19 The Border Guards Often Confiscated Them

When we first interviewed Erich Ortlieb and Marianne Zwirner Ortlieb, the street on which they lived was called the Ho-Chi-Minh Strasse, a constant reminder of communist rule. Nevertheless, their apartment has witnessed the progress of a large family raised in love, warmth, and good humor. It has housed weary visitors who came to district conferences in Dresden and has been the setting for wonderful meals given often to every missionary serving in Dresden since the mission was reopened in 1989.

Marianne: I come from Breslau in Silesia. My grandmother had already become acquainted with the Church when she was a young wife. American missionaries came to their home, and they started right in on genealogy, which was just the right thing for my grandma. She was actually Catholic, but she was a black sheep in that church because she wouldn’t believe that little children would be thrown into the eternal flames if they were not baptized. She had a sister who died before baptism, or, maybe it was the sister of her mother, I don’t remember anymore. In any case, she said that she wanted to be together with all of her loved ones and that if they went into the eternal flames then that’s also where she wanted to go. So, when the American missionaries told her about the genealogy program, she said, “That’s the right church for me,” and she was baptized within four weeks.

Her husband took a little longer. That was at the end of the nineteenth century. After that many of the missionaries came to their house. They always felt right at home with my grandmother. My mother was the fourth child. When she was four years old, her father died.

When my mother became acquainted with her husband, he was not a member of the Church, but he let himself be baptized just because he didn’t want to lose her. He was afraid she would drop him, but then after the wedding, he didn’t go near the church. So my mother didn’t go to church for twelve years.

In 1945 we had to evacuate Breslau with just a suitcase because Breslau had become a fortress. The Russians were getting closer and closer, and there was real warfare. I don’t remember exactly, but about five o’clock in the evening, we received orders that women and children were to leave immediately. We were lucky. We didn’t have to walk. Many left on foot, and many of them died because it was a very cold winter. We were able to ride in an open truck. My father arranged that. He was serving in Breslau with an antiaircraft group that was right in our neighborhood. But during the night, the truck broke down, and we sat there for three hours. Everyone else got frostbite, but we didn’t, not a thing. Not my mother, not my brother, nor I. We didn’t even catch a cold.

Then we were put into a camp. Before we came, there were Polish people there, prisoners. There were so many bedbugs it was terrible. One night my mother had to attend a meeting. We children were alone, and someone lost a key. He went crawling around under the beds looking for it with an open candle, and the beds were covered with straw mattresses. It’s a miracle we weren’t all burned to death.

Then my mother became attached to the Church again, and we became very active. My father stayed in Breslau during the fighting because of his responsibility for the fortifications there. He said to my grandmother, who had stayed behind, “If I ever get out of this, I am going to become active in the Church.” We had always hoped that would happen. In 1949 he came home from captivity. He had been a POW in Russia and had become a Marxist, so he would have nothing to do with the Church. In 1951 my parents divorced.

By this time I had gained a testimony of the gospel, but when I turned seventeen, my father insisted that I join the FDJ [Freie Deutsche Jugend] or he wouldn’t let me go to church anymore. The FDJ is a communist youth organization. I protested, but in the end, I had to go so I could attend church.

Many times I went out walking in the evening, and I thought to myself, “Is there really a Father in Heaven?” I was taught quite differently at school. You can belong to both the FDJ and the Church because the FDJ is just a youth organization, but you cannot belong to the Communist Party and also go to church. I didn’t want to go to the youth organization. When I am forced to do something, then something in me resists. So I began reading extensively in the Book of Mormon. Whenever I read the Book of Mormon, I became very calm, I felt a genuine peace, but when I stopped reading, anxiety rose up in me again. I didn’t realize what was happening. About a month later, I had such an overwhelming feeling of joy while reading I can’t even describe it. I felt so happy, and from that moment on, I knew I was in the right church, I knew the meaning of life, and I never doubted these things again. I knew them.

In 1955 I went on a mission. While serving in Nordhausen, I met my husband. He was not a missionary but was living in the branch there. The mission president, President Gregory, told me that one might meet his or her future spouse while on a mission, but one should not respond to these feelings. If it became too difficult, the missionary should request a transfer. He also said that if I would fast and pray about it everything would turn out the way it should. That was what I did, but I was very nervous; I was always hoping that I would marry him. When I was released, we found one another again, and I was very happy.

I had always wanted to have twelve children. That part didn’t happen; I had six. To me, having children seemed to be my stewardship in life. As a child, I was always playing with dolls; that was my life. Even today I often ask myself where the other six children are. I fulfilled only half of my task, but if I get six daughters- or sons-in-law, I will have twelve children. I am very happy. I have always said I was prepared for any sacrifice. The main thing is that my children remain faithful to the Church and all return someday to our Father in Heaven. That is the real desire of my life. So far I am very happy that my children are on the right path. I am also very, very happy I have a son on a mission. I feel the strength of the Spirit whenever I think of him.

