[ Scientology and Germany ] [ Main Scientology page ]
"Only a society founded by criminals, organized by criminals and devoted to making people criminals, could come to such a conclusion [about Scientology] ... The foundation of Victoria consists of the riff-raff of London's slums - robbers, murderers, prostitutes, fences, thieves - the scourings of Newgate and Bedlam... the niceties of truth and fairness, of hearing witnesses and weighing evidence, are not for men whose ancestry is lost in the promiscuity of the prison ships of transportation."
["Kangaroo Court", 1967]
However, there was a crucial difference. "Kangaroo Court" is a 48-page limited-edition black-bound volume with a rather fetching gold-embossed, bewigged kangaroo staring out of the front cover. It's nowhere near as high-visibility as a newspaper advertising campaign. So why the different tactics with regard to Germany? Do Scientologists "have something" about Germany?
Well, yes, it seems so. A transcript of a 1961 Hubbard lecture strongly suggests that Hubbard had personal views on the subject of the Germans. It boils down to (a) that Hubbard was a Roman fighting Germans in a past life and that (b) Germany has a national problem with "havingness" which makes the country perhaps uniquely prone to neurosis and psychosis. It is probably no accident that this lecture is being re-circulated in leaflet form at this present moment.
A large part of the lecture is taken up by a description of "a fellow by the name of Schicklgruber, a house painter". (The Schicklgruber story is something of a historical myth, btw; Adolf was born a Hitler). Hubbard offered a number of explanations as to why Hitler was so unpleasant - one suspects that he might have had his tongue in his cheek when he described, in a 1951 lecture, how baby Adolf was enturbulated by being jiggled up and down in the womb while listening to brass bands going "oompah-oompah-oompah" [sic] at Greater German rallies.
Hitler's problem was apparently with havingness,
"the ability to reach. Ability to reach equals the ability to have... The pc has to have the idea that he can reach before he can have. It's the idea that he can reach, not the possession. The idea that he can reach, not the action of reaching, which remedies havingness."
Hitler had the problem of wanting "to have Earth" but he was unable to achieve this through any means but war, because he had "overts" [hidden moral transgressions, roughly] on the subject of war. Had he not turned to military means,
"all [Germany] had to do was sit there and make cameras and putter with the chemicals, and she would practically have conquered Earth because nobody else was interested. But what did he do?He had to get armed men to plunge out against the German borders to wind up with five gallons of gasoline and a small square of Earth that he finally had."
This lack of ability "to reach" [to achieve the goal] results in neurosis, psychosis and ultimately insanity,
"the feeling that one must reach but one can't reach. One must withdraw but one can't withdraw. If you want someone to feel how it is to be insane, have him get the idea that he must reach but he can't reach... he all of a sudden for a moment will feel the glee of insanity. That's how insane people feel. It is as elementary as that."
Stalin was similarly affected by this problem. The real case study, to which Hubbard returned again towards the end of the lecture, was that of the German people. He believed he had been a Roman centurion who had for a time fought in Germania; for his account of his search for his buried treasure in the Med, see "Mission into Time", 1968, or alternatively try Chapter 17 of Russell Miller's Bare-Faced Messiah.
"Let's take a third dynamic example [third dynamic = people] and we have Germany, country of forests. I know, I was there and some of you were, too.And these characters kept trying to come out of these forests. It was damp in there, you know, and all you had was mud huts and it was a kind of blooey. And they kept trying to come out of the forests and go down into the Roman Empire ...
And there was an outfit called Rome. And they had some armies and they were pretty good - we were pretty good. And we just made sure these characters could never cross the Rhine.
Every time they started to cross the Rhine, we knocked them back across the Rhine. We used to have punitive expeditions go in and burn a bunch of villages just to teach them that they shouldn't cross the Rhine. And they mustn't cross the Danube, and they mustn't cross the Rhine and they mustn't cross the Danube ...
The prevented reach carried on as an engram. The prevented reach of the German areas of Europe. The prevented reach. And the German gradually became totally convinced that he mustn't reach Earth. And so he goes to war. 1870, 1914, 1939 ... and everybody [now] seems bound and determined to rearm Germany ...
The difficulties one has had with the Germans was restraining the Germans from reaching."
