Dietmar Kohl had spent the best part of forty-seven years, in one capacity or another, in the Lutheran Church, before his sudden death at the age of sixty-seven in 1987. He had lived for the first twenty-five years of that life in the unified German City of Leipzig, then for five further years in the same place. Only this time, Leipzig was under Soviet control in the Eastern partitioned sector of Germany, from where he and his wife and eight children were deported into the allied controlled democratic West, and it was not only for his religious beliefs that this action was taken. By the time he fathered his final child he had five boys and three daughters, none of whom knew of the dark secret he and his wife had borne, carrying it throughout their lives, until it was swallowed up by the co
