74 Facts About Wolfgang Schnur

Wolfgang Schnur was an East German civil rights lawyer and a longtime informer of the East German Stasi.

Wolfgang Schnur was closely involved with the Association of Evangelical Churches and worked on many of the cases in which the BEK's leading figures were involved.

Wolfgang Schnur became well networked, on more than one level, with the country's political establishment.

Wolfgang Schnur 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.

On 14 March 1990, less than a week before East Germany's first free parliamentary election, it was reported that Wolfgang Schnur had resigned from the presidency of Democratic Awakening.

Wolfgang Schnur was expelled from the party the next day.

Wolfgang Schnur was born in Stettin which at that time was in Germany.

Stettin was a strategic port and as Wolfgang 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 Schnur 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.

Wolfgang Schnur 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.

Evacuation to the island meant that Wolfgang Schnur would grow up, classified as a "parentless child" in the part of Germany administered as the Soviet occupation zone.

Wolfgang Schnur spent his early childhood believing that Martha and Rudolf Mummethei were his parents.

Later Wolfgang Schnur would describe his shock at the revelation and 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.

In many respects, Wolfgang Schnur's situation was not so different from that of many of his contemporaries.

Wolfgang Schnur was a "good student" and engaged fully in the activities and trips of the Ernst Thalmann Pioneer Organisation and stood out because of his contributions in school plays.

Wolfgang Schnur 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.

At Christmas 1960 the sixteen-year-old Wolfgang Schnur discovered that he was not an orphan.

Wolfgang Schnur's mother was alive and had been found living in the west.

Wolfgang 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.

Erna Wolfgang 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.

Wolfgang Schnur was employed by the Waldkrankenhaus, a psychiatric hospital in the Koppern quarter of Friedrichsdorf, a couple of kilometers outside Homburg.

Since Christmas mother and son had written to each other several times, but Wolfgang Schnur had not mentioned his plans for a visit.

When Wolfgang Schnur turned up, unannounced, at her front door, Erna Schur's reaction was not the one that her son had anticipated.

Wolfgang Schnur did not even invite him into her home.

Wolfgang Schnur 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 Schnur 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.

Wolfgang Schnur was not unduly troubled by the political differences that had by now developed between east and west.

Wolfgang Schnur was appointed, in May 1962, to the vice-presidency of a Youth Social Work forum in Hesse.

Wolfgang Schnur was not a typical disillusioned westerner seeking a new life in the workers' and peasants' paradise.

Wolfgang Schnur was held at a detention centre in Eisenach while decisions were made about his future.

Wolfgang Schnur himself was under intense surveillance from comrades looking for any signs that he might be a spy.

Wolfgang Schnur soon worked out how to join the political mainstream and on 16 March 1965 his application to become a candidate for party membership was accepted and his name was added to the candidates list.

Wolfgang Schnur took on party work and became a local leader with the Free German Youth.

Wolfgang Schnur chose the name Torsten because a friend at work had a son called Torsten.

Wolfgang Schnur had originally met Marlies Bahr at a large FDJ east-west social event in East Berlin the previous year.

Wolfgang Schnur wrote back just four days later, recommending a holiday apartment which the municipality rented out to holiday makers.

Wolfgang Schnur had heard of East German escaping via Turkish ships in the Mediterranean after managing to get themselves included on government-sponsored Mediterranean youth-holidays on an East German ship.

Wolfgang Schnur reported that she knew "nothing concrete" about that side of things.

Somehow "Torsten" very soon broke off contact with both Marlies and Hendrik, but the exceptionally comprehensive and detailed nature of the reports of his various meetings that Wolfgang Schnur submitted to his handlers continued to impress.

Wolfgang Schnur herself was part of a large and "interesting" extended family.

Wolfgang Schnur was a restless and frequently absent father: childcare responsibilities fell almost exclusively to Barbel.

In June 1967 Wolfgang Schnur returned to his studies for the Abitur in order, belatedly, to work towards a university degree.

Wolfgang Schnur's plan was to focus on his studies in order to become a full-time informer.

