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Ex-Audi boss Stadler in the Munich district court: a scandal that shook the German auto republic
Photo: Peter Kneffel / dpa
He is the last of the four defendants to arrive.
With quick steps, Rupert Stadler walks through the anteroom to the underground high-security courtroom in Munich-Stadelheim, right next to the long walls of the correctional facility, behind his lawyers.
The waiting journalists pause briefly.
Not only because of the corona mask - model blue disposable face mask - Stadler is not immediately recognizable.
The gray hair, otherwise neatly trimmed short, falls on his forehead.
He's wearing a white shirt under a dark blue suit, nothing has changed.
Stadler takes a seat in the dock - second row in the middle, framed by his lawyers Thilo Pfordte and Ulrike Thole - and takes off his face mask.
The face has become a little narrower.
The minute-long, monotonous clacking of the digital cameras aimed at him lets Stadler endure himself while sitting.
Then the photographers leave the room.
20 journalists and spectators kept at a Corona distance by red and white adhesive tape are allowed to stay in the brightly paneled hall, daylight falls through the barred skylights.
The 57-year-old Stadler takes the stage for the first criminal proceedings in the diesel scandal on German soil.
A scandal that shook the German auto republic and continues to have an impact today.
If VW, Daimler and BMW are desperately fighting against the stigmatization of internal combustion engines and for their place in the new mobility world, it is not only due to Elon Musk and "Fridays for Future", but also to their own sins of the past.
On September 18, 2015, the American environmental authorities accused the Audi parent company VW of having adhered to limit values for the emission of toxic nitrogen oxides for years only with the help of manipulated engines.
On the test bench, which is decisive for approval, the diesel vehicles met the standard; in road use they exceeded the permissible values many times over because sophisticated mechanisms stopped the exhaust gas cleaning.
Important components of the E189 fraud engine exposed by the Americans had been developed at Audi years earlier.
Since the scandal broke up, the slogan "Vorsprung durch Technik", with which the luxury brand celebrated long successes, has had a cynical overtone.
Audi is now considered the nucleus of diesel fraud, but it took more than a year before the investigations in Germany were also directed against Audi.
Then, however, the prosecutors proceeded all the more massively because they soon suspected that the Audi leadership around Stadler was not clearing up, but was knowingly selling further manipulated cars.
The indictment was issued in July 2019 and is now going to court.
Hundreds of thousands of drivers may have been waiting for this moment
Many have waited for this moment for five years: Hundreds of thousands of drivers whose cars have been played with fraudulent software and who may therefore be worth less today;
Employees of Audi and other corporations involved in the scandal who feel betrayed by their employer;
the prosecutors around chief investigator Dominik Kieninger, who investigated for years and identified more than 40 suspects at Audi alone;
the presiding judge Stefan Weickert, who only moved to the head of the 5th Chamber of the Regional Court of Munich II, which is responsible for commercial criminal matters, and who immediately got one of the most widely noticed proceedings of the past decades on the table;
and last but not least, the four defendants and their counsel.
Judge Weickert introduces the four men, two to his right, two across from him, each of the defendants has a row to himself.
Weickert is considered to be determined and straightforward.
He speaks quickly, often ending sentences with a questioning "jaa".
It starts with the engineers and ends with Stadler.
Deep fall
Stadler sits across from Weickert, albeit at a distance of about ten meters.
For four and a half months he was in custody in the Augsburg-Gablingen correctional facility.
A deep fall for the manager.
Grew up on a farm not far from Ingolstadt, studied business administration, joined Audi in 1990, became assistant to VW patriarch Ferdinand Piëch, moved to the top of the Audi team in 2007;
Entrepreneur one year, CEO another year, honorary professor and honorary senator, decorated with the Bavarian Order of Merit - and now Stadelheim.
Stadler is accused of having been informed a few days after the scandal at VW that Audi engines also contained illegal shutdown devices for exhaust gas cleaning.
Since then he has failed to stop production and clarify the matter.
Stadler has denied all of this so far.
His lawyer Pfordte submitted an application right at the beginning, he wanted to know from the judges whether any of them used a car that was equipped with an Audi diesel engine between 2009 and 2020.
That could be a reason to be biased in the process.
In front of Stadler sits Wolfgang Hatz, 61, once a star in the VW universe, from 2001 head of engine development at Audi.
In 2007, the then Audi boss Martin Winterkorn took his confidante Hatz to Wolfsburg, Winterkorn became VW boss and Hatz was in charge of engine development for the entire group.
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Ex-Audi engineer Wolfgang Hatz (center) with his lawyers: nine months in custody
Photo: Peter Kneffel / dpa
Hatz spent nine months in custody, longer than anyone else, suffered a slipped disc, and his lawyers fought a bitter battle with the public prosecutor.
