“If we expect to be taken serious by our interlocutors in regards to our faith and its testimonies, we must carry ourselves well. One cannot hold a conversation with the reviled, a recommendation for Christians to conduct a conversation would always have to go like: ‘Hearing -, praying -, thinking -, talking’. It cannot take place under rash condemnation judgments.” This does sound objective, doesn’t it? But his overall attitude was rather unfavourable in regards to spiritistic phenomena. His assessment was: They can all be rationally explained, the messages from the hereafter are produced by the mediums and they smell of swindle and conceit. Due to his brawny behaviourism, he wasn’t quite undisputed within his own Church. A particularly severe attack against parapsychology and parapsychologists was instigated in April 1981 by the Polizei-Zeitung Baden-Württemberg. In this journal, a publication for police officers, an article appeared in issue 4/1981: “The new dpz-series: Psycho-sciences – enquiries behind veiled curtains. In its new series, the dpz (Deutsche Polizei Zeitung) will try to report about the ‘psycho-sciences’, the ‘world of the supernatural, that have provided reputable publishers with best sellers and that are often somewhat frivolously dismissed as ‘non-relevant nonsense’. – This first treatise will deal with attitudes towards spiritual healing…” But it then continues by alternately citing Dr. Wimmer and Dr. Schäfer: “Here the affinity of an Ulrike Meinhof with occultism. Or the fact that Gudrun Ensslin and later a number of a group that shot the President of the Supreme Court Mr. von Drenckmann and kidnapped the politician Peter Lorenz, were interested buyers of occult literature in a bookstore for psycho-sciences in West Berlin. – And there the mass suicide of the followers of the American ‘Peoples Temple Sect’ in Guyana , where more than 900 people followed the instructions of their sect’s leader Jim Jones. - And elsewhere hypnotists appearing in variety shows. And there the case of a 23 years old pedagogy student Anneliese Michel from Klingenberg who died on the 1th of July 1976 – weighing just 60 pounds – after the Rituale Romanus (exorcism) had been performed on the devil worshipper… …The permanent dumbfounding efforts of parapsychologists on the general public, for instance the high priests of a technologically new theology, verified the fateful influence of such seemingly harmless soul prosthesis over the last 25 years.” The second part of this series was printed in issue 6/1981 two months later under the title: “Seer – Healer – Bewitcher: Occult perpetrators and their victims.” Parapsychology was once again dealt with in an unobjective way: “Parapsychology awakens and feeds victim’s superstitions and this in turn feeds the occult perpetrator who are able to disseminate and solidify their madness…” “… And this is how parapsychology provides the occult perpetrators not only with the facts of deception, but also the occult excuses.” “… The former District Attorney Dr. Wimmer doubts whether one will be able to clear away the muck in the occult Augean stables. He urgently warns about parapsychology. But at the same time, it seems to be important to him that the freedom within the sciences may not be impaired in any way. Everyone may research and learn what they consider right. But when the recognised scientific criteria fall by the wayside, as is the case with parapsychology, its representatives can no longer make the claim of being scientists. He encouraged them to swap their sect-preachers pulpit with professorship, in other words: To exchange religious freedom with the freedom of the sciences. Everyone has the freedom to believe in and to talk the greatest nonsense there.”
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