Konrad Adenauer, first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, had his Social Democratic adversaries spied on for more than 10 years, the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on Friday 8 April.
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The Christian Democrat leader, Chancellor from 1949 to 1963, was reportedly informed by two informants, including one linked to the intelligence services, close to the leadership of the Social Democratic Party SPD.
This is revealed by the study of a historian, Klaus-Dietmar Henke, unveiled Friday by the German daily.
Klaus-Dietmar Henke worked on the archives of the Konrad-Adenauer Foundation, close to the Christian Democrats of the CDU.
Obsessed with a possible infiltration into federal political life of Communists linked to the GDR, the Chancellor would thus have had access, often on the same day of their writing, to nearly 500 confidential reports from the SPD leadership revealing its strategy and its decisions. .
Previous studies had revealed that Chancellor Adenauer had the services spy on political figures, including the future Social Democrat Chancellor Willy Brandt, and collected compromising information on some of them.
But this is the first time that such practices targeting the SPD have come to light.
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First post-war Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, who died in 1967, is considered the father of contemporary Germany, attached to an Atlanticist anchorage, and one of the pioneers of European construction.