Thomas Kretschmer was born in Dornburg near Jena on 18 December 1955. His father was a biologist, and his mother was a childcare worker. Raised as a Catholic, he refused to take part in the secular state-organised coming-of-age ceremony (Jugendweihe) in 1970, though he was a member of the Pioneer organisation and later the Free German Youth (FDJ). Kretschmer knew that he would need an upper secondary school leaving certificate in order to be eligible to study medicine (he hoped to become a doctor), so in 1972, he chose to enter the dual track of vocational training and upper secondary schooling, which was one of the options the available at the time. Less than a year later, he was told expelled after withdrawing from the FDJ and announcing his intent to refuse to perform his military service. He then entered a nursing training programme but met with coercion to conform and indoctrination in that programme as well. The 17-year-old found himself increasingly overcome by feelings of hopelessness and unbearable constraint.

Under these conditions, Thomas Kretschmer attempted to flee to West Germany in June of 1973. He was caught, however and sentenced to 15 months of juvenile detention (he was not yet 18). While he was in prison, officials from the Ministry of State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS) pressured him into signing a document agreeing to act as an informer. He wrote up a few reports for the MfS but then decided that he would no longer work for the Stasi and notified his MfS handlers of this in writing. When he was released in late 1974 after serving out his full sentence, the MfS renewed their attempts to pressure him into informing, but he stood by his decision. He also told his friends what had a happened, thereby violating his obligation to keep his past activity confidential. By “outing” himself in this way, he rendered himself useless as an informant. What is more: he seized every opportunity to tell people about his experiences in order to show them that it was possible to refuse the MfS.

After his release, Kretschmer got into contact with the “Open Work” (Offenen Arbeit) programme in Jena. He had already had some contact with Open Work in 1972, after he left school. Open Work was a socio-pedagogical youth-work programme run by Thomas Auerbach, Deacon for Youth, one of the first such institutions in the GDR. It was the one of the seeds from which the opposition in Jena sprung. Both the state and the official Church looked on the programme with great mistrust, and both did what they could to hinder it. The contact meant a great deal to Kretschmer though, contributing to his decision to convert to Protestantism in 1976. Kretschmer worked as a nurse and lived in Jena’s semi-legal youth scene. After attempting in vain to obtain another training place, he was finally admitted to study theology at the Erfurt seminary in 1976.

By this time, Kretschmer was married, and he relocated his family to a rural vicarage outside of Erfurt in 1977. He turned this new home into a centre serving young people modelled on Jena's “Open Work” that became known throughout and beyond Thuringia. This, in conjunction with his uneasy relationship with the seminary authorities and his marital problems, resulted in Kretschmer having to interrupt his studies in 1979 to work in rail construction for a year. The official Church and the Stasi prevented his return to the seminary. Instead, he was conscripted.

At this point Kretschmer refused not just to perform military service in an armed unit, but to perform any form of military service at all, leading to his arrest in November 1980. While in pre-trial custody, he realised that staying in prison in order to stay true to his principles was not the right thing to do: serving as a “construction soldier” in an unarmed unit would be an opportunity to educate other young men. After six weeks in pre-trial detention and a sentence to probation, he was sent to Leipzig as a soldier in an unarmed unit in December 1980 and began to put this plan into operation. He argued for his pacifist stance actively and energetically, and advocated solidarity with Poland's *Solidarność and the emerging peace movement in the GDR.

In early 1982, shortly before the end of his one-and-a-half-year term of service, Kretschmer was arrested a second time and taken to the Stasi detention centre in Berlin. He was sentenced to four and a half years of prison in autumn of 1982. After periods spent in a series of detention centres, he was taken to a facility for detention pending deportation in Karl-Marx-Stadt (Chemnitz). From there, buses departed twice weekly to bring detainees for release to the Federal Republic of Germany. Neither Kretschmer nor his wife had applied to leave the country. The latter had been served notice to vacate her home by the official Thuringian Church and her request to rent another house was rejected by the state. Kretschmer held out in the face of enormous pressure and the offer of immediate departure until July of 1985. In the end, he was granted early release and permitted to stay in the GDR: his cause had been championed by various prominent figures in West Germany, including the former bishop Kurt Scharf, and organisations like Amnesty International, who had named Kretschmer “Prisoner of the Year”.

With help from the Stasi and the official Church, Kretschmer and his family found housing in a village in eastern Thuringia, where he was hired as a workman by the local church. Once again, he reached out to his old contacts and continued to refuse to conform with the dictates of the state in any way. He also spend time pursuing his beloved hobby of woodcarving and sculpture, both self- taught.

In the autumn of 1989, he became politically active again. Kretschmer was involved in the occupation of the local MfS offices, and later served as a member of Thuringia’s Citizen’s Committee for the Dissolution of the State Security Service. 1990–1994 he served on the Lobenstein district council, but he was disappointed by the partisan politics of united Germany. After an unsuccessful candidacy for the post of district chief executive in 1994 (his campaign slogan was “Poverty, beauty, disobedience”), he withdrew from the political arena. Today Kretschmer makes his living as a wood carver and lives with his family near the town of Schleiz in Thuringia.

According to Kretschmer, there were two basic principles that guided him when making important decisions. The first was one he heard from his mother: “You are free, but if you commit yourself to something, be aware that you are doing so.” The second he took from the Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and articulated as follows: “There is no greater act of human stupidity than one committed for the sake of a principle.”