Schattenspiel

Eckart Giebeler began his service as a chaplain in the prison on October 1, 1949, as a vicar under the then part-time Brandenburg prison pastor Werner Marienfeld on behalf of the Berlin-Brandenburg Church. However, in 1953, the Main Administration of the German People's Police (HVDVP), which was affiliated with the Ministry of the Interior of the GDR, created new circumstances by offering pastors Eckart Giebeler and Heinz Bluhm contracts as full-time prison chaplains employed by the Ministry of the Interior. Bluhm and Giebeler signed the contracts, but the church rejected any ecclesiastical appointment of the two chaplains to these positions. Alongside Pastor Hans-Joachim Mund, the Ministry of the Interior now employed three full-time prison chaplains. After the former fled to the Federal Republic in 1959 and Bluhm passed away in 1966, Eckart Giebeler remained the only state-employed full-time chaplain in the GDR with this special and unique status. With his employment at the Ministry of the Interior, Giebeler ultimately found himself in a precarious position. He worked in the penal system of the GDR and was, on one hand, employed and paid by the Ministry of the Interior of the GDR, Department of Corrections, like all other correctional staff, but on the other hand, as a Protestant pastor, he was an outsider within the structure of the GDR penal system, viewed with suspicion by the correctional personnel. However, Eckart Giebeler also had a shadowy side, unknown until 1992, as an unofficial collaborator of the Ministry for State Security. As IM "Roland," he wrote reports on detainees since 1959, discussed audio tapes containing information about pastor conventions and fellow pastors, and handed over documents to the Stasi that were "only intended for internal church use.".