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City authorities in Munich, southern Germany, have closed down a kindergarten with immediate effect after discovering it was run by the Church of Scientology, the municipality said overnight.

“The wellbeing of the children in the establishment was under threat because the education process was based on the principles of Scientology,” the municipality said.

“A few weeks after the center opened we received a letter from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution,” Eva-Maria Volland from Munich’s Education Department told SPIEGEL ONLINE. All members of the Kinderhäusl’s board were Scientologists, according to the letter, and the children were being raised according to the cult’s ideology.

Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution was set up after World War II to pursue any group which the government deemed a specific threat to its democratic system. Neo-Nazis as well as radical Muslim groups have been watched and shut down by the office.

A regional court in Germany recently ruled that Scientologists had enough “ambitions against the free, democratic basic order” for the agency to go on watching them.

Police officers across the country have been used by the Church of Scientology to promote its antidrugs campaign in schools.

Officers have been handing out booklets that praise the science fiction writer L Ron Hubbard, the church’s founder, and describe both prescription and illegal drugs as “poison”.

Scientologists say they are so trusted by the police that they have been asked to act as adult representatives for young people arrested on drugs offences.

One of the booklets handed out by Metropolitan police on behalf of the church’s Say No to Drugs campaign said Hubbard was creator of “the safest, most effective - and only - detoxification procedure of its kind”.

Scientology is mounting an offensive on Europe’s capitals and major cities. “National offices” already exist in Madrid, London and Brussels, and the opening of new branches was discussed at an “expansion summit” last year. “If we are to implement our planetary campaigns for salvation, then we have to reach the top levels of the German government in Berlin,” a Scientology document states, adding that the Berlin headquarters is responsible for “building the necessary in-roads to the German parliament, in order to ensure that our solutions are genuinely introduced to the whole of German society.”

Devotees of the Church of Scientology have gained access to thousands of British children through a charity that visits schools to lecture on the dangers of drugs. A Sunday Times investigation has found that Marlborough College is one of more than 500 schools across Britain where the charity has taught.

Critics of the charity, Narconon, say it is a front to promote the teaching of Scientology - the controversial “religion” founded by L Ron Hubbard, the science fiction writer.

Schools contacted last week said they knew nothing about the charity’s links with Scientology. There is no apparent reference to the church in its drugs education literature.

Police and intelligence agencies have been closely following the activities of the group. State security and educational officials have issued warnings to schools and parents that seemingly innocuous tutoring programmes may be fronts to recruit children and their families.

Scientology-affiliated tutoring programmes have more than tripled in the past 12 months, and there are now estimated to be at least 30 nationwide. ‘We know that Scientology is trying to approach students to gain followers,’ said Bavarian Interior Minister Gunther Beckstein, who said there were at least eight tutoring programmes connected to Scientology in Bavaria.

Over the past few months Riede, an educational expert, has learned of 20 new after-school tutoring centers that are run by Scientologists, in Frankfurt, Hamburg, Stuttgart and elsewhere. Most of the customers of these centers have no idea who they are entrusting their kids to. There is rarely a mention of the word ‘Scientology’ in the brochures, at most the name L. Ron Hubbard appears here and there: The founder of Scientology thought of children as nothing other than “adults in small bodies.”

An anti-drug program with ties to the Church of Scientology will be barred from San Francisco classrooms because of concerns about its scientific accuracy, city schools Superintendent Arlene Ackerman said Tuesday.

Ackerman’s decision followed a review of the Narconon Drug Prevention & Education Program by school health officials, who found that some of its teachings were not “100 percent accurate.”

Scientology teaches its adherents to file reports on members who are acting against the church. Such people are deemed to have brought shame on their families and are sent to ‘ethics’ sessions, where they are questioned for hours about their thoughts and forced to make ‘amends,’ which can include manual labour.

Finally, Astra extricated herself from the movement in 1998, but not before she confessed to a list of petty crimes to avoid being declared a Suppressive Person.

Other Scientologists are ordered not to speak to such outcasts, who are declared enemies, and Astra didn’t want to lose contact with her family.