Hofman Fund · printed sources · Canalul-80
My father is Gheorghe Hofman. Four printed records name him in the Canalul-80 case. They sit here side by side. The family papers stay above them.
CNSAS is the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives. They hold the Securitate archive. The search is not on this page. It is on their page, and it works now.
Collaborators are people checked for a public office or dignity, under article 3 of Law 293/2008, and found to have collaborated. Officers are officers and non-commissioned officers. An officer’s check was requested by someone who had seen their own file.
Fosta SecuritateList of officers
Where you type the name: open Fosta Securitate. From that page you open the list of collaborators. The officers’ list has its own address. The name is typed on the CNSAS site, not in the box on hofmanfund.org. The box on the homepage searches only the pages of this archive.
Their page, on 10 September 2026, gave 1,082 collaborators and 4,927 officers and non-commissioned officers. The list does not hold every informer from 1945–1989. A name missing from the list is not a certificate.
I opened this archive because my father, Gheorghe Hofman, was taken on 31 October 1980, and so a student can read the pages. The whole family file stays private. CNSAS opened the lists because the law requires a check of a person in public office. They are two different doors.
Cases sent to court are searched in the CNSAS register. Final court decisions stay in the Official Monitor, Part III. For one’s own file, and for the identity of the sources in that file: access to the file. The unmasking form is with the forms.
This page is a summary and a credit. It is not a reprint of the journal, and it is not the file. The PDFs stay with the people who published them. The family files are not here. Names of the living are not copied off lists.
The family’s working transcription joins two terms into one year and six months. The certified copy of penal sentence no. 13 of 10 January 1981 is not in the house. It is requested from CNSAS, file P 2551/2026. “Four years each,” “two to three years,” and “four years at Botoșani” are sentences from books.
A web search piles them together. The names come from different papers. The family did not choose them.
Canalul-80. This is the name the Securitate reports give the operation. The figure 80 is the year in that name. The CNSAS study says the people in one of the trials that make up Canalul-80 were found by chance, at an ordinary Militia filter in Suceava, on the night of 18/19 October 1980. Open Doors and the general books on Bible smuggling do not describe that night, and they did not give the file this name.
The Danube–Black Sea Canal (Canalul Dunăre–Marea Neagră) is a public construction work. A search for “Canalul-80” mostly brings that canal up. On Florentin Clipa’s panel, part 14, the Danube–Black Sea work site is the place another man was released from in May 1979. That sentence is his. The operation of the night of 18/19 October 1980 is Canalul-80.
Canalul-81. On p. 178, after Canalul-80, Dorin Dobrincu also has the name Canalul-81, another case. The passage comes from the CNSAS study. Florentin Clipa’s panel, part 10, is his reading of Canalul 81: a barge on the Danube. My father’s night remains the Suceava filter. Canalul-81 does not go on his map.
“Canal 80-81,” the case of Răceală Ioan. A Cluj doctoral table of contents has a chapter by this title, about Răceală Ioan. The chapter was not opened, and it is not a source on this page. The name Ioan Răceală also appears on Clipa’s panel in the Canalul 81 part. My father is named in the Canalul-80 part.
EVANGHELISTUL. A cover name on surveillance file DUI no. 1782. The word belongs to the file. In transcription the file opens on 3 April 1982. The closing date is not reconciled between the papers. A 1987 report still calls him “autorul principal din cazul Canalul 80,” the main author of the Canalul 80 case. It stands on the first page because that is what the cover says.
BIBLIA. The name of the group action, microfilm 45146, opened on 3 February 1981 and closed on 5 December 1985. The book called the Bible is a book title. Closing the file is not a sentence about the end of a person. I do not have a line that says who chose the word. “BIBLIA ÎN ROMÂNIA COMUNISTĂ” is the title of Florentin Clipa’s panel.
Stamora-Moravița, 10 August 1980. The study also places this stop under the name Canalul-80. The Suceava filter, 18/19 October, remains my father’s night.
Creștini după Evanghelie (Christians according to the Gospel) is the name of the assembly. EVANGHELISTUL remains the word on the cover.
