Wolfgang Schnur

Wolfgang Schnur (8 June 1944 – 16 January 2016) was an East German civil rights lawyer and a longtime informer of the East German Stasi. He was closely involved with the Association of Evangelical Churches ("Bund der Evangelischen Kirchen" / BEK) and worked on many of the cases in which the BEK's leading figures were involved. He also became well networked, on more than one level, with the country's political establishment.

East Germany was a one-party dictatorship. During the 1970s and 1980s, the churches increasingly provided an outlet for alternative political views which, under a more decentralised system, would have been expressed through an effective multi-party parliamentary structure. Schnur was a founding member of the oppositional "Demokratischer Aufbruch" (DA, loosely "Democratic Awakening") in October 1989. He was one of the "new party" leadership team's most attractive and dynamic members: over the next few months there was talk of Wolfgang Schnur becoming prime minister in a new genuinely democratic German Democratic Republic. In February 1990 he appointed Angela Merkel as a press spokeswoman, the start of a remarkable political career. Wolfgang Schnur's political career had peaked, however. On 8 March 1990 he rejected allegations that he had been a Stasi informer. On 14 March 1990, less than a week before East Germany's first (and only) free parliamentary election, it was reported that Schnur had resigned from the presidency of Democratic Awakening. He was expelled from the party the next day.

Life Provenance and early years Wolfgang Schnur was born in Stettin which at that time was in Germany. Stettin was a strategic port and as Schnur was born the city center and many of the surrounding residential and commercial districts were bombed by British bombers. Infection was rampant and very soon after his birth Wolfgang fell ill with Laryngeal Diphtheria. Wolfgang Schnur never knew his father: such vague and contradictory "facts" as have emerged about his paternity have been difficult to confirm and are likely to be, at least in part, incorrect. Wolfgang's mother, Erna Hermine Schnur had been born in Danzig on 24 July 1915. Schnur was her birth-name, so she was probably unmarried. At the time of Wolfgang's birth she was working as a domestic servant for a couple called "Piper". When, in the context of the ethnic cleansing of 1944/45, the Pipers moved to Lübeck, Erna Schnur went with them, leaving Wolfgang behind. She had already, in December 1941, given birth to Wolfgang's sister, Brigitte who had been taken from her mother within a few days and transferred to an orphanage. In the context of the chaos of the final part of the Second World War, records that may have been created concerning Wolfgang's paternity and first weeks of life do not survive, but it is known that once he had recovered from his Diphtheria he was moved directly from the hospital wing to the "Bergquell Children's Home" in Stettin, since "his mother did not want him". He soon worked out how to join the political mainstream and on 16 March 1965 his application to become a candidate for party membership was accepted and his name was added to the candidates list. He took on (unpaid) party work and became a local leader with the Free German Youth. Schnur was a restless and frequently absent father: childcare responsibilities fell almost exclusively to Bärbel. It was also Bärbel who "led him to faith": Wolfgang Schnur became a Christian. In 1978 he opened his own legal practice in Rostock, along the coast on the mainland, to the west. This suggests that he was at the time well regarded by his handlers, since permission for a lawyer to set up in what amounted to a form of private practice was a "rare privilege" in the German Democratic Republic.

It was partly as a result of his engagement with the Protestant church community at Binzen since the 1960s that Schnur had established and sustained contacts with many former so-called "Bausoldaten", people conscripted for military service who served in non-combatant units for reasons of conscience. Some of these later went on to become high-profile artistic figures whose commitment to environmental protection and human rights brought them into serious conflict with the government. As a civil rights lawyer Wolfgang Schnur's clients included the songwriters Stephan Krawczyk and Freya Klier, along with civil rights activists such as Bärbel Bohley und Vera Wollenberger and many other less well remembered "dissidents" and objectors to the government's military service requirements. He was a member of the synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church for Mecklenburg, and served for at least one term as vice-president of the national Evangelical Church synod. He was a member of the influential Weißensee Working Circle of senior churchmen and was viewed by the state authorities as one of the more progressive (i.e. pro-party church leaders. The working relationship between Schnur and Kasner extended to friendship between their families, and it placed Schnur for many years close to the critical fulcrum of East Germany's church-state relations.

A regular interlocutor for Schnur and Kasner in the context of the church's on-going conversations with the party was the lawyer-churchman Clemens de Maizière (1906–1980), whose son Lothar later became East German prime minister. Clemens de Maizière was both a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg synod and a leading member of the East German CDU (party). On the government side the principal interlocutor for all three men was the State Secretary for Church Affairs. Between 1979 and 1988 that office was held by Klaus Gysi.