Wolfgang Schnur was beginning to lose a little of the trust he had formerly enjoyed from his handlers, after it was discovered from routine postal intercepts that "Torsten" still had on-going contacts with Marlies Bahr in Hamburg, but had neglected to mention the fact in his reports.

Wolfgang Schnur was nevertheless encountering difficulties on obtaining law-related work because he had not been able to join the party and because the record of his expulsion from the FDJ remained on the files.

Wolfgang Schnur asked the ministry contacts for help, but it is not clear how much effort they were able or willing to exert on his behalf at this point.

Wolfgang Schnur was appalled by the absence of effective political-ideological education taking place at the business, which is fully reflected in his reports to his handlers of the time.

Wolfgang Schnur seems to have become depressed and disillusioned at this time, and in around 1968, which was the year of the crushing of the Prague Spring, he ended his habit of regularly completing and submitting application forms for party membership.

Wolfgang Schnur now supported himself as a lawyer, based in Binzen.

Wolfgang Schnur became one of East Germany's best-known church representatives, both as a lawyer and in the public sphere more generally.

Wolfgang Schnur was a member of the synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church for Mecklenburg, and served for at least one term as vice-president of the national Evangelical Church synod.

Wolfgang Schnur always had a close working relationship with Horst Kasner, who had worked in Templin for many years as head of the Evangelical Church's pastoral college for Berlin-Brandenburg.

On 1 October 1989 Wolfgang Schnur was a co-founder of "Demokratischer Aufbruch", an organisation with many of the characteristics of a western-style political party.

The movement had grown out of various increasingly politicised elements from within the evangelical churches, and there are indications that one reason for Wolfgang Schnur's election was that he was "not a theologian", unlike Rainer Eppelmann who was keen to take on the position, and indeed did so in succession to Wolfgang Schnur half a year later.

In December 1989, as the political changes gathered pace, Wolfgang Schnur was an early participant at the National Round Table meetings.

Wolfgang Schnur had for some months been spoken of as a "future East German prime minister" and at this point he retained his leading position in the enlarged party.

Wolfgang Schnur had already held in-depth discussions on the issues involved with Mikhail Gorbachev.

Kohl held the view that Wolfgang Schnur would make an excellent East German prime minister through the run-up to German reunification.

On 5 March 1990 Wolfgang Schnur's ambitions met with a setback, after disclosures surfaced concerning the nature, duration and extent of his activities as a Stasi informer.

Wolfgang Schnur rejected the allegations again the next day, 8 March 1990, then he collapsed and was taken to hospital.

Once the news broke, the first person to whom Wolfgang Schnur confessed his Stasi past, albeit only orally, was Helmut Kohl.

Kohl's team were keen to establish whether Wolfgang Schnur really had been working for the Stasi for many years, or whether he was simply the victim of a high-level personal undermining programme, of the kind in which the Stasi were known to specialise, launched by political opponents.

Wolfgang Schnur resigned the leadership of Democratic Awakening on 13 March 1990.

Schulz told his 2,000 listeners that the allegations against party leader Wolfgang Schnur were a slander and a lie, meticulously prepared by Stasi experts over a long period for "disclosure" directly ahead of the election.

Wolfgang Schnur demonstrated this by holding up what he said was an almost perfect "Stasi file" on the poet Goethe, produced by a Citizens Committee and DA in the space of just 24 hours.

In 1991 Wolfgang Schnur set up a law firm in Berlin.

Wolfgang Schnur was their lawyer and a longtime friend whom they trusted.

Wolfgang Schnur was further convicted because the court determined that he had reported to the Stasi his suspicion that author Freya Klier had been hiding in her house a manuscript that was critical of conditions in the German Democratic Republic.

Wolfgang Schnur was sentenced to a total of twelve months in jail, but the sentence was suspended on the condition that he should comply with the conditions of a probation order.

Wolfgang Schnur was found guilty of having disrespected a judge whom he had accused of antisemitic acts in the course of heated pleadings.

Wolfgang Schnur had acquired the house in which he lived under complicated circumstances before reunification.

Wolfgang Schnur died of prostate cancer on January 16,2016, in Wilhelminenspital.