The Freiburg defense attorney Gerson Trüg, who also sits at his side in court, wrote long pleadings in the year between the indictment and the start of the trial, in which he explained why Hatz was innocent.
In essence: It was only after Hatz switched to VW that the alleged fraud started at Audi, he did not know anything about it.
The two men sitting to the right of the judge in the high-security courtroom told the prosecutor a different story, and they want to do the same in court.
There is the engineer L., of all the defendants anchored the lowest in the Audi hierarchy, he headed the "Exhaust aftertreatment" subdivision.
L., 52 years old, has unpacked and especially burdened Hatz and other managers below the board.
He only carried out, and in his position could not have decided which technology would be built into the engines and whether laws would be disregarded.
Investigators say: Anyone who wants to understand how the fraud was technically carried out must talk to L.
Or with Zaccheo Giovanni Pamio.
The 63-year-old Italian - dark gray brush cut, dove blue suit - sits like L. diagonally across from Hatz and Stadler.
Pamio headed the department "Thermodynamics, OBD, Exhaust Aftertreatment", so it was one floor above L in the hierarchy. There is a video on the Internet in which Pamio is standing on the street of an American residential area and declaring the "cleanest diesel in the world".
Like Hatz, Pamio once worked at Fiat, and then both worked closely together at Audi for years.
Their good relationship broke due to the diesel scandal.
Like L. Pamio confessed and heavily burdened Hatz.
Again and again he testified against Hatz in the four months in which he was in custody in Stadelheim, where soon afterwards Hatz was also given a cell and where the two now meet again for the first time.
They hardly look at each other.
In the indictment: How Hatz, Pamio and L. are supposed to have implemented the manipulation
In procedural circles, it is said that all four defendants wanted to comment personally on the allegations made against them in the first few weeks of the trial.
But now the public prosecutors Dominik Kieninger and Christian Schuster have the floor, who alternately read out the indictment.
Even when Kieninger presented the hierarchies and the development of the departments involved in the alleged fraud, it was already clear how complex the matter is that is to be negotiated here over the next two years.
There is talk of oxidative and reductive NOx degradation mechanisms, of chemical processes and formulas.
From SCR catalytic converters, an acoustic function and AdBlue, the urea mixture for exhaust gas cleaning, of which the auto managers wanted as little as possible in the tank.
Technology was never Stadler's world
While the public prosecutor explains the intricacies of the technologies for reducing emissions, page by page, Stadler briefly takes off his glasses and runs his hand over his eyes and face.
Technology was never his world, he is a business economist, a salesman.
Hatz, the engine man who is said to have personally vouched for the success of the "Clean Diesel Campaign" with CEO Martin Winterkorn, leans sometimes to the left and sometimes to the right to his defenders and comments on the technical lecture, occasionally shaking it Head.
Pamio, for whom an interpreter translates the lecture, and L. follow the reading unmoved.
After almost an hour of reading, public prosecutor Schuster takes over and begins to describe the manipulation strategies in detail, from A to F. He reads out long tables of affected Audi models, their engines and the fraud techniques used.
And finally explains how Hatz, Pamio and L. are supposed to have implemented the manipulation.
The often quoted sentence from an engineer’s email is that you will not make it without shitting.
Namely, to make the incompatible compatible, to fulfill all supposed customer requests and at the same time the emission standards.
Only at the very end, in the last part of the 92-page indictment, will the afternoon deal with Rupert Stadler's contribution to the crime.
Unlike the other defendants, he is said to have not actively participated in the manipulation, but rather not adequately clarified and, against his better judgment, not prevented the sale of manipulated vehicles in Europe from autumn 2015.
Therefore, his sentence should be light, and he may be spared imprisonment.
The Winterkorn case is still pending
Nonetheless, attention is likely to be focused primarily on Stadler over the next few months.
Until another manager is likely to attract even more attention next year: the former VW boss Martin Winterkorn.
Probably in the spring of 2021, Winterkorn and other members of the former VW management team in Braunschweig will have to face a process because of their role in the diesel affair.
The Brunswick judges will not have too much respect for the prominent figures of the accused.
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In the Winterkorn case, the Braunschweig Regional Court is even investigating the suspicion of whether the former chief executive found out about the manipulation earlier than the public prosecutor's office suspected.
Instead of not until 2014, as the investigators assume, Winterkorn could have found out about the fraud as early as the summer of 2012 - the court sees at least evidence for this.
Two former VW technicians want to have reported the illegal defeat device internally at the time.
The sensitive information is said to have gone to a close confidante of Winterkorn.
The court now wants to check whether the confidante passed the information on to Winterkorn back then.
If the initial suspicion were to be confirmed, the previous line of defense of the VW Group would definitely be obsolete: For years, Volkswagen has been claiming that the suspicion of fraud did not reach executive board level until the summer of 2015.
The former VW boss denies all allegations.
Collaboration: Simon Hage
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