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".
By the time the Soviet army captured Stettin on 27 April 1945, inmates and patients from the children's home and the nearby children's hospital had been evacuated to the Island of Rügen a short distance to the west, where an abandoned barracks building was reassigned to accommodate them. The "Children's Barracks", as it became known, also accommodated the smaller infants. Meanwhile, following a redrawing of frontiers, Stettin had become part of Poland, ostensibly to compensate for the Polish lands now incorporated into the Soviet Union. Evacuation to the island meant that Schnur would grow up, classified as a "parentless child" ("elternloses Kind") in the part of Germany administered as the Soviet occupation zone. In April 1946 he was placed with foster parents at Natzevitz, a small village on the southern part of Rügen.
Martha and Rudolf Mummethei were so-called "new peasants", who had been allocated a parcel of land following the break-up by the military authorities of the great landed estates (and before the more long-lasting East German land reforms). Rudolf Mummethei had become a "milker" and Martha Mummethei, who before the war had worked as a domestic servant for one of the landowning families in the region, now ran the home and helped her husband with his agricultural work. Wolfgang spent his early childhood believing that Martha and Rudolf Mummethei were his parents. When he was five or six they carefully explained to him that they were not his "real parents", and that his real parents were "probably dead". Later Schnur would describe his shock at the revelation and also his anger that his foster parents had only told him the truth after the Children's Office of the local Welfare Department had intervened on several occasions, instructing them to do so. For the next ten years, he grew up believing himself a "full orphan", unaware that his mother was still alive. Despite his conflicted emotions, on learning that the Mummetheis were not his "real parents", Schnur had a mostly good relationship with his foster parents, who treated him "as their own". Files nevertheless refer to his having run away at least once, and having been removed from his foster parents home on several occasions, which Schnur later attributed to his foster mother's nervous illness on account of a bad nose fracture and resulting "substantial social difficulties". In many respects, Schnur's situation was not so different from that of many of his contemporaries. War had created many orphans.
In 1951 he was sent to the junior school at a village in the area called Seedorf. Interviewed sixty years later his former teacher, Horst Bürger, still recalled his deep interest in politics. He was a "good student" and engaged fully in the activities and trips of the Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organisation and also stood out because of his contributions in school plays. He excelled in lessons and his teacher recommended, unusually in rural East Germany at this time, that he should be entered for the Abitur, which would have opened the way to university-level education. On 1 September 1959 he transferred to the senior school at Bergen auf Rügen in order to prepare for the exam.
Mother At Christmas 1960 the sixteen-year-old Wolfgang Schnur discovered that he was not an orphan. His mother was alive and had been found living in the west.
The news came from Dr. Alfred Weckram, his former pediatrician at the little hospital in Bergen. The doctor also told him that as far back as 1946 his mother had posted a small "search advertisement" [in a newspaper]. The doctor showed him the "small ad". The doctor seems to have been operating on behalf of the East German tracing service. Schnur immediately became convinced that in the chaos of the final months of the war he and his mother had become separated against his mother's will. This is what he would write in an extensive autobiographical résumé that he provided to the Ministry for State Security much later, in March 1983. There could be no other explanation for the "search advertisement" from 1946. It was only much later that he learned from Erna Schnur's stepmother something of the difficulties that his mother had experienced during the National Socialist years. Erna Schnur was half Jewish and had herself spent the war years in Stettin, hidden by a succession of families in order to avoid being caught up in the Shoah. It was only with the arrival of the Red Army in April 1945 that she had been able to come out of hiding. (An explanation for her not having retrieved her child from the orphanage before leaving for Lübeck never emerged, however.)
By 1960 Erna Schnur had been living for fourteen years in Bad Homburg, near Frankfurt am Main. She was employed by the Waldkrankenhaus, a psychiatric hospital in the Köppern quarter of Friedrichsdorf, a couple of kilometers outside Homburg. Although she never married, she had told the tracing services in West Germany that the existence of her children should not be disclosed to her employers. In August 1961 (eight days before the sudden and unexpected erection of the Berlin Wall heralded a rapid intensification of east–west travel restrictions) Wolfgang Schnur booked himself time off work and set off excitedly for a joyful reunion with his mother, traveling via Berlin and passing through the Friedrichstraße passport control point without encountering any delays. Since Christmas mother and son had written to each other several times, but Wolfgang had not mentioned his plans for a visit. That would be a surprise. Since Christmas he had left school and embarked on an apprenticeship at the Stralsund shipyard. His school in Bergen had arranged the apprenticeship for him only after becoming convinced of his determination not to complete his academic course.
After crossing into West Berlin he stopped off at a Youth Camp where he was required to undergo a medical examination. A shadow in his lungs was identified. On 13 August 1961 the wall went up. On 23 August 1961 he was nevertheless able to leave the city, taking a flight from West Berlin to Giessen where he was accommodated at another Youth reception Camp, not far from his mother's home at Bad Homburg. When Wolfgang turned up, unannounced, at her front door, Erna Schur's reaction was not the one that her son had anticipated. There was no welcoming hug. She did not even invite him into her home. She was simply overwhelmed by the situation. She did, in fact, almost at once arrange for him to transfer from the Youth reception Camp in Giessen to an Internationaler Bund establishment in Homburg which specialised in preparing young refugees from East Germany for life in the west. Wolfgang was nevertheless desperately hurt that he had crossed the country in search of his long lost mother only to find himself an inmate of yet another institution. His relationship with his mother would never become close. Commentators have seen some of his more remarkable actions and character traits as evidence of a deeply seated search for an "alternative mother".
For the next few years, he stayed in the area. Between August 1961 and October 1962 he was able to support himself as a youth worker. The tasks were not so different from some of the activities in which he had been involved with the Young Pioneers. In October 1963 he was able to collect a western Middle School completion certificate. He was not unduly troubled by the political differences that had by now developed between east and west. There were people in charge who set the rules, and you did what you did within those rules. He was appointed, in May 1962, to the vice-presidency of a Youth Social Work forum in Hesse. In the longer term, he decided to build a career as a journalist, and he applied successfully for a traineeship with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which started in September 1962. The paper was keen to send him to East Berlin to gather material on politics, economics and sport. However, Schur was nervous about the idea, fearing (with good cause) that after his extended stay in the west he might find himself convicted of Escaping from the Republic ("Republikflucht"), a crime which under Paragraph 213 of the East German criminal code would normally lead to a prison sentence.
"Asylum" back home in the German Democratic Republic