Word: bers
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...Knock on the Door. In 1940, just before Christmas, there came the ineviable knock on the door. At the concentration camp in Sachsenhausen, the Nazis knocked out Grüber's front teeth. At Dachau, they threw his body on a pile of corpses after a heart attack had left him more dead than alive...
After the war, Grüber was appointed pastor of the Marienkirche, the oldest undestroyed church in Berlin's inner city. Several of the men he had known in concentration camps became top officials in the Communist government, and they trusted the earnest, red-faced man whose religious principles had led him to the same ugly places as their political convictions had led them. In 1949 Pastor Grüber was appointed plenipotentiary from the Evangelical Church to the Communist government at Pankow...
...Western press attacked him when, after a visit to Communist-run Sachsenhausen, he announced that the inmates received better food and treatment than under the Nazis. But soon after his visit, 15,000 prisoners in Soviet zone concentration camps were released in an amnesty credited to Grüber; another Grüber-inspired amnesty is said to be imminent...
...Talent for Politics. Recently, Pastor Grüber was criticized-this time by his own church synod-because he appeared at an East German "National Congress," publicly condemned the presence of U.S. atomic cannon in Germany, and called for a ban on nuclear weapons, a step the Russians favor. Pastor Grüber asked the synod to accept his resignation...
When word spread through Soviet Germany that Heinrich Grüber might go, consternation welled up among the Protestants. and protest rolled in. "There must be a way to relieve Pastor Grüber of his pastoral duties without necessarily jeopardizing his position as plenipotentiary ..." Said the weekly Potsdam Kirche: "Too many people are waiting for his services ..." Last week the Evangelical Church's Bishop Otto Dibelius announced that Grüber, though he would no longer be pastor of the Marienkirche, would continue his job of go-between. Said Heinrich Grüber as he went back...