigators into the Church. We had about sixty or seventy members and two directors, Brother Lehrig and Brother Baasch. I was the accompanist.

In 1976, I received a surprise, a real shock. I had never believed I would be called to be a counselor in the mission presidency. Elder Wirthlin was here, and I was busy doing some work in the church building. We had been doing some cleanup on this particular evening. I had on an apron and was very dirty when President Burkhardt called me into the office. That’s when Elder Wirthlin asked me if I would accept the calling. So I spent the next eight years as a counselor in the mission presidency.

I had worked a lot with our patriarch, Walter Krause. After work I would take him in my car along with the necessary building materials to the various branch houses where he, because of his carpentry skills, did a lot of repair work. He repaired carpets and built stages and did this and that. I helped him many, many times. Also during these days, I must have traveled to Poland about forty times. Once I went with President Burkhardt, some other brethren, and Brother Krause.

There are two experiences I should perhaps relate, one in Upper Silesia and one in East Prussia. As I was traveling to East Prussia, the car broke down along the way. The motor just stopped, and I simply couldn’t get it started again. I called home. Brother Krause was very sick—he had blood in his kidneys—but he came anyway with his delivery truck. We met one another there on this country road and determined that the motor was gone. His first question was, “What have you done wrong? How could that have happened? You were driving for the Church, for the Lord, why did that happen?” I had been approaching an area of deep forest where it might be up to forty kilometers between farmhouses. As we drove on, we found there had been a terrible wind storm; trees and telephone poles lay across the road. Where I had been driving, I hardly noticed it, but it caused a real disaster here in the forest. If I had been in the forest, it would have been very bad for me, so we were pleased that the motor had stopped, and nothing had happened to me.

We continued on and visited the branch in Selbongen. It was our habit to visit the members over there once a month to take care of their needs. Over the course of time, we made arrangements for some of them to emigrate to West Germany. Others came to Dresden, and eventually no members were left in Selbongen.

There was another occasion when we were traveling in Upper Silesia to find members whose names and addresses had been given to us by the international mission. We were mainly just supposed to find out if the members were still living. From the birth dates, it appeared that this was possible. We found only two old sisters. One was Sister Herod, who had at one time lived in Breslau and the area around there. She had been the district Relief Society president. We spent a long time visiting with her. My son Olaf, who was only a schoolboy at the time, was with me and Brother Erich Sellner from the Werdau Branch. He worked at the time for the regional office.

So we two adults and Olaf had an interesting experience. Sister Herod pulled out a long stocking from behind a kitchen cabinet and began untying several knots. She made a dish of her hands and filled them with money from the stocking. “This is my tithing. Even though it has been twenty-five years, I knew that the priesthood would visit me some day.” That was in about 1974 or 1975. So from then on, she was cared for by the district president, Brother Rudi Lehmann, who is now our stake patriarch. The members in the border city of Görlitz took care of the members in Upper Silesia. I went back two or three times, but I never experienced anything like that again. I will never forget it.

We used to take a lot of things into Poland. We took furniture; we took toys. Once, for example, we took in a large dollhouse with two floors and several rooms all furnished with doll furniture. We took donations from members. We took shoes. We took in literature so they could study the scriptures.

Once I was with my father and with Brother Lothar Ebisch. We arrived at the border at Görlitz on the Neisse River about one in the morning with a big truck. It was in the middle of the winter, and we were in a blizzard. We had to unload everything at the border and weren’t allowed to load it back in until six o’clock in the morning. We had to take some things back to the train station and to Brother and Sister Lehmann before we could continue on our way. All this because we had household goods and such things, and they wanted to know where they were going, and why did we have this thing and that thing? Five hours in the middle of the night from 1:00 until 6:00 a.m. in freezing ice and snow. But we were glad to do it.

In the meantime, I became acquainted with my real mother. She had spent several days looking for me in Bischofswerda until she found a man who told her I had joined a church and didn’t live in Bischofswerda anymore. He didn’t know where I had moved, but he advised her to go the Mormon Church and ask there. She found Brother Koschnicke, and, of course, he could tell her where I was. She must have learned my name from the welfare office or from the orphanage in Frankfurt-Oder. Anyway, she found me.

