Adenauer had the SPD leadership spied on - Kühnert is now demanding that the CDU: "It's about time"

Created: 04/10/2022, 16:41

By: Astrid Theil

Konrad Adenauer (centre) is said to have been informed about the BND informer often on the same day.

© dpa

For almost ten years, Konrad Adenauer apparently had the entire SPD leadership spied on.

The SPD reacted in horror - and targeted Adenauer's political heirs.

Berlin – The SPD * reacted in horror to a report that Konrad Adenauer (CDU) had the entire SPD leadership spied on as Chancellor for almost ten years.

The

published the allegations on Friday (April 8).

SPD General Secretary Kevin Kühnert asked the CDU at the weekend to work through the events.

Kühnert chose clear words: "It is an outrageous event that is probably unprecedented in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany that the first democratic Federal Chancellor systematically expanded and consolidated his power while disregarding constitutional and democratic principles".

"It's time to face a critical review as a German Christian democracy," he told the

.

The uncovering of this "unscrupulous abuse of power puts parts of our Federal Republic's history in a completely different light".

Spying by Adenauer: "The history of the CDU party is based on systematic spying for a decade"

The CDU* must respond to the fact that "the history of its most influential chairman and thus also its own party history for more than a decade is based on systematic spying on the political opponent, especially the SPD".

The SPD general secretary said it was hard to bear that it took more than 60 years to clear up this scandal.

According to the research, Adenauer * had the SPD leadership spied on with the help of two informants far more than previously assumed. 

The report is based on the evaluation of historical documents.

One of the informants is said to have worked directly in the SPD leadership.

Almost 500 confidential reports from the SPD board are said to have reached the CDU-led Federal Chancellery* in this way.

Adenauer, who ruled from 1949 to 1963, was often informed about events in the opposition party on the same day by the spies of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND).

Revealed by historians: researching the history of the BND

According to the report, these findings come from files from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, which is close to the CDU, which the historian Klaus-Dietmar Henke evaluated and which the

was able to see.

Henke is spokesman for the independent commission of historians to research the history of the BND.

Kühnert emphasized that it was pointless to ask the "what if" question.

It would not be worth speculating to what extent the course of history would have been different without this massive political distortion of competition.

However, that does not reduce the explosive power of the findings.

In view of these findings, according to Kühnert, history books and biographies would have to be rewritten and "Adenauer's work would have to be reclassified in view of his abuse by the foreign secret service".

Willy Brandt spied on: Adenauer had two informants in the SPD leadership

It was already known that Adenauer, through his state secretary Hans Globke and Reinhard Gehlen, the head of the Gehlen organization named after him, had domestic opponents under surveillance.

The later SPD Chancellor Willy Brandt* was also one of those spied on.

, the documents that have now been evaluated should

reveal a "new dimension" of espionage in political competition.

Today's BND emerged from the Gehlen organization in 1956.

The two main spies in the SPD leadership were the two Social Democrats Siegfried Ortloff and Siegfried Ziegler.

Ortloff worked for the SPD board and took care of the defense against communist infiltration.

Ziegler was in turn a member of the Gehlen organization and SPD district chairman in Starnberg.

According to the investigations, both provided information to Gehlen, which found its way to Adenauer via Globke.

Informed early on: Adenauer had the SPD spied on for a decade

In this way, Adenauer found out, for example, what was being negotiated in the SPD executive committee about the change to majority voting that was being considered at the time - or who would run as an SPD candidate in the federal presidential election.

Adenauer also received the confidential message that the then party leader Erich Ollenhauer did not want to run again as a candidate for chancellor in the 1961 federal election.