A few days later while Wilma and I were sitting in the restaurant at the Leipzig train station, a woman at our table who overheard our conversation, put a “Swords into Plowshares” armband of the independent peace movement in front of us. She then asked whether we would be willing to come to the small Brandenburg town of Finsterwalde the following Sunday to meet with GDR conscientious objectors in her church. We agreed. She said she would speak with her pastor and would then call us to confirm. We knew that what we were going to do was illegal. We of course told no one except the Klitzkes, whom we could trust and who should know if we did not come back from Finsterwalde the following day. In the afternoon we met with twenty-eight young men who either intended to apply for service in the Volksarmee without weapons or to refuse service entirely. While the GDR did not recognize conscientious objection, serving without weapons as so-called construction soldiers (Bausoldaten) was an option. In the evening we met with adult parishioners. The pastor told us proudly that there was not a single spy in the audience; we could not be sure of this, but nothing happened to us. We wonder whether the Stasi (the secret police) had any information about our visit or whether they just decided not to pursue the matter. (We have still not received our Stasi files for which we first applied in 1991.) We spent the night with members of the congregation which, of course, was also illegal. The next morning we returned to Leipzig.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 163