She was originally from Görlitz and must have kept up a little contact with her people there. But when she came to our apartment on Bergmann Street in Dresden, she sent her husband up, and she waited below in the car. I invited her to come in. At first we were very formal with “Mr.” and “Mrs.,” which was a rather strange situation. But then we dropped that and got along very nicely.

I have done a lot of work in the Church, often after work, on weekends, and on vacations, until at times it was simply too much for my wife. Then there were all these trips into Poland. I finally had to tell President Burkhardt that it couldn’t go on like that, that I couldn’t keep up with my work. Then he made the suggestion that I go to work for the Church, and since 1979 I have been employed by the Church.

We often had business in the office of the state secretary for ecclesiastical affairs [Staatssekretariat für Kirchenfragen]. One day an officer in the Secretariat spoke to us and asked us if we wouldn’t like to have a temple for our members in the German Democratic Republic. For years the state secretary had been aware of this problem, that we wanted to travel to our temple in Switzerland and were not allowed to. Now they offered us the chance to build a temple here and offered us three plots of ground in Saxony. We in the mission presidency decided on the hill where the temple now stands in Freiberg. It is a lovely location. The other locations were in Freiberg itself, but they would require a lot of tearing down of old buildings, etc.

But why am I telling you this? In 1979, President Monson crossed over Checkpoint Charlie with President Ringger. We were in a private car, President Burkhardt, President Richter, these two brethren, and I. There in the car, President Monson informed us that the First Presidency had given their approval for the building of a temple here. But he also told us that he would like to have our promise to say nothing of this to anyone, not even to our wives. That was really hard.

Then in 1982 or 1983, the preliminary work was begun with the state authorities. Several members of the Church were involved, so naturally, the news spread, and several members knew about it before my wife did. Then my wife asked me if there was any truth to the rumor. I said, “If you have heard it, then yes, it is true. But perhaps you should wait until it is announced officially.” After that no one asked us to keep it confidential anymore, but I can say with a clear conscience that I personally kept it confidential. That was something that cost me a lot of energy.

At the ground breaking of the Freiberg Germany Temple. Thomas S. Monson, Robert D. Hales, and Günter Schulze are second, fourth, and sixth from the left respectively. Courtesy Käthe Wöhe.

But the work was not any easier, and finally in 1984, President Burkhardt was called to be the temple president, and I was released as his counselor. Then I became the group leader of the high priests in the ward. Since I have been in Dresden, that has been my favorite job in the Church—high priest group leader—except for my job as organist. Working with the brethren, taking care of the older brothers, and visiting them when they were sick was a beautiful experience.

At the spring conference in 1989, I was called to be a member of the high council, and the stake president put me over music and singing once again. He told me that as long as he was stake president I would never be released. Half a year went by. In the middle of November 1989 at a seminar in Zwickau, he told me that I was to be the bishop in Dresden. That just about turned me inside out. I hadn’t the slightest desire to get involved in statistics and organizational matters. I wanted to be with the high priests, but somehow I had to find a way to convince myself that I was not too old. So I said yes, and when I received a blessing at my ordination, all the shyness and disinclination for these things essentially disappeared.

There is a lot of work in the Dresden Ward. We have new members almost every week, one to three baptisms, sometimes more. All of these new members have to be fellowshipped. They have to have an interview with the bishop. They have to work with the stake missionaries. They must be introduced to the temple, and before that they often have to receive a testimony, and a lot of detailed work is connected with that. They have to be continually strengthened, and one has to be their friend as well as their leader.

I am very thankful for my family, for my wife, that we can be so happy together. There are so many things one could talk about, the experiences I have had with President Burkhardt, Brother Krause, and Brother Richter, how one or the other of us was sick and how we supported one another, how we slept out on the highway some nights, and how we complemented one another so well. When you can read anothers’ lips or read it in their eyes and see what they need or what they want and know that you can fulfill their needs or their wants, it is a wonderful feeling.

Just the day before yesterday I said in the sacrament meeting that there are people who have come to us from a distant country who have helped us so much, who have strengthened the members in their homes, who have helped us put back into shape things that had become misshapen, who have helped many members make rough things smooth again, who have not shied away from any work they could do for the Dresden Ward, physical or spiritual. For these things, we are grateful with all our heart.