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STL 14 MAY 95 / Germany Calling By ANDREW GlMSON GERMANY is at war with 'the giant octopus of Scientology', according to Chancellor Helmut Kohl's close friend and colleague, the employment minister Norbert Blum. In a hard-hitting attack, Mr Blum says that the fringe religious sect is conspiring to take over Germany by infiltrating its economy and converting managers in key sectors such as property, publishing and computer software. Members of the organisation should not be trusted with money or trade secrets, Mr Blum adds, because their loyalty is to Scientology rather than to their employers. According to him, the sect is 'an organisation which will stop at nothing in its desire to spread its purblind ideology world-wide under the guise of religion'. The similarity of such attacks to the sort of thing which used to be said about the German Jews has not been lost on the Scientologists. They strongly deny Mr Blum's charges and point out that they enjoy charitable status, celebrity backers and a measure of respectability in the US They particularly enraged Mr Blum by taking out 26 full-page advertisements in the American press, comparing their treatment to the fate of the Jews. In the New York Times of January 11, for example, they claimed that present-day Germany is frighteningly similar to the Germany of the Thirties and Forties, when the world shut its eyes as the Holocaust was being prepared. This is preposterously unfair and has annoyed the Jews as well as the Germans. No one knows how many Scientologists there are in Germany - estimates range between 30,000 and 300,000 - but Mr Blum says it would be counter-productive to outlaw them. AND yet, to British ears, his outburst does sound somewhat hysterical. Can the Scientologists, founded in 1954 by an American science-fiction writer, L. Ron Hubbard, really be as dangerous as all that? In Britain we tend, sometimes with mistaken complacency to deal with people who say they are going to take over the world by ridiculing them. In Germany, which is said to be the second strongest centre of Scientology outside the United States, the subject is taken more seriously. After sales of beer were affected, the country's largest private brewery, Warsteiner, launched an advertising campaign to quash rumours that it had been infiltrated by the Scientologists. Die Woche, the newspaper which published Mr Blum's attack, describes how the sect can work its way into a person's confidence by the most insidious methods. A garage proprietor in Hamburg paid more than 7,000 marks (pounds 3,000) for four weekend seminars before realising he had fallen into the hands of the Scientologists. He found the seminars 'extremely positive and enjoyable', but became suspicious when participants were encouraged to reveal details of their private lives and the trainer started to demand information about his business. New recruits can find themselves under psychological domination paying vast sums for evening and weekend courses. There is said to be one good way of finding out whether the management consultant or personal counsellor who offers you help is a Scientologist. These people may be prepared to hide their membership of the sect, but are not prepared to renounce L. Ron Hubbard himself. Apparently their signature to a written declaration that their working practices will not be regulated according to Hubbardian principles should usually see one safe. The Sunday Telegraph
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