Cover names of informers. The Securitate gave an informer a cover name. The note carries that name, not the name in the identity card. The CNSAS dictionary of terms says that, as a rule, when the engagement was signed, the source received a cover name, which could be set by agreement with the officer: the dictionary. The same dictionary says the engagement, by itself, is not enough, and that the Securitate also took information from people who had not signed an engagement. On this door a cover name is not published as a person. EVANGHELISTUL is the name on the cover of the surveillance file, not an informer’s name. A declaration signed in one’s own name, before the investigation organ, is not a recruited informer. How to read a note, and seven masks from my father’s file, are on the page for school. There the names stay masks. The name in the identity card stays to be requested.
A search of a name on the official list is at the top of this page. The two CNSAS lists are there, and so is the reason a missing name is not a certificate.
The same five men are spelled differently from one printing to the next. The table How the names are spelled leaves the spellings as printed. On this door the commune is written Câlnic. The papers also write Câlnic.
The same story has four steps. I do not mix them. The credit stays on the step the sentence belongs to.
Fact · the page is photographed at home
Gheorghe Hofman, son of Serghie and Victoria, born 22 March 1936 in the commune of Grănicești. In October 1980 he was 44. A mechanic, from Rădăuți, an Evangelical Christian. He was taken into pre-trial detention from 31 October 1980, not on the night of the checkpoint.
Margareta Hofman, daughter of Ioan and Valeria, born 1 June 1939 in the same commune. In October 1980 she was 41. She is his wife.
Preventive-arrest warrant no. 337/B/1980, of 26 October 1980, prosecutor Buceșchi Constantin, orders 5 days: from 26 October at 15:00 until 31 October at 15:00. That number is the photographed penal file. It is not the number on a court cover.
The order of the same day, the same file, says the investigation began on 25 October 1980. The heading on the order is article 94 of Law no. 3/1974, distribution without authorization. The page gives the penalty in the statute, from 3 months to 2 years. That range belongs to the statute, not to the sentence.
On the accused form of 26 October 1980 the blanks are filled by the investigation organ. It is not a long statement in his hand. On schooling, the form and the order do not give the same number of grades. They are not reconciled here. The workplace word on the form remains an uncertain reading. The warrant, in transcription, reads the Rădăuți bread-making enterprise.
Working transcription · not the certified copy
The family summary, made from the papers in the house, puts the trial at Rădăuți and two heads: illegal holding of foreign currency, 170 rubles in August 1978, and unauthorized distribution of graphic and sound prints, 1971–1980, received from Gross Paul, Kloos Mihail and others, in Suceava and Botoșani counties. The two terms were joined into one year and six months. The appeal, Criminal Decision no. 49, Suceava County Tribunal, 31 January 1981, file 161/1981, was rejected. Pre-trial detention was deducted. The prison was at Botoșani. He and Kloos Mihail, jointly, 2,822 lei. Taken from him: 29 graphic prints, 25 sound prints and one cassette player. The confiscation receipt of 17 November 1980, in the same transcription, lists cassette player I.T.T. 6331-24-05.
Sentence no. 13 of 10 January 1981 is not in the house. One year and six months is the transcription’s figure. Later tables that print “4 years” beside every name are a summary, not the sentence.
Testimony · someone’s own statement, not the sentence
Margareta Hofman signed a declaration on 30 October 1980, before the investigation organ. A working comparison of the hand, not an expert opinion, finds the body of the pages and the signature “Hofman Margareta” to be the same hand. What she said stays her statement. I do not copy it here, and I do not put it in place of the sentence.
On 25 November 1980 the committee of the Evangelical Christian assembly in Rădăuți writes that he was upright and had no lapse in the assembly. Four signatures. The names are not copied here. The paper is a reference from the assembly. On the house maps this day is the assembly, not the trial. The CNSAS study puts the trial at Suceava from the same 25 November 1980. Both stay until the certified sentence.
His form of 26 October is not a testimony written in his own hand. The torture and the injections in the ALRC report are the committee’s sentence. The house does not hold a page signed by him that says them.
Printed by others · their credit, their sentence
Amnesty International, Report 1981, pp. 314–315, and Report 1982, p. 287. Arrest near Rădăuți, a closed trial at Rădăuți, terms between one and a half and four years for the group, a pardon dated 20 August. The report of a 26-year-old man stays unverified by Amnesty. I do not tie that report to my father.