Erich: When you have filled a mission yourself, you know the kind of experiences you have had, and you want them for your children. It doesn’t matter what country the children go to or what happens to them. The spiritual values that one receives on a mission cannot be obtained through any other calling in the Church. I think it is one of the most important callings a young person can have—as a preparation for life, for marriage, and for later callings to serve the Lord. There is no better work than missionary work; therefore, I can understand why my wife is so happy.

Marianne: And now Coni can go! There is no way I could be sad. When Luka went, everything was different, and I was somewhat sad. [In May 1989, their son Luka was one of the first missionaries permitted to leave the GDR to serve a mission outside the country. He served in Argentina. Their daughter Coni was one of the first sister missionaries permitted to leave in March 1990. See chapter 31.] There was the uncertainty about going to a foreign country and all; we just didn’t know what to expect. In spite of all that, I was happy, but now I am really happy because I know how happy Luka is and because Coni had such a desire in her heart to go. She cried because Luka was allowed to be a missionary and she wasn’t.

I was just telling you about the period of transition, the time right after the war. We had so little to eat that I fainted in the street one day. We were foreigners. We landed in the little village of Geithain, which is located between Leipzig and Karl-Marx Stadt, and we were treated like foreigners: “You don’t belong here. Why don’t you go back where you came from?” They were so hateful. If there was a garden where we could get something to eat or where lettuce or other vegetables were being sold, they were always just sold out when it came our turn. We had nothing. We had so little to eat I was literally close to starvation. I couldn’t learn in school anymore. I could no longer do the simplest mathematics. It was all gone out of my head, and I couldn’t understand what I was supposed to learn. It was my uncle who saved us.

He was a member of the FDJ. He was a group leader in a castle and was also a leader in an indoctrination school. He took my brother and me into his home, and he and my aunt really pampered us. They kept us there for four weeks, and everything came back. My memory came back, and I felt totally refreshed. We ate so much there they must have been embarrassed to watch us. They had sliced cucumbers, and they always had to give me a second plate. They were my salvation.

Then in Leipzig we began to get cans of fruit and vegetables from the welfare program of the Church. We were living in Geithain, but we belonged to the Leipzig Branch. (I was baptized in Leipzig when I was twelve years old.) We went to Leipzig, and I received a sack with things like clothing and soap and grain and canned vegetables. The trains going there were packed.

Erich: The trains were so full that people stood on the roofs and on the bumpers between the old railroad cars. There was a lot of hoarding going on, and the people from the cities were going to the villages and selling their carpets and rings and anything because the farmers would give them potatoes or bread for them.

Marianne: One time, my mother and I left Leipzig at night, and the train was not so full. We were dead tired, and we fell asleep. Suddenly, I looked out and said, “We’re already there!” My mother didn’t even look out. She just grabbed up our sack, and we jumped out. Then we saw that we were at the wrong train station. Bad Lausick it was called, I think. It was late in the night, dark, and cold. It was in the winter. So my mother and I wandered through the streets and found some sort of a pension where they gave us a bed. We didn’t dare go to sleep for fear they would steal our sack. It was terrible. We caught the first train the next morning, but it was so full, like my husband just said, that we had to stand on the running board on the outside. My mother tied the sack on somehow, and I had to stand out there in the cold on the running board. There was such a strong wind, and it was so cold. I had to close my eyes. If I looked down, I got dizzy. I kept thinking, “I’m going to fall off.” I kept telling myself, “Just hold on.” I was like a block of ice, and I thought, “If you fall off . . . !” When the train finally arrived in Geithain and nothing had happened to me, I felt like I had been reborn. That’s an experience I will never forget. It was terrible. We got home, and I got a slice of bread with sugar on it and went off to school. I was so happy that we returned home safe and sound.

Erich: A lot of things happened in those days. Brother Krause was a missionary then, and he was working with Brother Lehnig. One time when Brother Lehnig was a missionary, he fell off a train. After he fell, blood came out of his ears and mouth and nose, and everyone said he was dead. Brother Krause carried him into the little house of the signalman and kneeled down and prayed for him and gave him a blessing. A short time later, Brother Lehnig stood up and dusted himself off. There was nothing wrong with him. He could walk, he could run, he could continue his mission. Brother Krause told me that story once when we were talking about how the trains were so packed.

There was also a lot of fear around. The local police and also the Russians took everything away from the people who were hoarding things. There was a lot of profiteering going on. If someone took a good vase or a picture or something and gave it to the farmers and got bread in return, then when they arrived back at the city, they might find controls set up at the train station. They would say, “I gave this or that for the bread,” but the police would take their bread or their potatoes away from them because that was profiteering. That was against the law. There was also a lot of stealing and black marketing going on.

