Arrest at the Marienkirche

In Berlin last week, Pastor Reinhold George, 40, had just finished conducting vesper services in the Marienkirche, a stately Evangelical church in the Russian sector. When he stepped outside the church doors, a group of plainclothesmen from the East German police walked up and took him away. No explanation for the arrest was given. Church leaders presumed that Pastor George was singled out because he has been an extremely popular leader of Protestant youth groups.

The arrest, made outside the headquarters church of Berlin's Bishop Otto Dibelius, was the third in the last month in which a Protestant clergyman was taken into Communist custody. The East German Communists, like their relatives in Poland (TIME, Feb. 23), have begun a widening campaign of religious persecution, apparently worried because Bishop Dibelius and his pastors have been preaching Christianity all too effectively behind Germany's Iron Curtain.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.