Keston College, Religion in Communist Lands, vol. 10, no. 2, 1982, pp. 218–226, reprints the ALRC report, affiliated with Christian Solidarity International. On p. 225: two to three years, a trial in Botoșani, torture, injections for Paul Gross and Mihai Closs. A note marked “Ed.” is the Keston editor’s, not the committee’s. The decree in the note on p. 218 is dated 23 August 1981. The scan, by permission of the Keston Institute, stays at biblicalstudies.org.uk.
Elis Neagoe-Pleșa and Liviu Pleșa, “Cultele neoprotestante din România în perioada 1975–1989,” from Securitate reports: the Suceava checkpoint, seven sacks, 576 Russian Bibles, 167 brochures, 40 cassettes, a depot in Karlsruhe, five arrested, sentence no. 13. The term they have is Paul Gross’s: four years, pardoned on 22 August 1981, Decree 189/1981. Eight names of people fined stay in the study. The same authors, in Petcu (ed.), Partidul, Securitatea și cultele, Nemira, 2005, pp. 379–381, by way of Dorin Dobrincu, Polirom, 2018, pp. 177–178. I do not say the PDF and the chapter are the same page.
The panel by Florentin Clipa, in the volume on this site, is his reading. Where a later table puts four years beside every name, the family transcription does not follow it for my father.
Hypothesis · ours, or theirs, and marked as such
That the five in the Christianity Today article of February 1983 were Canalul-80 is our inference. The article names no one. That the Karlsruhe depot was Hoffnung und Hilfe is a hypothesis: the association speaks of transports from 1972, and the study gives the city and does not give their name. That Matei Fakner was pardoned too, because of emigration approval on 21 January 1982, is the study authors’ conclusion, not a line of the sentence.
Stamora-Moravița, on 10 August 1980, in the same study, and Aleksandra Đurić-Milovanović’s 2012 article, are another stop under the name Canalul-80. That is not the night of the Suceava checkpoint. Hidden Galleries, items 215 and 220, are a 1985 case. Mary Heimann, “Christian Outlaws,” 2025, is context, not this file. The Christian Science Monitor of 13 October 1983 does not give the names in this case.
Still to be researched · not in the house, or the papers do not agree
The certified copy of sentence no. 13 and the full text of the appeal decision. The day of release and the file from Botoșani Penitentiary. Which court heard the first trial: the transcription says Rădăuți, the study says Suceava. Which of the three August 1981 dates covers him: 20 August in Amnesty, 22 August for Gross in the study, 23 August in the Keston note. The article written on the sentence. The number of grades. The workplace word. The United States Senate hearing of 27 July 1981, and the two Keston folders at Baylor, Box 4 F7 and Box 17 F9, are not opened here. File 3339/1980 is not in the papers in the house.
Gheorghe Hofman, a mechanic from Rădăuți, an Evangelical Christian. On the family papers he was taken on 31 October 1980, after the Militia filter on the night of 18/19 October at Suceava. The working transcription puts the trial at Rădăuți. The photographed penal file is 337/B/1980. The appeal: Criminal Decision no. 49, Suceava County Tribunal, 31 January 1981, file 161/1981, rejected. Pre-trial detention was deducted. Botoșani was the prison.
The state did not write “Bible smuggling.” The transcription puts two heads: illegal holding of foreign currency, 170 rubles in August 1978, and unauthorized distribution of graphic and sound prints, 1971–1980, received from Gross Paul, Kloos Mihail and others, in Suceava and Botoșani counties. The two terms were joined into one year and six months in prison. He and Kloos Mihail, jointly, 2,822 lei, the equivalent of 170 rubles.
The house maps hold the places: Europe, the road of the books, after the arrest. Florentin Clipa’s panel is at BIBLIA ÎN ROMÂNIA COMUNISTĂ.
