Guillaume affair

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Brandt and Guillaume in Düsseldorf

The Guillaume affair is the most politically significant espionage case in German-German history . On April 24, 1974 with Günter Guillaume one of the closest associates of Chancellor Willy Brandt as DDR - Agent of the Ministry of State Security(MfS, also: Stasi) exposed. Brandt took over political responsibility and resigned from his office as Federal Chancellor on May 7, 1974. It is considered likely that the Guillaume affair was not the sole reason for the resignation, especially since the information sent by Guillaume to the GDR was apparently not particularly relevant to security. Günter Guillaume his with him was intelligence Lich cooperating wife Christel Guillaume unmasked as an agent.

Espionage

On behalf of the Central Enlightenment Administration (HVA) of the MfS, Guillaume traveled to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1956 as an " Officer in Special Operations " (OibE). The employee of the MfS and officer of the National People's Army (NVA) pretended to be a refugee . From the beginning he was committed to the party work in the SPD and distinguished himself in the more conservative wing in Frankfurt am Main . In 1970 Guillaume joined the Federal Chancellery and in October 1972 became the Federal Chancellor's personal advisor on party matters. In this function, he had, among other things, to organize the party meetings with Brandt, who in addition to the chancellorship also held the party chairmanship of the SPD, and to conduct correspondence with party branches and members. Guillaume thus belonged to Brandt's closest circle of employees and was one of the few who accompanied the Chancellor privately and on vacation.

Exposure

Guillaume with Willy Brandt on a campaign trip in Lower Saxony, 1974

Guillaume was exposed on the basis of congratulations that the HVA sent the Guillaume couple in the 1950s. On February 1, 1956, birthday greetings to "Georg" were sent via agent radio, birthday greetings to "Chr." On October 6, 1956, and in mid-April 1957 the message: "Congratulations on the second husband!" (This meant his newborn son Pierre) been. The Federal Intelligence Service (BND) was able to decipher these radio messages and archived them. Based on these records, the identity of Guillaume was later established beyond doubt, and with it his previous work for the HVA. In February 1973, senior official Heinrich Schoregge from the Cologne Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) was busy with three espionage cases , in each of which Guillaume somehow appeared. A colleague told him about the 17-year-old radio messages, he checked the data and was able to assign them to the Guillaume couple. Schoregge reported, whereupon he was " advised to carefully observe the couple [...]". What is remarkable about revealing Guillaume in the 1970s, he was known to the BND early stage as a potential Agent: One in the former East Berlin Verlag Volk und Wissen active former Wehrmacht - commissioned officer had alerted the BND in 1954 to Guillaume. This informant then sent the BND information about the commissioning of Guillaume by this publisher to enter the Federal Republic "with the aim of gaining influence in publishers, printing houses and people in order to then infiltrate them to the east". In 1956 Guillaume moved to the Federal Republic, where he made a career as a functionary in the SPD from 1964; In vain did the BND warn the Chancellery in 1969 against the recruitment of Guillaume, who was applying there.

On May 29, 1973, the President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution , Günther Nollau , addressed the then Interior Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher for the first time about the suspicion of espionage against Guillaume. Genscher then informed the Chancellor. Nollau asked that Guillaume be left in his position for the time being in order to observe him, to get an idea of ​​the extent of his betrayal and to collect further material. Brandt agreed to this procedure and only informed his office manager Reinhard Wilke and the head of the Chancellery, Horst Grabert . Neither Egon Bahr, Brandt's closest advisor, nor Horst Ehmke , who had hired Guillaume as Grabert's predecessor, were informed of the suspicion. Because of the long drawn-out investigation, Guillaume stayed in the immediate vicinity of Brandt for a relatively long time and even accompanied the Chancellor in July 1973 during his vacation in Norway .

On March 1, 1974, Nollau and Genscher visited the Chancellor and Nollau reported on the investigation against Guillaume. Nollau announced that Guillaume would be arrested for the next two to three weeks. Since evidence that could be used in court was still not available, Nollau suggested that the collected material be handed over to the Attorney General so that he could decide on a formal opening of proceedings. Brandt underestimated the explosiveness of the affair, which he believed would get lost, and continued to pay little attention to it.

