Unbreakable

Pastor Siegfried Schmutzler, 42, is a blond, ramrod-straight veteran who does not mind a fight. Last week he won a notable struggle with the Communist government of East Germany.

After he was demobilized as a warrant officer in the German Wehrmacht, Siegfried Schmutzler began to study theology, and in 1954 was ordained an Evangelical minister in St. Peter's Church in the East German city of Leipzig. The students of Leipzig University were his special concern; he volunteered to serve as minister to the Evangelical Studentengemeinde. This organization was no more political than a campus branch of the Y.M.C.A., but after the Hungarian massacre last year, the Reds grew jumpy about any non-Communist student organization--especially one with so opiniated a pastor.

Siegfried Schmutzler did not hesitate to speak out loud and clear against the rites of Youth Dedication to the State with which Communism is trying to drive out the Christian custom of confirmation in the church. For preaching against any work on Sunday that conflicted with the hours of worship Pastor Schmutzler was jailed on charges of "sabotaging the five-year plan."

It was eight months before Pastor Schmutzler was brought to trial, while the Reds evidently tried to break his spirit. Last week 150 hand-picked "workers" and "observers" were assembled in the Leipzig district court for a show trial. Western newsmen were barred, and even the Communist papers significantly omitted their usual lush descriptions of the defendant's cringing and pleading for clemency. Siegfried Schmutzler's sentence: five years at hard labor. Top churchmen throughout East and West Germany protested, but they knew that in a real sense the sentence represented a victory for unbreakable Pastor Schmutzler. Said Hamburg University's Theologian Helmut Thielicke: "I know exactly what he will do now; he will pray for his enemies and become a source of life for his fellow prisoners . . . Will we ponder, on our part, how, by imprisoning him, Eastern tyranny has passed judgment on itself?"

This week in East Berlin's famed Marienkirche--under the noses of his Red enemies--doughty Evangelical Bishop Otto Dibelius, 77, offered a prayer for Pastor Schmutzler, and told his congregation that, in fact, the church had already defeated the Communists in their campaign to win German youth away from religion: "Our younger generation has a more conscious faith than when we were young. Young people sink themselves in the Bible to strengthen their faith."

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