Several international peace activists served sentences in German prisons stemming from actions of civil disobedience at a nuclear weapons base in Büchel, Germany. The two Catholic Workers Susan Crane from Redwood City, California, and Susan van der Hijden from Amsterdam have been sentenced to a 229 and 115 days fine, the Veterans for Peace member Dennis DuVall has been sentenced to 90 days, Gerd Buentzley from Herford, Germany, has been sentenced to 90 days. Miriam Krämer from Germany has been sentenced to 30 days for repeatedly entering Büchel Air Base, Germany. Brian Terrell, Catholic Worker from Maloy, Iowa, did 15 days of prison sentence in 2025. Together, they hope to use their prison sentences to bear witness for a nuclear-weapon-free world.
In 2024 we walked a Pilgrimage for Freedom from Nuclear Execution from Büchel Airbase to the women’s prison in Rohrbach, 100 km away. (A short diary of our peace walk you find here.) At the end of the pilgrimage, both Susan’s went to jail. In 2025 we sent Brian off into prison after vigiling at two airforce bases, the commander’s office and the prison. Our vigils were part of Global Day of Action to #CloseBases – World BEYOND War
Contact information
Prisoncontact in Germany is Chris Danowski:
christiane.danowski@web.de, 0049 151 10726612
If you like to contribute to their expenses you can send money to
GAAA – Gewaltfreie Aktion Atomwaffen Abschaffen
GLS Bank, IBAN DE57 4306 0967 8019 1512 00, BIC: GENODEM1GLS, Betreff: Vigil behind bars
Susan is a school teacher, mom, grandma, war tax resister, nonviolent anti-nuclear and anti-war activist, and Catholic Worker from Redwood City, California. For the past 48 years Susan has tried to withdraw her consent from the economic and political system that is a death sentence to life on earth. She has done this through war tax resistance and nonviolent direct action. She has been in prison over 6 years for peace actions, including several Plowshares actions, which addressed the dangers, illegality and immorality of nuclear weapons. In 2024/25 she spent 220 days for several Go-in-actions at Büchel Airbase.
Susan Crane states:
“As a US citizen, I feel responsible for the nuclear weapons that are created with my tax dollars. I have said, out of conviction and conscience, that we must disarm nuclear weapons here in the US, and that is why it makes sense to get involved with the international community of peacemakers against the US nuclear weapons stationed in Europe.” The United States spends more than $84,094 on nuclear weapons every minute. Meanwhile, millions of people in the United States face contaminated water and unsafe food, are homeless and suffer from inadequate medical care. These problems, also faced by the poor around the world, could be solved with the resources and money the United States spends on warfare and nuclear weapons. “My faith teaches me that every child is sacred and that there is no moral justification for killing other people in war, destroying their land, or poisoning their water. Nuclear war does all of this.”
Susan Crane
Brian Terrell, Catholic Worker from Iowa, USA, spent 15 days “vigil behind bars” in Wittlich Prison Germany in 2025.
Brian Terrell states:
“It’s not me who is a criminal, it’s my government that is stationing nuclear weapons of mass destruction in Büchel in violation of international law and thus making it the target of a nuclear strike. The German government is aiding and abetting this by having Bundeswehr soldiers practice using these weapons on a daily basis,”
Brian Terrell
Susan, born 1969, has been living in the Amsterdam Catholic Worker since 1998, with a long break after her participation in the Jubilee Ploughshares 2000 action in England. Besides (helping) organise actions against nuclear weapons, such as the Pink Shovel actions and the Volkel peace camp in August 2023. Although already demonstrating at Büchel in the early 2000’s, the first actions Susan helped organise and involved going on the nuclear air base were in 2017. In 2024 she spent 115 days in prison as a result from actions in 2018 and 2019.
Court statement in Cochem dicstrict court 2020:
Honourable Judge, ladies and gentlemen,
I would like to start with thanking the people that made it possible for me to stand here today. I was part of a group of seventeen people, who together cut and entered the fences of Nuclear airforce base Büchel. […] I do not have much faith in the law. The law should protect its citizens but it keeps protecting the weapons, the violence against the poor and the fences surounding nuclear bases such as the ones at Büchel airforce base. […] I can name laws and treaties, but in the end the fences are more important than human lives. I can talk about the damage done to people and the enviroment from mining Uranium, or the families I talked to in Kansas City in the USA, who lost loved ones to cancer, who worked making Nuclear weapons. […] You will tell me you sympathize but that this is not the right way to go about it. That the fence is sacred and shall not be touched. There are other ways to get rid of the nukes. But what are they? I wish I could do other things, but do not know what will make those in power listen. It seems time to make the changes we want ourselves. Cutting the fence is the first step. […] I dont have much faith in the law but I have hope. And I do think its a good thing to have laws. So I came here, despite all the Corona madness, to have you judge my actions. If you really think the fences are more important than human lives you should punish me and I will go to prison without resistance. But I have hope that these small actions of ours will plant seeds for the future, that they will draw attention to these weapons of mass destruction and keep it on the agendas of politicians.