Marianne: My mother once sold a ring and a necklace to get some meat and sausage. We lived up in an attic, and we left a little lard out in a cupboard, and it was stolen. We had practically nothing, and the people who stole it owned a vegetable market, and they weren’t poor at all.

G. Davis: Tell us about your missions.

Marianne: I went on a mission first. My first field of labor was Leipzig. The missionaries were about half sisters and half elders. That was in 1955. We had ration cards to get food. Actually our mission field was Delitzsch, but we couldn’t find a room there, so we lived in Leipzig. When we arrived, the people we were supposed to stay with had just moved out. Since we had to have authorization for an apartment, we could stay there only a few days and then had to move out. Brother Burkhardt told us that if we could not find an apartment in Delitzsch he would have to close that part of the mission.

Once a week, as soon as the housing office was open, we went to Delitzsch. The men in the housing office were very nice to us, and we finally got a room. In the meantime, I had been living in the missionary apartment in Leipzig, but I was not a registered resident with the police, so I had to be there as a guest. The worst part of that was I could not have a ration card for food. You had to register with the police and state where you lived in order to get a ration card for food. But the owner of the apartment was gone, and even though the apartment was unlocked, I was not authorized to live there, so the police wouldn’t let me register. I couldn’t go on like that. The lady who gave out the cards said to me, “Well, you can’t starve, you have to get something to eat,” and so she gave me a food card, even though it was against the regulations. It was a testimony to me that I got a food card anyway, and then we found an apartment.

In Delitzsch we met a lot of very nice people who listened to us, and one of them, a Catholic woman, was baptized and did a lot of genealogy. Back then it wasn’t like it is now, when so many are being baptized. In those days, we were happy to baptize anyone. We also did a lot of work in the branches during our mission—teachers, leaders in the Relief Society, and so on, but we also did a lot of tracting.

Erich: I was twenty when I was called on a mission. That was in the spring of 1958, but I didn’t want to go on a mission. I never wanted to go on a mission because I was never very good in school. I liked to study, but outside, in nature. I watched the animals. I knew where all the squirrels were, where there was a woodpecker, where there was a bullfinch. I knew every tree and knew how to climb it. That was my world, and when my mother went looking for me, she always found me in the forest. I had little interest in school. At church I met many missionaries. They were always my idols. They were perfect. They could do everything. They could write correctly, they could read properly, they could handle numbers. They could even play the piano and lead the branch. I told myself I would never be able to do those things.

And then our district was divided. The Thüringen district was dissolved, and we were put in the Leipzig district. The district president, Walter Schiele, didn’t know me very well. He said to me, “We’re sending you on a mission.” I told him I couldn’t go on a mission. “Why not,” he said. I told him I had problems, and I didn’t know how I would get the finances together. He told me to fast and pray about it, and I would find a way.

So I went home and talked it over with my mother and father. My mother said, “Well, we can help you out a little, maybe twenty-five or thirty marks.” My father was very ill at the time. He had a problem with very bad rheumatism, and he didn’t earn much money. So I fasted and prayed about it. I was earning a little money at the time and had saved a little over a thousand marks. So I fasted and prayed for two days. On the third day, I left our house and went to the park in Nordhausen, where I prayed again. When I finished praying, I knew that if the leaders of the Church said I should go on a mission then I could go on a mission. I went to President Schiele and told him I was ready to go. But I still didn’t know where I was going to get the finances.

Then I had a conversation with Brother Burkhardt, who was a counselor to the mission president, Brother Robbins. [Burtis F. Robbins was president of the North German mission 1957–60.] Brother Burkhardt said, “Brother Ortlieb, just don’t worry about it. The Lord will help you.” So in April 1958, I went on a mission.

I still had six hundred marks left, but I had to buy myself a new suit, new shoes, and a coat. I didn’t want to go on a mission in old clothes, and because my father didn’t earn much, we were a very poor family. As a young man, when I earned a little money, I always quickly bought something for my parents, a new radio, for example. We had never had a radio at home. We didn’t know what it would be like. Since we all wanted to have a radio but no one had the money for one, I bought a radio for us. And once I bought them a couch, not a very big one. But now there was no money, and I wanted to go on a mission.

German Democratic Republic missionaries in 1956. Henry Burkhardt is second from the left. Courtesy Edith Krause.

My first area was Gotha. I had a very good companion who did a good job of teaching me. At that time, there were still food ration cards, but not all food was rationed, only some things like butter, meat, and sugar. All the other food items were not rationed, but the things that were rationed were very cheap; I could get them for very little money. When I got to my first area, Brother Burkhardt sent me one hundred fifty marks. I didn’t know where the money had come from. He told me there was an elders quorum in the United States who would support me. But, he told me, “Each month you must write a letter to this quorum.”

