New Sect Skirmish

Hamburg's Scientologists get help from the USA

Hamburg, Germany
April 25, 2000
http://www.abendblatt.de/
Hamburger Abendblatt

The pitch is again increasing. While the Director of the Interior Agency's Work Group on Scientology, Ursula Caberta, is saying that Scientology is making a more aggressive showing, the organization is accusing Caberta of "intentional public manipulation."

>From Caberta's viewpoint "the millions in aid" from the USA for the Hamburg Scientologists is "a declaration of hostility." Ever since Hamburg has been dealing directly withe their U.S. headquarters, she said, the organization has been making a more aggressive showing in the Hanseatic City.

"Scientology units are regarded as having been successful when they bring as much money and people into the center as possible," Caberta believes. Until the early '90s, she said, Hamburg had been the "most successful group worldwide." But after a large number of people, including those well-to-do, left Scientology in the Hanseatic City, it was "economically at the end of its rope." The headquarters in Los Angeles made about 20 million marks available for a new building for the organization in downtown Hamburg. "Up to that point, a bankrupt unit had never been re-financed from the USA," said Caberta. At the moment, she said, Scientology was not doing well in Germany, but that did not mean that the fight against this new form of political extremism was going to cease.

In response, Hamburg Scientology spokesman Frank Busch stated that Caberta was "driven by boundless discriminatory delusion."

He said that she was serving herself from "dubious experts" like, recently, U.S. American Robert Minton, who Busch stated was involved in an international money-laundering scandal. Scientology had written a letter to inform Interior Senator Hartmuth Wrocklage and his office colleagues in the German states on that account.

(scho / lno)

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