Against the Peace

Tightening the screws on German Protestantism (TIME, March 9), the Communists of East Germany have arrested five ministers in the past month. Last week congregations in West Germany got the first word of the kind of charges the Communists were making against them. The people's court at Chemnitz had convicted popular Pastor Erich Schuman, a member of a small sect in the Evangelical Church, for "breaking the law for the protection of peace." That was all.

The trial was secret; no church observers were permitted to attend. But a few details filtered back to Berlin. Pastor Schuman had been charged with violating two articles of the law against: 1) "instigation to boycott democratic institutions" 2) "glorification of capitalism."

None of Pastor Schuman's friends could think of anything he had done to account for the boycotting charge, but a refugee to West Berlin supplied a clue to the minister's "glorification of capitalism." In a lecture to young Evangelical churchmen early this year, Schuman had told a story of an English millionaire who never belonged to any organized religion but left his money to a church when he died.

The sentence of the people's court: six years at hard labor.

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