That was very hard for me. I had never liked writing letters except to my fiancée. That was before I went on my mission and only to show my fiancée (the woman who is now my wife) that I really liked her, that I loved her, so that she would feel secure. We became engaged before I left so that I would be sure of her and she would be sure of me and know that I truly loved her. I had never written a single letter to anyone else.

Well, there I was in my first area, and every month I wrote a letter to an elders quorum in Idaho. The quorum president was a former German, Brother Hans M. Bötscher, who is now working with his wife in the Freiberg Temple. Imagine my joy when I went to the temple this year on the Day of Pentecost and when I entered the reception area and saw a brother with a name tag that said “Temple Missionary, Hans M. Bötscher.” I embraced him and said, “I know you.” He said, “But I don’t know you.” I said, “But I have written many letters to you. You never liked my letters; you were never satisfied with my reports.” He said, “Well, I don’t know about that. Why wasn’t I satisfied?” I said, “I just had this feeling that you weren’t satisfied.” Then I told him I was the missionary correspondent whom he never knew. I told him I wanted him to thank all the brothers with all my heart for supporting me for two years on my mission.

I sent all the letters to Idaho, and I hoped they all got through. That was out of my control. But Brother Bötscher never said my letters were not coming. Usually he answered all of my letters, which was a very nice thing. I wrote to him of my testimony, and I told him what I was doing in the Church. I was the MIA leader while I was a missionary, but we also did missionary work, going from door to door. I explained to him our method of making a map of the streets we had covered and marking the names and house numbers so that we could come back in the evenings and catch the people we had missed during the day. We often caught people home in the evenings, but we didn’t have a lot of success even with this method. We found very few investigators. At that time, in our country, there was so much pressure on the people from the Communists and the Marxists that many people just didn’t dare join a church, even if they had an inner desire to do so. They didn’t dare because they were afraid of the reprisals at work or wherever it was found out. We didn’t have much success, so I wrote more about my church work than about my missionary work, and Brother Bötscher was not as satisfied with my reports. He wanted to hear about more missionary work. Now I have explained all of this to him.

I must say I learned a great deal on my mission, and I met a lot of people. But we, as missionaries, had a lot of problems. The criminal police and the secret police visited us in our apartments several times. They inspected the books we had, especially the Books of Mormon we were passing out. And we had several little tracts at the time which were forbidden. But we always had a few that we had picked up at the mission office in Berlin, The Joseph Smith Story, for example, or What Do the Mormons Believe? And, of course, we distributed them to investigators wherever we went.

We had more success in Werdau. My companion there was Brother Frank Apel, who is now our stake president. We gave out the Book of Mormon, and the people there were quite interested. Werdau is a little branch out in the country, and the people were not as restricted as they were in the cities. They were much more interested in the Church and in the Book of Mormon, so we gave away a lot of them. But we didn’t have many books, and when we ran out, we had to travel to West Berlin with a big suitcase to get our books. But as missionaries we had to pay for them. Each book cost, at that time, eight marks. We didn’t have much money. We could get the money back from the mission office, but we had to pay for them in advance.

We were also afraid that when we came to the border with a suitcase full of Books of Mormon that they would take the books away from us. They always asked if we had any West literature or if we had this or that. Where were we going, and where had we been? Did we buy anything in the West Sector? We couldn’t lie. We couldn’t say we hadn’t bought anything. We just told them we were working for the Church and we had picked up some literature, the Book of Mormon. When they saw we had thirty or forty copies in one suitcase, they wanted to know what we were going to do with them. The border guards often confiscated them, but we usually got them back again.

Often we could get misprints from the mission office. Those were Books of Mormon that were not printed properly; maybe there was a typo, or the title page was upside down, and we could say that the books were a gift, that we had not bought them. They were a gift, and they were allowed in the German Democratic Republic, and that’s why we were bringing them in. We then distributed these Books of Mormon to investigators, especially in Werdau.

The authorities in the GDR knew our methods, how we went from door to door and from street to street. In Werdau, for example, we went through every street. We would hand out the Book of Mormon, and the authorities would come behind us and tell the people, “Give us that Book of Mormon” or “Give us that literature that the people from that church have just given you.” We handed them out, and they collected them.

Sometimes we were called in by the authorities and told it was forbidden to be missionaries. I always said that my authority came from the Lord and I wanted to be a missionary. When they forbade us in one city, we got permission from President Burkhardt to go to another city. We were not only in Rathenow, but also in Stendal. That was the next largest city. Then we went to Werdau an der Havel, or we worked in Potsdam. I was always looking for cities where we could do missionary work and the authorities could not say it was forbidden. Because it wasn’t forbidden by law at that time; the laws against missionary work came later. That’s the way I worked, even with the threat that it could cause us some difficulties.

