Religion: The Man in the Middle

A tired, 63-year-old man went back to work last week at a fearsome job, and the 16 million Protestants in Communist East Germany gave thanks for his decision. Heinrich Grüber’s white hair is thinning rapidly and he is racked with angina pectoris, but there is nobody who has proved able to deal so effectively with the Communists on behalf of East Germany’s Protestants.

Courage and pain trained Pastor Grüber for his job. In 1934 the Nazis ousted him from his post as director of a children’s home in Templin. Brandenburg. His church sent him to a parish in East Berlin. Victims of the Nazis soon learned that Pastor Grüber would help them, and many of them fled to his church for refuge. He set up an underground organization to hide them in apartments, penthouses and garden sheds, to smuggle them abroad.

The Knock on the Door. In 1940, just before Christmas, there came the ineviable knock on the door. At the concentration camp in Sachsenhausen, the Nazis knocked out Grüber’s front teeth. At Dachau, they threw his body on a pile of corpses after a heart attack had left him more dead than alive. He got out in 1943.

After the war, Grüber was appointed pastor of the Marienkirche, the oldest undestroyed church in Berlin’s inner city. Several of the men he had known in concentration camps became top officials in the Communist government, and they trusted the earnest, red-faced man whose religious principles had led him to the same ugly places as their political convictions had led them. In 1949 Pastor Grüber was appointed plenipotentiary from the Evangelical Church to the Communist government at Pankow.

He became the man in the middle. The Western press attacked him when, after a visit to Communist-run Sachsenhausen, he announced that the inmates received better food and treatment than under the Nazis. But soon after his visit, 15,000 prisoners in Soviet zone concentration camps were released in an amnesty credited to Grüber; another Grüber-inspired amnesty is said to be imminent.

No Talent for Politics. Recently, Pastor Grüber was criticized—this time by his own church synod—because he appeared at an East German “National Congress,” publicly condemned the presence of U.S. atomic cannon in Germany, and called for a ban on nuclear weapons, a step the Russians favor. Pastor Grüber asked the synod to accept his resignation.

When word spread through Soviet Germany that Heinrich Grüber might go, consternation welled up among the Protestants. and protest rolled in. “There must be a way to relieve Pastor Grüber of his pastoral duties without necessarily jeopardizing his position as plenipotentiary …” Said the weekly Potsdam Kirche: “Too many people are waiting for his services …” Last week the Evangelical Church’s Bishop Otto Dibelius announced that Grüber, though he would no longer be pastor of the Marienkirche, would continue his job of go-between. Said Heinrich Grüber as he went back to work: “I have no talent for politics. I entered into poli tics only to help men.”