Editorial: Religious Persecution in Today's Germany: Old Habits Renewed

Abstract

In September of 1941, a law was passed in Nazi Germany requiring all Jews to wear a large yellow star that, according to Daniel Goldhagen, officially marked the Jews as socially dead beings. Fifty five years later in 1996, as part of a campaign denying certain commer cial rights to Scientologists, the German Ministry of Employment is sued a directive, still in force, to its Labor offices to mark all files on companies owned by Scientologists with an S. While the Special Rapporteur to the United Nations investigating religious discrimination in Germany appropriately suggested that any comparisons of modern abuses to Nazi treatment of the Jews in the 1930s are meaningless and puerile, the comparison is somehow inescapable. Evidence is mounting that the German government is trampling on the liberties of its religious minorities in direct violation of several international human rights agreements into which it freely entered. Interestingly, the German government has conducted some investi gations of its own. A German Parliamentary Enquete (Inquiry) Com mission recently concluded a two-year investigation into the nation's sects and psycho-cults and reported that these groups pose no tangi ble threat to the state. It is unfortunate that the myopic scope of the Commission's inquiry limited the results of this lengthy investigation to such a bland conclusion. The Commission's efforts would have been