On April 24, 1974, Guillaume and his wife were arrested. When he was arrested, Guillaume said: “I am an officer in the National People's Army of the GDR and an employee of the Ministry for State Security. I ask you to respect my officer's honor ”, but remained silent during the rest of the proceedings because he was not allowed to have the desired personal discussion with Chancellor Brandt. In 1975 Guillaume was sentenced to 13 and his wife to 8 years imprisonment for serious treason , which they did not fully serve due to an exchange of agents between the GDR and the Federal Republic in 1981.

After the end of the GDR and the decryption of HVA data carriers, it turned out that the informational value of Guillaume's reports was relatively low. Half concerned internal SPD party matters, just under a quarter trade union issues. Only a good quarter dealt with government policy. None of the explosive papers that Guillaume allegedly submitted to the Ministry for State Security while on vacation in Norway with Brandt , is not recorded in the database. The low value of the “Hansen” source is also evident in the fact that out of nineteen items of information, fourteen were rated “3” (“medium value”). Only five received the grade “2” (“valuable”) and not a single one received the grade “1” (“very valuable”).

Resignation of the Federal Chancellor

Helmut Schmidt in conversation with Herbert Wehner on May 8, 1974

On May 1, 1974, Brandt received a dossier from the head of the Federal Criminal Police Office , Horst Herold, from Klaus Kinkel , the personal advisor to Interior Minister Genscher . This document summarized the statements of the security officers about Brandt's private life recorded in the course of the investigation against Guillaume. This also included statements about Brandt's alcohol consumption and sexual affairs. Guillaume is even said to have been the one who “brought women” to Brandt. Brandt's environment feared that these details, the first of which had apparently already been passed on to the media, would be used by political opponents for a media campaign in the next election campaign (which then took place in 1976 ). Herold and Nollau also saw the risk that the federal government could be blackmailed by means of targeted indiscretion and disclosure of spicy details by the GDR. In a personal conversation, Nollau advised Herbert Wehner to persuade Brandt to resign.

On the evening of May 4, 1974, Brandt and Wehner had an hour-long conversation in Bad Münstereifel on the sidelines of the regular consultations between the SPD and the trade unions in the Münstereifel building . Presumably because Wehner did not expressly advise against resigning, Brandt decided to resign . Possibly, however, the inner leadership circle of the SPD - and here especially Wehner - came to the conclusion that Brandt, weakened by depression, illness and alcohol problems, lacked the strength to withstand the expected media campaign. Probably the SPD's supposedly better chances of success in the upcoming election campaign with a new, unencumbered Chancellor also played a role. Wehner later claimed that he had assured Brandt that in case of doubt he would allow himself to be "torn apart" for him if Brandt decides to get through the matter. Brandt, on the other hand, presented it in such a way that he had been denied the decisive support of Wehner, Helmut Schmidt and others. The final rash in the morning was the statement by his wife, Rut Brandt , that somebody had to take responsibility after all .

On the morning of May 5, 1974, Brandt announced his decision to resign to the top SPD politicians who were present in Bad Münstereifel. He had the head of the Chancellery Horst Grabert deliver a letter to this effect to the Federal President Gustav Heinemann , who was in Hamburg . Brandt thus also assumed political responsibility for the decision, subsequently judged as negligence, not to arrest Guillaume immediately. In his letter accompanying the declaration of resignation, which was not intended for the public, Brandt wrote: “I will remain in politics, but I have to get rid of the current burden.” On May 7, 1974, Brandt's resignation was announced by NDR at midnight . The television news programs the following day showed a scene that was to establish itself in the collective memory for a long time: In the parliamentary group meeting, Wehner lays a large bouquet of flowers on Brandt's square, while Egon Bahr , weeping, buries his face in his hands.

