I thought Germany was more aggressive because of the encrypted messaging Scientologists were using and their bullying tactics against their critics and those who’d left the cult.
My private opinion is that Scientology spent some time trying to find something to blackmail a couple of individuals within the two major political parties (CDU and SPD), and then got a private meeting where they found some logic to allow them to exist.
But here’s the other side of this coin. Roughly one-quarter of Germany is atheists, who won’t buy into any religion, period. Then you have forty percent of the nation who is hard-core Lutheran or Catholic. That only leaves around 30-percent of the nation that you might be able to draw into the pitch....but then you run into the next issues.
A large segment of society is working middle-class with no money to throw away. Then you have the general skeptical view of Germans when it comes to begging money off people. I’d take a guess that out of a thousand German adults....they might only be able to convince two or three people to come and spend a weekend at one of their seminars.
Rich Germans “Hollywood” types? German TV doesn’t pay those salaries, and the movie-production studios don’t give out 7-figure salaries for movies. So, they don’t have money to throw at this type of religious experience, and neither do the music industry types.