Last week 34 non-Scientologists from the U.S. movie industry lambasted the Germans in a full-page advertisement in the International Herald Tribune. Addressed to Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the open letter claimed that Scientologists suffer “organized persecution” in Germany. “In the 1930s, it was the Jews,” said the ad. “Today it is the Scientologists.” Many Germans were outraged by the comparison to the Holocaust. “They don’t know anything about Germany, and they don’t want to, either,” said Kohl. “Otherwise, they wouldn’t have talked such rubbish.”
The ad was signed by Goldie Hawn, Dustin Hoffman and Oliver Stone, along with a phalanx of ranking Hollywood suits. Were they moved by principle or profit? “You mean,” said one signer, “do we all want to be in business with Tom Cruise and John Travolta, and would we sign a letter just to make them happy, make them like us? What do you think?” Other signers said Germany was morally wrong. “Being Jewish, as I am, it’s always been “never again’,” said Bertram Fields, an entertainment lawyer who represents Cruise and wrote the letter of protest. “That can’t be “never again’ just for Jews. It’s for anybody.” “The issues here are the same as in “The People vs. Larry Flynt’,” said Stone, who produced that controversial movie. “You may not agree with them,” he said of the Scientologists. “I certainly don’t. But they have a right to do what they do.”
Scientology was founded in Los Angeles in the 1950s by L. Ron Hubbard, a science-fiction writer who died in 1986. A religion without a god, it aims at spiritual growth through a rigorous series of self-improvement courses that can cost new members thousands of dollars. It claims to heal psychic scars through the use of a simple lie detector called an “E-meter,” and it tries to promote a more effective form of thought called “going clear.” The church has often been accused of brainwashing and fleecing its members and of intimidating its critics with threats and lawsuits.
Scientology, which denies such charges, claims 8 million members worldwide, 30,000 of them in Germany. Kohl’s government accuses the church of driving its recruits into bankruptcy and splitting their families. The federal and regional governments charged last month that Scientology seeks “domination” of German society. Anywhere else that charge might sound ridiculous, but Germans remember how a small party led by Adolf Hitler brainwashed the nation. Last November the state of Bavaria barred church members from serving as public employees (a ban that is unlikely to stand up in court). And last summer the youth organization of Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union called for a boycott of Cruise’s film “Mission: Impossible.” The movie was a hit in Germany anyway.
The Rev. Heber Jentzsch, president of the Church of Scientology International, accused Kohl of ignoring the open letter. “Such arrogance is typical of the contempt and indifference shown by highhanded German officials to the church’s extensively documented complaints of discrimination over the past five years,” he said. But the law allows German officials to take tough action against groups that can be described as antidemocratic. Whether or not Scientology deserves that label, the officials insist they are only trying to apply one of the key lessons of the Nazi era: that power-hungry extremist groups must not be permitted to undermine society.