Helmut Schmidt later said (in an interview with Reinhold Beckmann ) that Brandt's depression was the main reason for the resignation. He (Schmidt) was “scared” (literally) to hold the office of Federal Chancellor; he yelled at Brandt, told him that this affair was absolutely no reason to resign.

Political Consequences

The Guillaume affair took place shortly after the signing of the basic agreement ; Brandt's resignation took place five days after the opening of the Permanent Mission of the Federal Republic in the GDR . Even if the official statement of the GDR government that Guillaume had already been "switched off" in the course of the policy of détente must be doubted, the overthrow of Brandt was not in the interests of the GDR, which supported Brandt's east policy. According to Markus Wolf , the former head of the GDR's foreign intelligence service , Brandt's overthrow was never intended and was viewed by the Stasi as a major mishap.

In the aftermath of Brandt's resignation, there were intensive unofficial contacts between the governments of the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR with the aim of limiting the damage. In fact, the West German government signaled to the East German government that it was ready to continue the normalization policy, provided that “certain limits would be adhered to by the intelligence services in the future” and warned of the “serious burdens on intergovernmental relations” if it was not ensured that Such would not happen in the future.

Wehner is said to have asked Schmidt to become chancellor with the sentence “Helmut, you have to do this now” . Schmidt claims to have been surprised by the request to make him chancellor and to have set himself the task reluctantly and out of a sense of duty. After his nomination by the SPD, Schmidt was elected Chancellor on May 16, 1974. Brandt remained party chairman of the SPD until 1987. In 1994 Brandt's “Notes on Case G” appeared posthumously, in which he settled accounts with Wehner, among others.

Quotes

In the reason for his resignation on television on May 8, 1974, Brandt said among other things:

“Whatever advice I was given, I shouldn't have let secret papers slip through the hands of the agent during my vacation in Norway last summer. It is and remains grotesque to consider a German Chancellor to be open to blackmail. In any case, I am not. "

At a later point in time, Brandt explained in front of the television camera:

"In truth, I was broken for reasons that had nothing to do with the incident at the time."

In an NDR interview on October 29, 1979, Herbert Wehner replied to the question whether he had considered the resignation to be necessary:

“I didn't think anything was necessary. I met Willy Brandt early on May 6, 1974, when he said in a narrow circle of the coalition that he had decided to resign, because of the incident with this Guillaume because of negligence that had occurred, I was one of them - by the way, none the other agreed, neither the three from the FDP nor the second from the SPD - except for me - I'm talking about Brandt, he was one of the three of us. I said at the time that there was no reason for his resignation, but - and then I said: There is reason for the so-and-so to leave because of the responsibility he had during the weeks in question. Not a minister, but a state secretary, not because I thought it would be better to be a state secretary, but rather who was responsible for ensuring that texts, encrypted and decrypted, passed through the hands of someone who otherwise would never have had anything to do with them. And the other thing I say, you have to decide that, someone else has to decide, none of them are decisions by the Chancellor. How it was with the observations and the evaluation of the observations that were made from a certain point in time. That was my explanation. I have stated that there is no need for Chancellor Willy Brandt to resign from what has been termed negligence. There was a period of reflection and discussion until the evening of that day, and in the evening he then declared that he would stick to this decision. "

Wibke Bruhns said about an evening with the Chancellor four days before his resignation:

