by Paolo Valentino
For more than ten years, the Federal Intelligence Service obtained confidential information about the plans and internal decisions of the Social Democrats in advance
FROM THE BERLIN CORRESPONDENT Konrad Adenauer had his political opponents illegally and systematically spied on. For more than a decade, the Chancellor, who linked Germany to the democratic West after the tragedy of National Socialism, used the Federal Intelligence Service to obtain confidential information in advance about the plans and internal decisions of the SPD, the opposition social democratic party. Adenauer, one of the founding fathers of Europe, used two invaders at the top of social democracy, whose existence is only now becoming known.
This was revealed by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, citing unpublished documents emerging from the archives of the KonradAdenauerFoundation and examined as part of an independent historical investigation into the history of the BND, the Federal Republic’s secret services, led by academic KlausDietmar Henke .
In the heart of a country shattered by war in Ukraine and in the face of what Chancellor Scholz called an epochal turning point, a belated Watergate explodes in Germany, shedding new light on the glory and evervaunted years of democratic awakening of the postwar economic miracle, the economic miracle.
The fact that Adenauer had a penchant for dossiers is nothing new. Thanks to two of his notorious employees, State Secretary Hans Globke and secret service agent Reinhard Gehlen, the elderly chancellor had individual opponents monitored and compromising material collected for them, starting with the later SPD leader Willy Brandt. Globke was one of the most controversial figures in Adenauer’s government: under National Socialism, the lawyer had actually been actively involved in drafting the Nuremberg Race Laws, a prologue to the Holocaust of Jews in Germany. As for Gehlen, a former Wehrmacht general, in the postwar period the Nazi Army had reestablished a counterintelligence force that was actually spying on the inside as well, thanks to a sort of confidential agency created within the BND called Organization Gehlen.
What is new, however, is the systemic dimension of the illegal espionage work orchestrated by Adenauer against political competition. At the heart of the operation were Siegfried Ortloff and Siegfried Ziegler, two chairmen of the SPD, the first member of the state management, the second head of the Starnberg state association in Upper Bavaria. Ziegler actually worked for the Gehlen organization and established contact between Adenauer’s employees and Ortloff. Gehlen was the information terminal, which then went to the clerk’s desk, who read everything and wrote many comments in the margins of the papers.
For example, Adenauer found out in real time which candidates the SPD was nominating for the chancellorship or the office of federal president, or that the then socialdemocratic president, Erich Ollenhauer, would no longer run for the chancellorship in the 1961 elections made.
Adenauer’s illegal espionage must be seen in the context of the rampant anticommunism in Germany at the time, which the former chancellor systematically made the subject of his political narrative. In 1953, Adenauer even accused the Social Democrats of illegal funds from the communist GDR, an accusation that he had to publicly withdraw after the elections. On the other hand, no one was spared the fear of communist infiltration: Ortloff himself was responsible in the social democratic leadership for warding off any smuggled communist moles. a fact that there was at least one infiltration, albeit later, that of Günter Guillaume, the East German spy who led the entire process within the SPD from the late 1950s until he became a personal collaborator of Willy Brandt in 1972. Two years later, his discovery forced Brandt, the Chancellor of Ostpolitik, to resign.
Adenauer’s authoritarian style, a man of individual decisions, was also the subject of criticism within the CDU during the years he was in power. In 1949, when the Federal Republic was founded, the Chancellor rejected a grand coalition with the Social Democrats, arguing that a strong opposition was needed. Whatever the SPD did to become stronger, the old fox Adenauer, who had forged himself in the fire of the Weimar Republic, apparently wanted to prepare for the answer in good time at all costs. Too bad he broke the law.
April 9, 2022 (Change April 9, 2022 | 18:42)
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