Communists covered up abuse by priests, deporting them to the West

Abuse in  East Germany: Covered up by church and state

Sexualised violence against children and young people in Mecklenburg's Catholic Church during the German Democratic Republic period was covered up by church and state, a study has found.

There had been unofficial agreements between both sides to keep incidents under cover or to deport repeat offenders to the West. In addition, accused clerics were forced by the Stasi to cooperate under pressure. This is the finding of a study presented on Friday on cases of abuse in the Catholic Church in Mecklenburg between 1946 and 1989. However, the church cannot be absolved of the main responsibility for the acts, the authors say.

First study on church misdemeanours in the GDR

The study, led by psychiatrist Manuela Dudeck from Ulm, is the first to address the issue of sexualised violence in the Catholic Church in the GDR. Hamburg Archbishop Stefan Heße, who commissioned the work, said: "This study is not an end point." It can only be a building block in coming to terms with abuse in the Archdiocese of Hamburg, he said. Heße plans to comment in detail on the study on Monday.

In the course of research for a study published in 2018 by the German Bishops' Conference (DBK), it had become known that a particularly large number of acts of abuse were said to have occurred in the Mecklenburg part of the Hamburg archdiocese. Dudeck and her team identified about 40 victims and 19 accused persons during the investigation period, but assume that the number of unreported cases is high. One accused is said to be responsible for 10 cases alone. The authors interviewed 13 of those affected, 11 church representatives and 3 experts from outside the church. In addition, they examined about 1,500 files from church and state archives, including 12 Stasi files. The 170-page study does not name names for reasons of data protection.

High number of unreported cases, victims on average ten years old

According to the study, the victims were on average ten years old when the abuse began. Abuse and violence lasted an average of five years. According to Dudeck, such incidents were often known both in the congregations and in the church leadership. However, by making sexuality and the spread of physical violence taboo, those responsible as well as confidants concealed and suppressed things. According to the researchers, sexualised violence by clerics in the first decades after 1945 was often accompanied by physical and psychological violence. Thus, beatings and rapes by clergy were often dressed up in religious or pedagogical terms.

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