Three publications, three courtrooms. I do not straighten them. I set them beside the family paper.
| Family papers | Amnesty, 1981 | Keston, p. 225 | CNSAS study | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Court | The transcription: the trial at Rădăuți. Photographed penal file: 337/B/1980. Appeal: 161/1981, Suceava Tribunal. | a court in Rădăuți, in camera | a trial in Botoșani | a trial at Suceava, from 25 November 1980 |
| Prison | Botoșani | not given as the courtroom | puts the trial in Botoșani | does not give the prison in this passage |
| Length | The transcription: two terms joined into one year and six months. Sentence no. 13 / 10 January 1981. The certified copy is not in the house. | between one and a half and four years, for the group, plus a fine. Not a figure for my father alone. | two to three years | the same sentence no. 13. The authors say they have a term only for Paul Gross: four years’ corrective imprisonment and three years’ loss of rights. Not “four years each.” |
| Release | Appeal rejected 31 January 1981, Criminal Decision no. 49, file 161/1981. The day of release is not on the papers in the house. | the 1982 report: the five were freed after the pardon decree of 20 August | the editor’s note: all five, under the August 1981 amnesty | Gross pardoned on 22 August 1981, Decree 189/1981. The study does not give my father’s day. |
Credit · Report 1981 · pp. 314–315
Amnesty International writes that a group of Christians was arrested near Rădăuți in October 1980 while trying to take Bibles into the Soviet Union. It writes that they were allegedly beaten to extract information and confessions. It also notes a report, from sources in Western Europe, that a 26-year-old man died as a result of a beating. Amnesty says it could not verify that report. I do not tie it to my father.
In January 1981 at least five were tried in camera by a court in Rădăuți: Michael Kloos, Manfred Herberth, Gheorghe Hofman, Mathias Fackner and Paul Gross. Amnesty writes that they were sentenced to between one and a half and four years, and fined, for illegal possession of foreign currency and smuggling. Amnesty adopted them as prisoners of conscience and writes that the real reason was their attempt to distribute Bibles.
Amnesty International Report 1981, the Romania chapter.
Credit · Report 1982 · p. 287
After the pardon decree of 20 August, Amnesty writes that five Christians sentenced in January to between one and a half and four years, in connection with the smuggling of Bibles into the USSR, were also freed. This page does not name them. It points back to the 1981 report.
Amnesty International Report 1982, the Romania chapter.
Credit · Religion in Communist Lands · vol. 10, no. 2, 1982, pp. 218–226
The report was compiled by the Romanian Christian Committee for the Defence of Believers’ Rights (ALRC), affiliated with Christian Solidarity International, based in Switzerland. The printed signature is “The Romanian Committee of Christian Solidarity International.” Keston College reprinted it and added the notes marked “Ed.” The printed dateline is “Romania, 22 March 1981.” The same text also describes events from 1982, so that date does not cover the whole report. The Keston annual-meeting notice on the last page is not part of the report.
In short, the report gathers cases from 1981 and the first months of 1982: prison, closed or damaged churches, fines, books and papers taken, pressure at school and at work, attacks in the press, refused passports. I do not copy every name from the nine pages.
Page 225 · the journal’s English
In January 1981, five believers accused of distributing Bibles in Romania and the USSR were imprisoned for periods of two to three years after a trial in Botoșani. These were Gheorghe Hofman, Mathias Fahner, Paul Gross, Manfred Herbert and Mihai Closs. Before that they were tortured by the security police. Paul Gross and Mihai Closs were injected with drugs to break their will and reveal all that they knew. In connection with this, the following were also interrogated and searched in their homes: Mihai Romaniuc, Ioan Latan, Filip Tăbăcaru, Pricob Tărniceru, Bocan. Other Christians were beaten.
The editor’s note, not the authors’: “They were all released under the amnesty of August 1981.” Lower on the same page the journal speaks again of “the five Christians sentenced in the trial in Botoșani.”
That is their sentence about my father. “Two to three years” and “a trial in Botoșani” stay the journal’s sentence. Beside it, the family transcription: one year and six months, the trial at Rădăuți, the prison at Botoșani. An earlier editor’s note, on p. 218, describes the decree of 23 August 1981: pardon for sentences of up to five years, and one-sixth taken off sentences between five and eight years.
The online scan, by permission of the Keston Institute: biblicalstudies.org.uk, rcl/10-2_218.pdf.