“The triumph of the election was torn to pieces in internal political turmoil - oil crisis, air traffic controller strike, toughest disputes over excessive wage demands by ÖTV. The Chancellor was in poor health, a vocal cord operation and general exhaustion put him out of action for a long time. His lack of assertiveness was increasingly the subject of public criticism. It culminated in Herbert Wehner's attacks on Brandt during a trip to Moscow in the autumn of 1973: 'The gentleman likes to take a bath' and 'the government lacks a head'. […] On May 1, 1974, a week after the GDR spy was arrested, Willy Brandt was on his last trip as Chancellor, a long-planned trip to Heligoland. Shortly before, he had received a list from Interior Minister Genscher's office manager, Klaus Kinkel, in Hamburg, which included the statements of his bodyguards about alleged meetings with women that Guillaume is said to have 'brought' to him. Brandt probably suspected that he could not get through this, that after decades of defamation campaigns by the right-wing mass newspapers, the combination of sex and spy thriller would now bring him down. We, the traveling journalists, had no idea of ​​this list. It was bleak weather, Willy Brandt holed up behind his stone face. We didn't dare speak to him, especially not to Guillaume. Apart from a few comrades and the mayor, no one had appeared at the pier to receive them. The island seemed deserted at this late hour of the afternoon. The day guests had left, the people of Heligoland were crouching in their warm rooms and watching football. 'That would not have happened to Günter,' was whispered among colleagues - Guillaume would have sent the Chancellor into the midst of the butter ships and had the football times in his head. It turned out to be a chunky evening with a lot of alcohol and 'Mr. Pastor sin Kau-jau-jau'. The brave comrades patted the great chairman on the shoulder encouragingly - 'wi mok dat already!' Brandt, who already endured such evenings with difficulty, resorted to the tried and tested means of defense: he told jokes. In the middle of the drunken hustle and bustle, he suddenly stared at his hands. 'Fuck life!' He muttered. The next morning Brandt had a hangover and appeared with a suit jacket that did not go with his trousers. The substitute speaker, an inexperienced fellow, kept the Chancellor and everyone else waiting because he hadn't got out of bed in time. It was an uncomfortable return trip across rough seas. "

Matthias Brandt , Willy Brandt's son, who played the role of Guillaume in the ARD docudrama Im Schatten der Macht , explained:

“I found it interesting that we don't really know that much about Guillaume. [...] I was fascinated by Guillaume's double loyalty to my father on the one hand and to the GDR on the other. "

Günter Gaus , the Permanent Representative of the Federal Republic in East Berlin , said:

“When Guillaume was exposed and arrested, I canceled my next round of negotiations with Kurt Nier on the instructions of the Federal Chancellor. We wanted to make it clear that this is not the way the Federal Republic wants to be treated. But there was unanimous agreement in the coalition that this exposure of a spy in the Chancellery did not change the factual correctness of the policy. "

Movies

  • ARD feature film In the Shadow of Power by director Oliver Storz with Michael Mendl as Willy Brandt, Jürgen Hentsch as Herbert Wehner, Dieter Pfaff as Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Matthias Brandt as Günter Guillaume. Above all, the last 14 days of Brandt's chancellorship, i.e. the climax of the Guillaume affair, are shown. The docudrama is partly fictional. Since certain details could not be reconstructed, one wanted - according to the ARD info text - to show how it could have been (for example in a personal conversation with Brandt-Wehner).

See also

Sources

What or who ultimately persuaded Brandt to resign has not yet been finally clarified. Crucial information on this is presumed to be in the so-called “Unkeler inventory” from Brandt's estate. So far, however, no author or journalist has been able to evaluate this, as it was still blocked by Brandt himself.

