Introduction
They had survived six years of war. Their cities had been bombed. On February 13 and 14, 1945, the city of Dresden was burnt to the ground by three heavy bombing raids. Those husbands and sons who had not fallen in the war were slowly straggling back from POW camps. They had very little to eat. A new geographical term now described the area: Soviet Zone of Occupation. The people were forced to clean up the rubble of their destroyed cities, to dismantle their own factories, and to send them off piece by piece to the Soviet Union. The new state, the German Democratic Republic (GDR—communist East Germany—founded in 1949), established a communist government that was officially atheistic and antagonistic to religion. In 1961 the government of the GDR built a solid wall—the Berlin Wall, officially called antifaschistischer Schutzwall, the Anti-Fascist Wall of Protection. A secret police system watched the people’s every move.
Before the war, when Hitler’s armies marched into Poland in 1939, the LDS missionaries had to leave Germany and eventually all continental Europe. But they left a strong and thriving Church in the eastern part of Germany. The major cities of this area—Berlin, Leipzig, Chemnitz, and Dresden—were among the few cities in Europe with multiple branches, many of which were old and well established. In Dresden, for example, the Church had been established longer than most wards in Utah; the Dresden Branch was organized in 1855 with a young convert, Karl G. Maeser, as its first branch president. Many of the people in these congregations were second-, third-, and fourth-generation members of the Church. The eastern area of Germany had been sending a continuous stream of converts to Utah for almost one hundred years, yet approximately ten thousand members were still in Germany when the missionaries were forced to leave. When Hitler’s armies were defeated in 1945, the missionaries returned to Europe, but foreign missionaries were not permitted to enter the Soviet Zone of Occupation.
The Church in the GDR was battered and scattered. Most of the branch meetinghouses had been destroyed by bombings. Priesthood holders who had survived the war were taken to prisoner-of-war camps. Members from the eastern branches fled westward, and many ended up in refugee camps. Members had to be gathered. Meeting places had to be found. Missionary work had to go on. The Church had to be rebuilt.
The men who returned from the war were called to leave their families again, to go out as missionaries, but only within the borders of the GDR. In addition to proselyting, they were to find the scattered members and rebuild the Church. To hold church services, the members were shifted from back rooms in taverns to old theaters, to horse barns, and to bombed out casinos, which they had to rebuild themselves.
After the Berlin wall was built in 1961, members could no longer serve missions, even inside the country. They could have no teaching manuals, no Church magazines, no handbooks, no printed material, no temple. They could not attend the university except under exceptional circumstances, and then they were told that because of their religion they would neither be advanced nor permitted to hold administrative positions in their professions.
In the years following the war, the Church in the GDR was presided over by a sequence of mission presidents who resided for the most part in West Berlin. During this time, Berlin provided a door between East and West. The frequency with which mission presidents living outside the country were permitted to visit the leaders and the various branches of the Church inside the GDR varied over the years according to the attitude of the government officials and the political situation. On some occasions, General Authorities were given permission to enter the country. Mission presidents and General Authorities entered through this door; up until 1961 many members exited.
With the erection of the Wall, entrance into Germany became more difficult for mission presidents and General Authorities, and except for the elderly and retired, authorized exit was nearly impossible. In spite of their isolation, the members inside the Wall carried on the programs of the Church with even greater determination. Because of the severe restrictions against entering the country, however, the organization of the Church in the GDR was somewhat more complicated.
Johannes Henry Burkhardt was recognized by the government of the German Democratic Republic as the authorized spokesperson for the Church inside that country. Henry Burkhardt was born and grew up in Chemnitz (Karl-Marx Stadt), and his family had been members of the Church for three generations. From the Church’s point of view, he was counselor to the mission president from 1950 to 1972. In 1972 the Dresden Mission was organized, and Henry Burkhardt was appointed mission president. For the first time, the presiding officer of the Church in the German Democratic Republic resided inside the country.
At first slowly, and then more and more rapidly, a brighter day began to dawn. On October 22–24, 1969, President Thomas S. Monson visited the GDR, and at a meeting in Görlitz, a city on the Polish border, he promised the members of the GDR that they would have all of the blessings other members of the Church enjoy (as reported in the Ensign, May 1989). On April 27, 1975, President Monson offered a dedicatory prayer for the country on a small hill near Dresden. In August 1977, President Kimball held a special conference in Dresden. In 1982 the Freiberg Stake was organized with Frank Apel as stake president, and in 1984 the Leipzig Stake was organized with Manfred Schütze as stake president. At that time, Henry Burkhardt was appointed president of the Freiberg Temple, which was under construction. In June 1985 came a day the Saints in the GDR never dreamed would come—the dedication of a temple in their own country. In April 1989, the first foreign missionaries in fifty years entered East Germany, and by the end of that year, the newly organized Germany Dresden Mission reported 669 convert baptisms. On the night of November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and the long years of isolation were over.
These are the events that the Saints living inside the Iron Curtain experienced and told us. After telling us these stories, they invariably concluded with a statement such as “Oh, those were beautiful times; oh, those were wonderful days!” What irony! Or is it irony? In our materialistic, media-driven society of today, do we have the wrong idea about what makes us happy, what gives us joy, what makes life satisfying? In addition to its historical importance, the value of the material published here may be that it gives us answers to some questions about our own lives.
These are not our stories. They belong to those who experienced them and told them to us. We have collected, translated, and edited their stories because we believe them to be a valuable part of Church history that should not be lost. The stories do not present a complete or even detailed history. They are told by a relatively small number of the members of the Church who lived in the GDR in 1989–90, when we were serving as missionaries there.
The narrators do not always agree in detail or in their evaluation of the events they experienced. We have left the inconsistencies intact because these are their honest responses to the circumstances. By looking at the circumstances from various points of view, we sometimes come closer to the reality.
These stories tell little about the courage of the faithful members of the Church from East Germany who chose to leave their beloved homeland and flee to the West, always at great personal sacrifice. These Saints brought a fresh spirit of commitment into the wards and branches throughout Europe and the United States as they struggled to find a new home. Because they never forgot those they left behind, these members also provided a very necessary link between the Church members outside the Wall and those behind it. They sent packages of food and clothing, they wrote letters, sometimes they even gave financial support to those missionaries serving in the GDR. Without these members who fled the country, the stories in this book would certainly have had a different ending. We leave their part in history to be recorded by others.