Susan van der Hijden
On July 22 2024, accompanied by his wife and friends, 82-year-old Dennis DuVall reported to Bautzen prison in Germany. The Veterans for Peace member spent 60 days in the same prison in 2023, also for actions at Büchel, where U.S. nuclear weapons are stored. The American citizen, who has lived in Germany for six years, was about to be serving a 90 day sentence for nonpayment of fines for protest actions at Büchel air base. He was being payed out though by an anonymous donor and now tries to fight being expelled from Germany.
Court statement from Dennis DuVall:
I am here today as a United States citizen committed to removing American nuclear weapons out of Germany: “I am not to blame, but I am responsible.”
As a U.S. citizen, I am responsible for the production of hydrogen bombs in the USA: From the plutonium produced at the Hanford N-Reactor in Washington state, to purifying and machining the plutonium at Rocky Flats, Colorado, to building the hydrogen fusion secondary at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to the non-nuclear casing and electrical parts in Kansas City, Missouri, to final assembly of the bomb at the Pantex plant in Texas. New bomb plants are also being built in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Savannah River, S. Carolina.
I am back at Bautzen prison not because I am reverting back to criminal behavior, but because my civil resistance raises public awareness about a new nuclear arms race now speeding ahead with fantastically costly bombs and warplanes. The Life Extension Program for nuclear bombs and missiles will cost one trillion dollars over the next 30 years, which includes 400 B61-12 nuclear bombs ($28 Million each). At more than $100 million each, the F35 warplane program has already cost more than two trillion dollars over its lifetime.
Nuclear resistance is not criminal behavior, it is crime prevention. Nuclear resistance is stopping or preventing the crime of planning and preparing for nuclear war – a nuclear war that would kill millions of people and destroy all living things – omnicide! Nuclear resistance is stopping a mind-boggling waste of money that should be spent on human needs instead of death and destruction.
Dennis DuVall
Write respectful letters of support to Herr Staatsminister Armin Schuster, Sächsisches Staatsministerium des Innern, 01095 Dresden, Germany.
Support Dennis’ demand to ban the US/NATO B61-12 nuclear bombs from Büchel and to stop the stationing of medium-range missiles in Germany.
Support-contact: michelle.shiloh(at)icloud.com
July 4 2022, Frits ter Kuile entered into Wittlich Prison in Germany for a 30 day sentence for his resistance of nuclear weapons. With 17 others, he in 2018 went onto the Büchel Air Base, which is home to 20 U.S. nuclear weapons, and had prayed an Our father on top of a bunker. With this as well with his prison time he warned against danger of the us-american nuclear weapons in Büchel.
Frits says:
“Nuclear weapons are illegal under many international laws and are a threat to creation. Jesus teaches us: pray for those, that prosecute you. Overcome evil with good.”
During our vigils we read these words of Daniel Berrigan about the wasting disease of normalcy:
“I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm… in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans—that five-year plan of studies, that ten-year plan of professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise. “Of course, let us have the peace,” we cry, “but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.” And because we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costs—at all costs—our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost—because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace. There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war—at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.“
Frits ter Kuile
Why is My Grandma in Prison?
Susan and Susan made a comic strip when being at JVA Rohrbach for the grandchildren of Susan C. (Click on the picture to read the whole comic strip.)
Background information
In the German book Brot und Gessetze brechen – Christlicher Antimilitarismus auf der Anklagebank, by Jakob Frühmann and Cristina Yurena Zerr, you find more about theses and connected actions.
Ordensschwestern, Großmütter, Priester oder Postangestellte, die in Militärbasen einbrechen, um gegen dort stationierte Atombomben zu protestieren und so Veränderungen globaler Gewaltverhältnisse zu fordern. Die Pflugscharbewegung wurde zum Symbol radikal christlicher und gewaltfreier Praxis. So etwa im deutschen Büchel, wo US-Atomwaffen gelagert werden, oder in Kings Bay (USA), einer Basis für UBoote mit nuklearen Sprengköpfen. An beiden Orten fanden 2018 Einbrüche statt, um mittels zivilem Ungehorsam gegen die Gewalt und Autorität des Staates Widerstand zu leisten – die Konsequenz waren Prozesse und mehrjährige Haftstrafen.
Das Buch gibt die bemerkenswerten Abschlussplädoyers der angeklagten Aktivist*innen wieder und versammelt Beiträge zur Frage von Abrüstung von unten, zur Geschichte christlich-antimilitaristischen Widerstands und zu blinden Flecken in der Linken. Es liefert in Zeiten zunehmender Aufrüstung Impulse für eine neue Friedensbewegung fernab bürgerlicher Religiosität.