literature

  • Arnulf Baring : Change of power . Deutsche Verlags Anstalt, 1982, ISBN 3-421-06095-9
    Is considered a standard work. For a long time Brandt did not comment publicly on his decision, but instead gave extensive information to the journalist Baring.
  • Hermann Schreiber : Falling Chancellor - Why Willy Brandt resigned . Econ, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-430-18054-6
    More like a portrait of Guillaume; takes up conspiracy theories without substantiating them. See the book review in Die Zeit
  • Willy Brandt: memories. With the "Notes on Case G". Extended edition. UTB, Berlin-Frankfurt a. M. 1994, ISBN 3-548-36497-7
    In the "Notes on Case G" Brandt raises serious allegations against Wehner, whom he holds responsible for his resignation.
  • Günter Guillaume: The statement - How it really was . Universitas, Tübingen 1990, ISBN 3-8004-1229-2
  • Pierre Boom , Gerhard Haase-Hindenberg : The strange father . Structure, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-7466-2146-1
  • Eckard Michels : Guillaume, the spy. A German-German career. Links, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-86153-708-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hermann Schreiber: Fall of the Chancellor - Why Willy Brandt resigned. Econ, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-430-18054-6 . (According to Schreiber, Guillaume should not have been a really successful agent in the assessment of the HVA . None of his around 25 reports from the Federal Chancellery had been awarded the highest seal of quality, grade 1, in East Berlin)
  2. ↑ Guillaume exposed . In: Der Spiegel . No. 10 , 2013, p. 18 ( online ).
  3. ↑ The Guillaume case . In: Der Spiegel . No. 41 , 1974, p. 161-174 ( online ).
  4. ^ End of a chancellorship. April 23, 2019, accessed on May 12, 2019 (German).
  5. ↑ a b c Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt Foundation: Willy Brandt Biography: Resignation ( Memento of February 4, 2012 in the Internet Archive ).
  6. ^ Speech by Hans-Jochen Vogel on October 21, 2002 on the occasion of the presentation of the fifth volume of the Berlin edition in the Literaturhaus of the state capital Munich
  7. ^ Gregor Schöllgen: Willy Brandt. The biography. Propylaea, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-549-07142-6 . (Schöllgen describes Brandt's “inclination to nicotine and alcohol”, his “amorous affairs” and his “depressions” in detail, which, however, would not have harmed him.)
  8. ^ The letter of resignation ( memento of June 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Deutsches Historisches Museum , EB no .: 1996/01/0045 in the <?>
  9. ^ Arnulf Baring : Change of power . Deutsche Verlags Anstalt, 1982, ISBN 3-421-06095-9 (From this letter, among other things, Baring concluded how “exhausted and tired” Brandt must have been personally.)
  10. ↑ Martin Rupps: Against the formation of legends. The overthrow of the Chancellor in the force field of the Troika. (No longer available online.) In: Frankfurter Hefte. Archived from the original on November 26, 2004 ; Retrieved on December 25, 2014 (under the topic The topic: Politics and Emotion. ).
  11. ↑ Markus Wolf: Chief of espionage in the secret war. Memories. Econ & List, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-612-26482-6 .
  12. ^ State Secretary Günter Gaus : Minutes of a one-to-one conversation with the GDR Deputy Foreign Minister Kurt Nier on May 23, 1974 in the GDR Foreign Ministry in East Berlin bundesarchiv.de (PDF). Source: Federal Chancellery, VS registry, negotiations with the GDR, volume 8
  13. ↑ Willy Brandt: Memories. With the "Notes on Case G". Extended edition. UTB, Berlin / Frankfurt a. M. 1994, ISBN 3-548-36497-7 .
  14. ↑ Quoted from: Gregor Schöllgen: The Chancellor and his Spy . In: Die Zeit , No. 40/2003
  15. ^ Wibke Bruhns : Willy Brandt - Disassembly of a light figure . In: stern.de
  16. ↑ TV film: "In the shadow of power" . In: stern.de , May 7, 2004
  17. ↑ It was the most important time of my life. Günter Gaus on the first permanent representation of the FRG in the GDR Berlin talks . In: Berlin monthly magazine ( Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein ) . Issue 6, 2001, ISSN  0944-5560 , p. 87-88 ( luise-berlin.de ).
  18. ^ Gregor Schöllgen: The Chancellor and his spy . In: Die Zeit , No. 40/2003. “The report was written long ago, and since Arnulf Baring's change of power, that is, since 1982, we have known exactly how everything happened, how the GDR spy ended up in the Chancellor's personal office, and who was responsible and those affected, including Brandt For years, we dealt with the suspicion of Günther Guillaume, how Brandt's environment behaved in the decisive days and hours before his resignation, what physical and mental condition the Chancellor was in when he learned of the spy's arrest, but also of the fact that Among other things, information about his love life had been collected by officers from his escort. "
This article was added to the list of excellent articles on September 17, 2006 in this version .