For reasons easily understood, German-Polish relations were very tense after World War II, which began with the German invasion of Poland. The good relations the two countries enjoy today are not the product of the last few years alone, but result from decades of work by private individuals and organisations in the cause of German-Polish reconciliation. Some of this work was done in the GDR, although it was certainly no easy undertaking there. Not easy, because the GDR’s assertion of friendship with its socialist “brother nation” to the east was a tool wielded deliberately by the state to serve official political ends. The “state of workers and peasants” had no thought of striving to achieve a reconciliation with Poland that would be sustained by society as a whole; according to the SED propaganda, all the former Nazis criminals lived in the Federal Republic of Germany. Nonetheless, there were people in the GDR who sought reconciliation with Poland. Probably the most important of these, and the first to take up the cause, was Günter Särchen.
Günter Särchen was born in 1927 to German-Sorbian parents in the small Lusatian town of Wittichenau. His childhood was shaped by urban middle-class and Catholic values, which he continued to hold throughout his life. Growing up as a Sorbian in the Nazi era, Särchen’s attitudes were influenced by the discrimination he endured from his fellow pupils at the Wittichenau secondary school. Such experiences made Särchen want to be a “good German”. Like almost all teenage boys at the time, he joined the Hitler Youth, ultimately advancing to the position of group leader. This does not mean that he was a Nazi, though: he was also involved in Kolping Youth, an illegal Catholic youth group, during the same period.
Särchen became a Wehrmacht soldier at the age of 17 and was assigned to a unit stationed in the Berlin region. His superior officer had his unit retreat consistently westwards, so that he and his men would not end up as prisoners of the Soviets if they were captured. At the end of the war, Särchen was interned in an American POW camp in Bad Kreuznach. Following his release in 1946, he returned to his hometown in Lusatia, where he founded a chapter of the FDJ (Freie Deutsche Jugend: Free German Youth) and joined the Ost-CDU (East-CDU/Christian Democratic Union of Germany – Christlich-Demokratische Union Deutschlands). He withdrew from both organisations shortly thereafter however, having realised that neither was genuinely independent. Specifically, the FDJ was dependent on the SED, and Särchen could not and would not be identified with that party.
In 1948, Günter Särchen began training as a teacher in West Berlin. He also started working as a pastoral youth worker in Görlitz, where he encountered many Silesians who had been forcibly expelled from Poland. Görlitz lies right on the Polish border, and it was there that Särchen first met people from Poland. His interest in Poland began then, although just how great a role this country was destined to play in his future was not yet apparent.
Günter Särchen had to make himself scarce after the suppression of the uprising in June of 1953, as he had played an active part in it, including by acting as a courier between individual enterprises involved in the strike. He moved to Magdeburg, where he became involved in pastoral youth work once again. He also met people there who, like himself, were working in the cause of German-Polish reconciliation. Särchen married his first wife, Christa Schäfer (whom he knew from Görlitz), in Magdeburg in 1955. She died in 1959 after the birth of their second child.
In 1956, Särchen took on the task of creating a photographic archive/library for the Catholic Church in the GDR. Later he worked in the Magdeburg Office of Pastoral Care and was responsible for pastoral work materials. It was from this facility, which Särchen led until 1984, that he organised most of his Poland-related activities.
Särchen’s first interactions with people in Poland began in the mid-1950s, though at first these were limited to the exchange of letters and sending books. He made personal contact with various church and opposition groups when he finally visited Poland himself in 1960. Särchen also remarried in 1960, he would have two children with his second wife, Brigitte Pawlik.
In this period, Särchen began to work with Lothar Kreyssig and his group Action Reconciliation, later becoming one of its directors. He also organised events with the organisation, the first of which took place in Magdeburg in 1962. Two years later, Särchen and Kreyssig had the idea of holding the first Action Reconciliation “pilgrimage”, a trip by young Germans to Poland, but the Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS) refused to grant the necessary travel permits. They were able to make the planned trip the following year, though. The group visited the concentration camps in Majdanek and Auschwitz and met with representatives of the Church and the opposition in Krakow. Särchen became a target of the MfS, which viewed his interest in Poland as hostile to the state. He was interrogated several times and put under surveillance. His Stasi file bore the codename “Patron”. The records of operation “Patron” make it quite clear that the power apparatus considered Särchen to be a highly problematic figure. There were even plans for his assassination. He later recalled: “I broke down while reading my file. Until then I had not truly understood that I had been balancing at the edge of the abyss for 25 years.” However, Särchen had been aware that he was running substantial risks with his reconciliation work with Poland, but he continued it anyway. He started organising what he called “Poland seminars” in addition to further pilgrimages to Poland. These seminars, devoted to Polish history, culture, literature and present-day, were held in Rossbach and Magdeburg from 1968 onwards. In 1985, the seminars were named after Anna Morawska, a Krakow-based journalist and an early activist on behalf of German-Polish reconciliation. In 1990, the Anna Morawska Society grew out of them. As another method of raising awareness about Poland in the GDR, in the 1970s he began to publish "Handreichungen" (hand-outs). The East German samizdat publication contained also pieces by Polish authors and reprinted articles from Polish periodicals. A total of 55 issues were released, all officially “for Church-internal use only”. This was a way of getting an undistorted image of Poland past the censor. For decades, these publications, along with the Poland seminars, were one the few independent sources of information about Poland and Polish society available to many citizens of the GDR.
After *martial law was declared in Poland in 1981, it became impossible for Särchen and others to maintain direct contacts with acquaintances in Poland, because the GDR closed the border to their Eastern neighbour. This did not prevent Särchen from continuing to promote Polish reconciliation, though. He gave lectures throughout the GDR and met with people who were interested in Poland. After *martial law was lifted in July 1983, Särchen went back to Poland and picked up where he had been forced to leave off in 1981.
Särchen continued to devote himself to the cause of German-Polish reconciliation despite his deteriorating health, for which repeated MfS interrogations were partly to blame. He was forced to let others take over more and more of the day-to-day work though. In 1987, he left the Pastoral Care Office in Magdeburg for good. This decision was due partly to his ailing health but partly, too, to differences of opinion with his new supervisor, who did not want the office to continue supporting his Polish work. Särchen continued his efforts from retirement and, after the collapse of the Communist dictatorship, became a co-founder of the Krzyżowa Foundation for Mutual Understanding in Europe.
Särchen received the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland in 1990 in recognition of his efforts in the cause of German-Polish reconciliation. Two years later, he was awarded the Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. On the question of why Germany awarded him only the lowest class of the medal, he said in an interview: "For the West German officials in Magdeburg who reviewed the nominations, it was inconceivable that anyone in the GDR, let alone a group of persons, could have positively contributed towards understanding among nations.”
In the last years of his life, Günter Särchen withdrew more and more from public life, giving only the occasional lecture on Poland. His health problems grew visibly worse, and he was hospitalised again and again. Günter Särchen died in Hoyerswerda in 2004. A street in Magdeburg was named after him in 2008.