I learned a lot of things while I was a missionary. I served in Gotha, in Weimar, in Gera, in Rathenow. It was a good experience, but it cannot be compared with the kind of work the missionaries do today. We were too busy doing the work of the branches. Often we couldn’t go out teaching investigators because we were the branch presidents. In almost every branch I served in, I was the organist because they simply had no one else who could play.

Marianne: I was a missionary in Weimar, for example, and one of our responsibilities was to reactivate the youth. None of them was coming anymore. I think our efforts went quite well, since many of them started coming again. We held a lot of firesides and programs. In Gänsemarsch we took all of the young people collecting wild flowers.

Erich: I won’t say our work at that time was not necessary, but the missionary work now is much more productive in finding investigators. Of course, politically and socially, things have changed greatly, and the attitudes of the people have changed, also. Clearly, with the political turnaround going on here, a policeman, a soldier, or even an officer in the army can become a member of the Church. That could never have happened before. He would have been discharged from the army immediately. And he would not have found a job, either.

I have a good friend, for example, actually a good brother in another city, who was a civilian employee with the army. As such, he was forbidden to have any contact with anyone from a western country. One day he gave an old school chum a ride in his car. He was found out—these things were passed along—and he was dismissed from his job and for several months could not find any work. No company would hire him. Of course, this was very hard on him. He finally got a job as a garbage collector. That was the only job he could get. He was paid well enough, but it was not something he liked to do, and it was hard on him. I just mention this to demonstrate why people were afraid to join the Church.

G. Davis: Were there any missionaries from outside the country during those years?

Erich: No, there were none. In short, no foreigners were allowed into the country in those days. There was a possibility that the mission president could get permission to enter the German Democratic Republic when the fair was held in Leipzig. Then the mission president or the Brethren who wanted to enter the GDR—at that time we said “behind the iron curtain” or “Russian Zone”—these leaders could get a visa in West Berlin or in the Federal Republic of Germany somewhere, and with this special visa, they could enter the country. Then we always had a special conference in Leipzig.

I still remember that old branch house in Leipzig. It was on Gerber Street right by the train station. That place was always packed. I saw Ezra Taft Benson with his wife and two daughters at one of these special conferences. These special conferences were always held twice a year, during the spring and during the fall fairs.

How it was for the regular citizens of the West, whether they could come in or not, I don’t know. We had the feeling that the majority of the members of the Church in the West were afraid to enter our country, to enter the Russian Zone. They were afraid they would be arrested and they would never get out. But that wasn’t true. Actually, foreign visitors were treated quite well. The authorities never did anything to bother the foreign visitors if they behaved themselves. We never had any trouble in Leipzig. The visits were well known to the authorities because the letters of invitation to the special conferences always went through the authorities so they knew about it.

No one is to be blamed for being afraid to enter the GDR. I am just telling you how it was. There were some mission presidents who were quite fearless. One of these was President Joel Tate. He was here all the time. He was always coming into the GDR. Others came only during the spring and fall fairs. Whenever the leaders of the Church came in to see us, it really gave us spiritual support. It renewed our ties to the Church so much.

At a 1963 conference in Leipzig. Joel Tate (mission president) with his wife, Frances; daughter Nancy; and Walter Krause on the front row. GDR members considered President Tate their guardian angel. Courtesy Edith Krause.

G. Davis: Did having visitors cause any difficulties for you?

Erich: For us there was no danger. But when we wrote a letter, we never knew who would read it. We just didn’t know. But the Church had nothing to hide. Often I would write a letter with statistical information in it—especially during those years when I was in the mission leadership—and friends would come to me and say, “Mr. Ortlieb, what’s going on? Someone from the authorities was here to see me and asked me about you.” And I told them, my neighbors or people in our apartment building, that I was responsible for the statistics in our church. I evaluated them and sent them on. The authorities knew all about it, but they just wanted to know if I was behaving myself. We were being watched.

Marianne: When Luka went on his mission, they asked our neighbors about us.

Erich: The Church has nothing to hide because we don’t break the laws. And this fear—it’s often all quite needless, not only with us, but maybe with the other churches, too. Naturally, there were problems in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and the mission presidents were thrown out by the officials, and contact with the Church was broken, but I have actually never felt anything like that here in the GDR. I must say that except for the time when I was on a mission I have been nicely treated by the authorities.

Marianne: Yes, in Dessau, for example, when I was there on my mission, we went door to door. One day the police came along and said, “Can’t you just go to your investigators or to your members? The people here have complained that you are bothering them.” But it was no bother when we just asked them if they wanted to learn about the Church or not and if not we went on our way.

There were a lot of party members who were playing this game with us, but the police themselves were very nice and just said, “Go on; do what you like.”

