Hansjürg Schößler

Hansjürg Schößler was born Hansjürg Neß in Erfurt in 1963 and grew up in a Christian family. As a teenager, he refused to join the communist Free German Youth (FDJ) and take part in military training.

In 1979, he was "brought in" by the police for the first time and temporarily remanded in custody in Saalfeld, Thuringia. Between 1980 and 1985, H. Schößler was interrogated several times by the State Security and the German People's Police in Eisenach and Erfurt to ‘clarify a matter’. In 1983, Schößler was involved in founding an independent environmental and peace group in Eisenach, which again led to his arrest.  

In spring 1989, together with other civil rights activists, he monitored the counting of votes in the GDR local elections. For the first time, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) was proven to have falsified the election results. Schößler was placed under house arrest in the GDR until October 1989.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he became a representative of the Initiative for Human Rights at the Round Table in Berlin and was involved in dissolving the Ministry for State Security. Until 1992, as a member of the Berlin-Pankow district assembly, he chaired the committee of the "Temporary Stasi / VEM (Pension scheme of the GDR Council of Ministers) Investigation Committee" in the district of Pankow. At the late 1990s, Schößler worked for the SED State Research Network at the Freie Universität Berlin. He completed his studies in sociology, philosophy and history in 2000.

Hansjürg Schößler has been a tour guide at the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial and a contemporary witness at schools and educational institutions for the Co-ordinating Office of Contemporary Witnesses since 2000.