[All extracts from LRH, "Havingness, Quality of Reach", lecture given on 31 Dec 1961]
It follows from this that the German engram of wanting to conquer the world still exists, and logically that only Scientology can remove the engram. It also strongly suggests that there is more behind the campaign against the "Fourth Reich" than simply the well-publicised opposition of the German Lander to Scientology. Of course, nobody would want to suggest that this lecture is the basic reason behind the ferocity with which the Church has sustained the attack. But its content and the timing of its reissue is possibly significant and goes some way towards explaining the broad nature of the CoS's criticism.
"Employing persons of the Leipzig, Germany, death-camp school (psychologists, psychiatrists) to handle personal aberration is like throwing ink in water to clean it up. Governments stupidly do this and wonder why their final product as an organization is riot, war and a polluted planet. The point is not how bad psychology and psychiatry are, but that one does have to handle personal aberration in an organization and these schools were too vicious and incompetent to do so."
Hubbard regularly accused those close to him who thwarted his will of being Nazi spies. In particular, he maintained that his second, bigamous wife was a Nazi spy until his dying day.
Hubbard advocated teaching the German nation to be altruistic, rendering them powerless forever (Hubbard regarded politeness and modesty as the most destructive traits an individual could acquire - in this process he wanted the Germans to become "too nice" to people low on the tone scale, and therefore, by his teachings, all become physically ill). This was his advice on how to "lick the German nation" and "fix the German nation so you would never have any more trouble with them." [All from the Personal Integrity Course] Ironically, if Germany had more of an Ayn Rand, anti-altruistic attitude to its citizens, Scientology would probably have less trouble with the German government today.
Hubbard had a few positive things to say about Germans. He thought that both Germans and Japanese were racially superior to the Chinese, and proved it in Tsingtao [Bare-Faced Messiah, chapter 3, pp. 41-42]. He also said that the Versailles treaty, by disarming Germans, had made them admirable glider pilots. (This notion is apparently widely spread in U.S. glider pilot cycles.)
Hubbard also had to say some positive things about the Nazis. Most importantly, he thought they were keeping Germany free of a Communist/psych plot [Manual on Brainwashing]. He thought their invention of the Hitler Youth was brilliant and to be imitated [Bare-Faced Messiah, chapter 19, p. 323]. He shared Hitler's drive for occult powers to help him dominate other men and called him a genius [Bare-Faced Messiah, chapter 19, p. 323, and chapters 6-8. Also, Gerry Armstrong's reports on Hubbard, in and out of Bare-faced Messiah, especially Hubbard's "Affirmations." Many sources have confirmed Hitler's interest in occult powers, and the similarities are brought out in, for example, the "Big Book of Conspiracies"].
To give its accusation against psychiatry more weight, the Church of Scientology through its frontgroup, the Citizen's Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) has tried to shift some of the blame for the Holocaust from Hitler to German psychiatrists ["Psychiatrists: The Men Behind Hitler", CCHR]
Scientology has come up with some really bizarre things. For example, it was claimed that Judge Breckenridge's decision in a court case came from the German S.S. via Interpol [Heber Jentzsch, quoted in BFM]. Even more fantastic sounds the allegation that
"a million-plus American children and 500 thousand German children receive name brand psychotropics from Tupperware bowls in the nurse's office."Since Germany's population is less than half that of the United States, this is a way of slamming American psychiatrists -- then slamming Germany a bit harder as apparently the worst drugger of its children in the world.
One reason for the Church's intense hatred of Germany may be the existence of the "Freie Zone" or Free Zone. This group is one of several "squirrel groups" which use Scientology techniques in ways not authorized by the Church's central committee. Since the Freie Zone was initially a mainly German gathering of splinter groups, RTC and Scientology were anxious to use the German police to harrass, persecute and destroy it [Free Zone FAQ]. In one case, German police arrested a framed Free Zone member on charges that she had embezzled Church funds while on staff, but the case was thrown out of court. Furthermore, Scientology's failed attempt to use the justice apparatus to destroy a religious group led German authorities to question Scientology's own standing [Jon Zegel Tape #3 - but later repudiated by the speaker in tape 4 after a "flip" back towards Church of Scientology compliance]. It is possible that this refusal to help destroy the Freie Zone made Germany more of a target than before, especially because Scientologists are very good in coming up with conspiracy theories.