Erich: Generally the authorities thought well of us, but there were, of course, others—there are people like this in every country—who couldn’t stand the Mormons, and they tried every way possible, especially if they were employees of public officials, to make problems for us. There were several years, for example, when we had to apply to the police for permission to hold every meeting. We had to write down who was going to speak in the sacrament meeting. So we wrote them down. Then the police wanted to know what they were going to talk about. There were times in some branches when we had to report every sacrament meeting every week, and in others, every month. They wanted to know what we were doing. They wanted to know the times of our meetings, how long they lasted, etc. They wanted to know when we had a dance at the church house.

For several years, young people’s dances were forbidden. The excuse was that dancing did not belong to a cult or to a religion. You can do whatever is appropriate for your cult, but if it is not appropriate, you have to do it with the FDJ [Free German Youth] organization or the official youth organizations.Then our young people started going to Free German Youth organization, where we didn’t want them. So several times we reported our branch or district youth programs as a young people’s worship service. We didn’t say “dance.” It was a worship service, and only a part of it was a dance. We reported it as a worship service to the authorities, or we didn’t report it.

I don’t know how that went every time; I was not always involved. I only want to say we had real problems in the GDR that had to be solved. They couldn’t be solved by the Church authorities overseas but had to be solved by the Church authorities who were right here in the country. It is very important to us that people understand that.

The first person who really implemented this idea when I was in the district presidency was our current area president, Hans B. Ringger. Whenever he came to Dresden for a meeting with the district presidency and we sat down in the mission office, his first question was almost always, “Brethren, what are you doing to let the Church operate in public, and how are you getting along as leaders of the Church with the regulations of the State? What relations do you have with the mayor and other state authorities?”

Actually, we had kept ourselves very closed and withdrawn for the following reasons. Every activity that the Church sponsored in public, regardless of the nature of the activity, would immediately be used politically. It would be turned into political propaganda to the advantage of communism or the existing social system. So, for several years, we had isolated ourselves as a church.

Of course, that was also fine with the authorities, but what we were saying was that we didn’t want to identify ourselves with Communism in any way. And, the state authorities had placed real obstacles in our way. We were not permitted to construct any buildings in the country. For many years, that was forbidden. We were not allowed to build chapels for ourselves. Therefore, it was actually a good thing when Brother Ringger came on the scene. He brought us new instructions directly from the leaders of the Church that we should open a dialogue with the authorities and invite them to our functions, especially to our sacrament meetings.

Brother Ringger challenged us. And from that time on, things began to open up. The separation between Church and State that we promoted did not break down, but we did develop a good relationship. Things were no longer so stagnant. The authorities approached us in a more friendly way. They had a more friendly attitude toward us, and we didn’t have to report every little meeting. As a Church, we were invited to special state functions that had a bearing on church affairs, functions to which we were never invited before. Before, only the big churches were invited—the Catholics and the Evangelical Lutherans. After that, we were invited along with them.

Erich: Once there was a youth conference that was always in August. I was responsible for the youth in the Church, and the young people were supposed to do some community service, either something that the Church took care of on an ongoing basis or a one-time project like cleaning up a playground or cleaning up a park. I had the responsibility of talking with the individual organizations or with the authorities.

I asked around in the city hall, and the man who was responsible for such things suggested I talk to the individual state organizations. The office of state organizations said there was nothing for us to do, and that was the end of the matter. Then I went to the People’s Organization for Parks of the City of Dresden [VEB Grünlagen der Stadt Dresden]. They kept the parks in order and so on. They were very shorthanded, and the man in charge was very enthusiastic. He told me what a wonderful thing this was and asked how many young people would be involved? I told him there would be about eighty. “Oh!” he said. “I don’t know what I would do with so many. We don’t have enough tools; we don’t have enough supervisors to train them and supervise them.”

But I brought the negotiations along to the point that we had an assignment cleaning up a very busy street. Everything was organized. Then he went on vacation and told me to give him a call when he got back. When he got home from his vacation, I called him, and he said simply, “No! We can’t do it. We can’t use your young people.” “Why,” I said. “Why can’t you use us?” But he wouldn’t give me a reason.

I was not allowed to place the young people in another area. I asked the man why, but he wouldn’t give me a reason. I asked him, “Why are you calling it off now; there is so much work to do in the city?” But he didn’t want to be involved. Maybe he was afraid of the authorities or of the public, I don’t know. So we used the young people to clean up the park and the land attached to the Church, which is, as you know, a very large area. And then we sent them to help the members—older sisters and brothers, those who lived far out, and some in the city. They were supposed to help out a bit, to visit with these older people, so that the young people would have something constructive to do that would give them some pleasure.