The political pioneer On 1 October 1989 Wolfgang Schnur was a co-founder of "Demokratischer Aufbruch" (DA, loosely "Democratic Awakening"), an organisation with many of the characteristics of a western-style political party. As the professional lawyer among the group it had fallen to Schnur to draft the party constitution, taking every possible care to try and ensure that DA could not legitimately be declared illegal. The movement had grown out of various increasingly politicised elements from within the evangelical churches, and there are indications that one reason for Schnur's election was that he was "not a theologian", unlike Rainer Eppelmann who was also keen to take on the position, and indeed did so in succession to Schnur half a year later. As right-left tensions within DA were resolved in favour of the "moderate right", several of the founding leaders such as Friedrich Schorlemmer moved away, while the larger part that remained joined with the (East German) DSU and the (East German) CDU to form the Alliance for Germany, formally launched on 6 February 1990, with Schnur one of the co-founders. Wolfgang Schnur had for some months been spoken of as a "future East German prime minister" and at this point he retained his leading position in the enlarged party.

Nemesis At the beginning of 1990 it was not clear to most people whether the path on which East Germany had embarked would lead to reunification. One person with rather fewer doubts on the matter was the West German chancellor, Helmut Kohl. He had already held in-depth discussions on the issues involved with Mikhail Gorbachev. Kohl held the view that Schnur would make an excellent East German prime minister through the run-up to German reunification. During the campaign for the East German General election scheduled for March 1990, Kohl even took time out to join Schnur on campaign trail. On 5 March 1990 Schnur's ambitions met with a setback, after disclosures surfaced concerning the nature, duration and extent of his activities as a Stasi informer. The information came from the carefully maintained and indexed files held by the Stasi at their Rostock office. The following afternoon, the Rostock regional party executives of DA were informed of the discoveries. They immediately sent an express courier with the news to Magdeburg, where Schnur was campaigning with Kohl. Eppelmann knew by then about the files in Rostock, but still could not believe them. (Koblinski noted that two more of the Stasi files listed had disappeared. CDU Party Secretary Volker Rühe thought immediately of Stasi "dirty tricks". On 12 March, the DA leaders issued a statement to the press focusing on Schur's health: it was still "very bad". Visited the previous day in hospital, his face had worn a "glazed look": he was affected by heavy medication. But he had nevertheless given a declaration concerning his personal honour with great "mental clarity". The matter of the Rostock files and a detailed follow-up report appearing in Der Spiegel could only be cleared up by Schnur himself. Meanwhile, the East German prosecutor's office had already confirmed that a preliminary investigation against persons unknown had already been launched in respect of an alleged defamation.

Schnur resigned the leadership of Democratic Awakening on 13 March 1990. Apparently unaware of this development, his party colleague Horst Schulz was addressing an election rally in Erfurt. Schulz told his 2,000 listeners that the allegations against party leader Schnur were a slander and a lie, meticulously prepared by Stasi experts over a long period for "disclosure" directly ahead of the election. He demonstrated this by holding up what he said was an almost perfect "Stasi file" on the poet Goethe, produced by a Citizens Committee and DA in the space of just 24 hours. On 15 March 1990, it was reported that the DA party executive had excluded Schnur from the party at the same time as they had appointed Eppelmann as the new party leader. The election duly took place three days later. DA did not perform well, but the Alliance for Germany, the three-way grouping of which they were a part, received 48% of the votes cast.

After politics In October 1990 the two German states were formally reunited. In 1991 Wolfgang Schnur set up a law firm in Berlin. In 1993, however, he lost his practicing certificate on account of his "unsuitability" ("Unwürdigkeit") and for "Mandantenverrat" (serious breach of clients' trust). The ban arose out of accusations (which Schnur always denied) that in his reports to his Stasi handlers he had breached his duty of professional confidentiality towards clients, especially dissidents planning their escape from East Germany and those objecting to military service on grounds of conscience. It was confirmed by the High Court the next year.

On 15 March 1996 he was convicted at the Berlin District Court on two counts under §241a of the Penal Code. §241a was added to the West German law in 1951 and was deemed to have applied across the reunified country even in respect of events predating reunification. It defines as a criminal offence the action of placing someone else in danger of political persecution.

The circumstances of the §241a case gave rise to a further conviction in September 1997, this time accompanied by a DM 1,320 fine. Schnur was found guilty of having disrespected a judge whom he had accused of antisemitic acts in the course of heated pleadings. Between 1990 and 2000, there were also criminal cases involving allegations of financial misconduct. By the turn of the century, Schnur was living in diminished circumstances with his latest wife and their two-year-old son in a poorly maintained "grey villa" in the Hessenwinkel district on the eastern edge of Berlin.