Credit · Elis Neagoe-Pleșa and Liviu Pleșa
The study confirms the Suceava Militia filter on the night of 18/19 October 1980. Two cars with Alba plates, driven by Paul Gross of Câlnic, Alba County, and by Matei Fakner of Sebeș. In the trunks, seven sacks: 576 Russian Bibles, 167 brochures and 40 cassettes. The materials, the study writes from the Securitate reports, came from a depot in Karlsruhe.
Five people were arrested, all Evangelical Christians (Creștini după Evanghelie): Paul Gross, Matei Fakner, Gheorghe Hoffman of Rădăuți, Mihail Kloos of Miercurea Sibiului and Manfred Herbert of Sibiu. The study also names eight other people who were fined. Their names stay in the study.
The charges, in the study’s words, are foreign currency, unauthorized distribution of printed matter and tapes, and, for some of them, complicity in taking goods across the border other than at a customs post. For my father, the study’s lines print the complicity and the distribution, without the currency article. The working transcription puts both: 170 rubles in August 1978, and unauthorized prints from 1971 to 1980. The family papers stay above the study. The certified copy says the article on the sentence.
The trial, the study writes, was at Suceava, from 25 November 1980. On the house maps, 25 November is the assembly, not the trial day. Both stay, until the certified sentence. The five were sentenced by sentence no. 13 of 10 January 1981. The authors write that, at the time of the study, they had a term only for Paul Gross: four years’ corrective imprisonment and three years’ loss of certain rights, pardoned on 22 August 1981 under Decree no. 189/1981. That Matei Fakner was pardoned too, because on 21 January 1982 he was allowed to emigrate to West Germany, is their conclusion, not a line of the sentence.
The same study also mentions another stop, at Stamora-Moravița, on 10 August 1980: brochures, cassettes, cards. It is under the name Canalul-80 as well. It is not the Suceava filter, and it is not my father’s night.
The archive note: Documentary fond, file 141, vol. 1, ff. 127–128, and file 146, vol. 3, ff. 4, 31, 33, 50, 51, 57–68.
The Wayback copy, when cnsas.ro does not answer: the study PDF. The same authors also appear in the volume edited by Adrian Nicolae Petcu, Partidul, Securitatea și cultele, 1945–1989, Nemira, 2005, pp. 379–381, the passage already cited on the front door by way of Dorin Dobrincu, Polirom, 2018, pp. 177–178.
| Romanian papers | Amnesty | Keston | CNSAS study |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hofman Gheorghe | Gheorghe Hofman | Gheorghe Hofman | Gheorghe Hoffman |
| Kloos Mihail, also Kloss | Michael Kloos | Mihai Closs | Mihail Kloos |
| Fakner Matei, also Farner | Mathias Fackner | Mathias Fahner | Matei Fakner |
| Herberth Manfred | Manfred Herberth | Manfred Herbert | Manfred Herbert |
| Gross Paul | Paul Gross | Paul Gross | Paul Gross, and once Paul Gros |
The spellings stay as printed. They do not become new people on this door.
The lines below do not name my father. Where the link is ours, it says so.
Our inference · not the article’s claim
Christianity Today, “Time to Cry Enough!”, February 1983, writes that in March 1981 Senator Mark Hatfield and six other senators wrote for five Romanian Christians imprisoned and fined for distributing Bibles, and that an amnesty followed. The article names no one. That this was Canalul-80 is our inference, from the number, the month and the amnesty.
Another stop · Stamora Moravița
Aleksandra Đurić-Milovanović, “Smuggling Bibles,” Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe 32, no. 4, 2012: the article. A separate Canalul 80 seizure at Stamora Moravița, not the Suceava filter.
No names
The Christian Science Monitor, 13 October 1983, writes about Bible distributors sentenced in 1980–1981. It does not give the names in this case.
Hypothesis
Hoffnung und Hilfe e.V. describes aid transports from Karlsruhe from 1972. That the depot in the CNSAS study was theirs is a hypothesis. The study gives a depot in Karlsruhe. It does not give this association’s name.
Context · not this file
Mary Heimann, “Christian Outlaws,” 2025: PDF. A frame for Bible smuggling in Cold War Europe. It is not my father’s file.
Hidden Galleries, item 215 and item 220, are a different case, from 1985, with Karlsruhe plates. They are not glued to 1980.
I have not read these. They stay here so they do not look as if they were already on the page.