When we had the youth conferences, most of the young people were really enthusiastic that they could do something. I think it is so important our young people learn that true love grows out of practical service and of activity. So, if this kind of service was denied us by the state, we tried to do something on our own property. The young people really took good care of it. Of course, it was a problem for us to get our hands on enough tools for ten or twenty workers. But the service was always a great thing, and we tried it at several youth conferences.

A lot of people were aware that the State was trying to put the brakes on it, either the state leaders in the factories or in the administration. They didn’t want a youth activity such as the churches were promoting—not only our church. They were always trying to put us down. They didn’t want any church groups of young people showing the Free German Youth communist organization how people can actually work together for the common good.

Once we buried an old sister in Nordhausen. It was in the fall, and the rain was pouring down. When I got out of the train, old Brother Gulla was standing on the platform waiting for me because we had to dig the grave ourselves. There was no one else there, and we also had to lower the casket into the grave. When he saw me, no hat, a ragged, old coat—I didn’t have a hat or any money to buy a hat—he said, “Brother Ortlieb, where is your hat?” I was probably about fourteen or fifteen years old. He was a very strict man, and I learned a lot from him, from the old Brother Gulla. He was truly full of love.

Marianne: When I was released from my mission, I went back to work at the same job where I had been before. The foreman went to the personnel office and arranged everything for me. But when I changed jobs because I could get more money in another position, my mission came out. They took a close look into my files to see what I had been doing for a year and a half. They noticed I had been a missionary, which was something that hadn’t come to their attention before. Then the new job was no longer available, and my old company didn’t want to keep me.

After a while, I went to see a colleague with whom I had worked before I went on my mission, and he was able to help me. We had worked at a small branch office of a big firm in Karl-Marx Stadt. The department head at the branch refused to sign my hiring papers. But then he became very ill, and my colleague took advantage of the situation and went to the temporary department head and told her that the papers were complete but needed a signature. So she signed them, and I could go to work.

A short time later, the party secretary from Karl-Marx Stadt showed up and said he would have to meet me and see what was going on. So we took a little walk, and he listened while I told him what our Church is all about and what I had done on my mission for eighteen months. He was very nice and told me that if I had any problems in the future I should know why. The reason was that the word “mission” was in my file. I wrote it in there myself. I was honest, so I thought, Why shouldn’t I? I didn’t want to lie about it. He told me he couldn’t understand it. That’s the way things were here. There were some missionaries who had real problems getting a job after their mission.

Erich: Brother Fischer, for example, and Brother Schulze. He couldn’t get a job for four months. He used to have a tough job, a dirty job. He is a trained foundryman. Do you know what a foundryman is? He’s the one who pours the hot metal into the forms. That is a very hard and a very dirty job. He was trained to do it. Before he went on his mission, he had a good job, but when he was released from his mission, he couldn’t get a job anymore. And that is not the kind of work where you might peek into documents or something like that. It was all just because he had worked for the Church.

G. Davis: When did you move to Dresden?

Erich: I came to Dresden in 1960, when I was released from my mission. I didn’t have much money, and we had to travel back and forth. My wife lived here in Dresden, and I lived in Nordhausen. That’s 250 kilometers away, and we wanted to be together. At first the plan was that my wife would come to Nordhausen because it was just a small branch of the Church and I didn’t want to leave. I owed so much to that branch. I grew up there. I don’t say this to boast, but as a young man in the Church, I learned to bless and pass the sacrament, and on a single Sunday to give a talk, to teach a lesson, and to play the organ because there was simply no one else. In a small branch like that, you learn an enormous amount, and I didn’t want to leave.

My parents were also members. My mother joined the Church in 1937, and that was a rather strange event. The missionaries had gone to a small restaurant to have their lunch. It was a small private restaurant. My mother came in to eat. The missionaries began tracting out all the tables. Each day they would sit at a different table; it was a good method. One day there were some investigators there, and when the missionaries came in, they said, “Go talk to that stout lady over there; she is really interested in the Church.” My mother says, “I don’t know where they got that idea, but the next day they came over to my table and began to tell me about the Church.” She was interested in the Church right away, and in a very short time, she became a member. At that time, I was about to be born.

My father drank a lot. He comes from South Germany, and that is an area where they drink a lot of wine. They say that Nordhausen is really not Nordhausen, but Boozehausen. Before and during the war, there was a liquor distillery on every street. When the missionaries came to our house, my father refused to let them in. He said they could not enter his house. About three months later, when I was born, my father came into the maternity clinic, and a little baby blanket was lying there. My father asked where it had come from. My mother told him the missionaries had been to see her and had brought it. They had been to see her before my father had. They were very conscientious missionaries. So my father said, “Well let them come back.” From then on, they were permitted to come to our house, and my father later joined the Church.

I owe a great deal to my father. He always made me adhere strictly to the teachings of the Church even though they were very hard for him. He always had trouble with the Word of Wisdom, but I learned a great deal from him. In particular, he taught me that a man has to get up after he has fallen, that he can never give up.

