At 8 a.m. on August 29, as Dirk and Petra Wunderlich began the day’s homseschooling classes with their four children, a team of twenty armed special agents, social workers, and police with a battering ram stormed the family’s home in Darmstadt, Germany. The children were forcibly taken from their parents in a raid that was described by observers as “brutal and vicious” and transported to unknown locations, while the officials told the parents “they would not be seeing their children anytime soon.” The reason for the raid was that the parents homeschool their children, which is forbidden by German law dating from the WWII era.
Judge Koenig of Darmstadt family court signed the order authorizing seizure of the children because the parents failed to cooperate with the authorities to send the children to school. The Judge authorized the use of force against the children “because the children had adopted the parents’ opinions regarding homeschooling and that no cooperation could be expected from either the parents or the children,” according to the Home School Legal Defense Association, which reported the incident. HSLDA obtained the court documents, which do not allege abuse, neglect, or even failure of the parents to provide adequate education.
Dirk Wunderlich described the events to HSLDA: “I looked through a window and saw many people, police, and special agents, all armed. They told me they wanted to come in to speak with me. I tried to ask questions, but within seconds, three police officers brought a battering ram and were about to break the door in, so I opened it. The police shoved me into a chair and wouldn’t let me even make a phone call at first. It was chaotic as they told me they had an order to take the children. At my slightest movement the agents would grab me, as if I were a terrorist. ” He said his 14-year-old daughter Machsejah resisted and was taken forcibly from their home.
Mr. Wunderlich told HSLDA: “When I went outside, our neighbor was crying as she watched. I turned around to see my daughter being escorted as if she were a criminal by two big policemen. When my wife tried to give my daughter a kiss and a hug goodbye, one of the special agents roughly elbowed her out of the way and said—‘It’s too late for that.’ What kind of government acts like this?”
Dirk and Angela Wunderlich left Germany with their four children to avoid the persecution for homeschooling and began a four-year sojourn from one country to another in Europe to try to find a place to live where they could continue to teach their children. When they moved to France in 2009, they were stunned by officials who appeared at their door without notice to take the children into custody. It was three days before their parents could see them. German authorities had requested the French intervention, claiming that the children were “socially isolated” and “in grave danger.”
The Wunderlich family eventually returned to Germany, because the father was unable to find work elsewhere. In October 2012, the German court placed the four children in formal legal custody of state youth officials, solely because their parents were homeschooling them. The parents sought appellate relief, but that hope ended the morning of August 29.
“These are broken people,” says HSLDA Director for International Affairs, who is helping to defend the Wunderlich family. “They said they felt like they were being ground into dust. They were shaken to their core and shocked by the event. But they also told me that they had followed their conscience and the dictates of their faith. Although they don’t have much faith in the German state—they have a lot of faith in God. They are an inspiring and courageous family.”
This is not the first case of this sort. In 2007, fifteen-year-old Melissa Busekros was taken by force from her home in Germany by a police squad and placed in a psychiatric hospital because she was being homeschooled. After her stay in the mental institution, she was placed in a foster home. When she turned sixteen, she walked away from the foster home to return to her parents, where she was permitted to stay only after being subjected to evaluations by the state’s youth welfare agency. What caused this conflict? Melissa had fallen behind in math and Latin and was being tutored at home. When school officials found out, they expelled her and then took her to court, where they obtained the order to place her in a psychiatric institution.
If anyone thought totalitarian tactics had ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, think again. Germany is one of the most aggressive opponents of homeschooling, despite international law protecting human rights. Even the UN criticized its harsh treatment of homeschoolers in a 2006 report on the German education system.
I know from the fourteen years that I lived in Germany, as a parent you have no say on what your children will be exposed to at school. When I met with parents at the beginning of the school year and was told about the sex education they were going to give to my then fifth-grade daughter, Stephanie, I objected that abstinence was not even one of the options they would discuss. Not only the teacher, but the other parents laughed at me. When my then second-grade son came back from school, he told me about a conversation with his instructor in religion. (Children were required to take a class in religion, but the content was perfect to inoculate one against the real thing.) “You don’t believe any of this, do you?” Tommy asked his teacher, who lowered his head and shook it slowly. “But if you don’t believe in Jesus, why are you teaching this class?” Tommy asked with indignation. “Because it was the only course open and I needed a job,” his teacher replied with surprising candor. When one of Stephanie’s fifth grade teachers was out sick for six weeks (with no substitute), I offered to form a co-op with the other parents and their children to pick up the instruction the youngsters in my daughter’s class were missing. Nothing doing. We were forbidden to do so, even informally. Now I realize I would have been breaking the law, which makes me wish I had done it anyway.
Homeschooling may not be for everyone. But the right of parents to teach their children themselves is one of the most fundamental of human rights. Kudos to Mike Farris and the HSLDA in defending homeschooling families in America and abroad. The Gestapo tactics of the Germans against the Wunderlich family are outrageously reprehensible.
Books mentioned in this essay may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore.
They should have moved to Poland. Homeschooling is perfectly legal, here with legal protections for the practice. Parents register their child with a physical school (public or private), and then home school their kids. The physical school conducts exams (usually once or twice a year) to ensure the child is learning, and beyond that parents decide how to school their children (directly, through private tutors, or in groups organized via social networks with other parents). My niece is being homeschooled, and the homeschooling market is booming right now here.
Why these German folks fled to France of all places is beyond me. Who in their right mind flees to France? – well, aside from the random terrorist or two?
Goodness me! Perhaps because I meet (different) Germans outside of Germany, I came to believe that the authoritarian, one-size-fits-all past was behind them. Overall, have they merely exchanged one colour of jackboot for another? Are the leopard’s spots fundamentally unchanged? One hopes not, but you would know. Meanwhile, thank you for a typically stirring and thought-provoking essay!
This would never happen to a Muslim family doing the same thing in the same town.
Excellent point regarding Muslims. As to the surprise over how something like this could happen in Germany – was this the Eastern or Western part? That might have something to do with it, as Eastern Germans are culturaly deficient due to their Communist past, although given the deficiency of European bureaucrats in general, I would not put it past West Germans to behave like this.
Most people who work as clerks for the State in Poland, and Europe I imagine,have Masters of Administration degrees. In fact, they habitually stamp their Academic Titles on every form they send out instructing citizens to pay some tax or fee or face jail time. This is the apolitical administrative state in effect. These people are trained to execute the laws without thought. For many of them, homeschooling is a cultural phenomenon that is simply unimaginable, and therefore any parent who would keep their children from the school system must be mentaly insane (not evil, since that is a value judgement).
One of my family was arrested a few years back for not having any National ID card, and when this person (a Harvard educated lawyer) argued before the court that she saw no need to have one, since she already had a passport, a drivers licence, a tax ID number, a Personal ID number and quite a few other state issued numbers, she was ordered to underfo psychological evaluations because it is, naturally, insane to think a human being could live without all of these important numbers and cards.
Although in Poland, they abolishee compulsory state IDs a few years ago, so clearly people are coming to their senses…
Can anyone doubt that the end is near? God is longsuffering, but….
Has anyone ever compared Bismarck to Victor Frankenstein?