So, in 1960 I came to Dresden. At the time the stake was founded, I had been a counselor to the district president, Brother Lehmann. Then the district was dissolved, and I was made the first bishop of the Dresden Ward. All in all that was a wonderful calling, because from 1983 on, two years before it happened, we knew that a temple was going to be built here. There were many members who had been true and faithful for years and who had always had the desire to go to the temple. I had the marvelous duty of helping them prepare themselves to go to the temple—myself included.

Of the 125 members whom I considered to be active, 84 of them received a temple recommend. I am still so thankful that I was able to serve as bishop at that time and help the members prepare themselves for the temple. That was a wonderful blessing for me.

G. Davis: What did you actually do to prepare the people for the temple?

Erich: Of course, that was a very difficult situation for us because none of us here had ever been in the temple, or very few. The members who had been to the Swiss Temple were mostly so old that they couldn’t help us very much. We received instructions from the leadership of the Church, and we had a manual which we used with all of the members who attended the temple training seminar. All of the members were invited to the seminar, not just the new converts, but also those members who had been in the Church for many years. There was nothing new in the temple seminar for many of these people, but we tried to prepare them with as much concrete information as possible because we had never received the temple ordinances ourselves. This was a unique situation in the history of the Church. We were, for example, ordained as high priests but had never been in the temple. It was the same for those called as bishops. I’m sure that this was a situation peculiar to East Germany. Many of the Church leaders couldn’t understand when we explained this to them.

We knew after Elder Monson had given us his blessing—he rededicated the German Democratic Republic here in Dresden, actually in Radebeul near Dresden—we knew that this blessing would be fulfilled, not only with the building of the temple but in many other ways that had to do with the state authorities. We knew that things would move forward and that ways would be opened. For example, we can now have Church literature, manuals for the classes, and programs for the young people, the single adults, the Sunday School, and the Primary. Our contact with the Church itself has stabilized since that blessing spoken by Elder Monson.

Marianne: In March we celebrated our silver anniversary, and in June we were sealed.

G. Davis: Could all of the members go to the temple at the same time?

Erich: The temple wouldn’t hold so many people. As far as I know, it is the smallest temple in the world. The Freiberg Ward was first and then came Dresden. Not all of the Dresden Ward could go together. There were too many, so we had two days reserved for the Dresden Ward. On the first day for the Dresden Ward, I took all the ward leadership, that is my counselors, the quorum presidencies, and the ward mission leader and their wives and families into one session. On the second day, I took all the members that had not yet been.

G. Davis: How did everything proceed?

Erich: Well, it was this way. We, as a ward, were instructed to be at the temple at seven in the morning, and we didn’t come out until seven in the evening. We were in the temple for twelve hours until the endowment and all the other ordinances had been completed, including the sealing of the children to their parents. We didn’t do any sealing because our son was in the army and we wanted to wait until the fall, when he would be home. But the families who had children did everything in one day. That was just for the families where this was possible, and, of course, everything took a long time. We had to learn everything for the first time, but there were many workers there to help us.

Marianne: The more often one goes, the more beautiful it becomes, actually. At first our heads were spinning. I thought, I’ll never learn all of that. But then, as we went more often, peace seemed to prevail, and it all became more beautiful.

G. Davis: How was it for you when the first missionaries arrived?

Erich: When they first came in, we were overjoyed. We never learned ahead of time when they were coming. We in the ward would have given them a real welcome. But they just came sneaking in. There was a wedding reception in the chapel, and suddenly there they were.

Marianne: We were thinking, “That can’t be the missionaries!”

 The first “foreign” missionaries to enter the GDR. First row, left to right: Ruth Schult and Hans Schult (members living in the GDR), Jeffrey Engelke, Christopher Karpowitz, William Powley. Second row: Wolfgang Paul (German Dresden Mission president), Stephen Anderson, Christian Yost, Craig Miles, Steven Tree, Steven Smith, Manfred Schütze (Leipzig Stake president). Courtesy Christopher Karpowitz.

Erich: That was a special experience for us because of what we had heard from our parents about the missionaries, about what they had meant to them. Toward the end of the war when Nordhausen was bombed, my mother escaped with the pictures of her family and of the missionaries. That’s all she took with her. She talked about the missionaries all the time. She loved the missionaries who were in Nordhausen converting people. That’s why my expectations were so high, and then suddenly, there they were. They just dropped in.

Marianne: In any case, when they came to visit us, Elder Smith came first and taught us how we could invite friends into our home. And there was always such a special spirit when they were here. It was like light coming into the room. There was such a feeling of freedom. If you were feeling depressed or something, that all went away. Those were really joyful times. Even when they came to eat. It was always so natural. You noticed it when they came. They seemed to glow.