HS-30 scandal

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HS 30 infantry fighting vehicle in June 1965
HS 30 infantry fighting vehicle

The HS-30 scandal (or Hispano-Suiza scandal ) of the 1960s was the largest German armaments scandal to date . It was about the procurement of the armored personnel carrier HS 30 for the German armed forces , which was apparently only done because bribery payments to several people involved in the procurement decision (including ministerial officials ) and illegal party financing for the CDU were connected with the business.

The procurement of the HS 30

From 1953 the Blank Office planned to procure armored personnel carriers for the Bundeswehr, which was founded in autumn 1955. Since the infantry fighting vehicles offered on the market or used by other western armies did not meet the requirements of the German armed forces, the development of a new infantry fighting vehicle was commissioned.

The designer was André Fürst Poniatowski , a former French officer of Polish origin , who ran a small design office in Paris. As general contractor , the Group was Hispano-Suiza (Suisse) SA in Geneva named. The company was founded in 1938 by Marc Birkigt together with his son Louis after he left the company of the same name in Barcelona after the beginning of the Spanish Civil War . The Swiss company had no experience building tanks. It produced automatic cannons and tools, and at that time it was in Geneva a. a. also make mopeds of the Velosolex type. In 1953, the Federal Border Police had acquired 20 mm anti-aircraft guns from the Swiss , which were technically obsolete and hardly usable. Poniatowski, who had not completed an engineering degree , had designed a troop transport in the 1930s , but it never went into series production.

The Swiss Hispano-Suiza group commissioned the two German companies Hanomag in Hanover and Henschel in Kassel as well as the British Manufacture and Research Company (BMARC) to build the tanks. The BMARC, based in Grantham (Lincolnshire), was a Hispano-Suiza subsidiary and not at all equipped for vehicle construction. They passed the order on to Leyland Motors without the knowledge or consent of the Bonn government . On March 28, 1956, Hispano-Suiza presented the Defense Committee of the Bundestag with a miniature model of the planned HS 30 made of wood and cardboard .

On July 3, 1956, Ministerial Director Wolfgang Holtz told the Defense Committee that the armored personnel carrier had been sufficiently checked for series production, while opposition members (including Helmut Schmidt ) demanded that a few prototypes be ordered before the final decision on purchasing a large number of units . On July 5, 1956, the Defense and Budget Committees decided in a joint meeting for the procurement of 10,680 tanks to grant a binding authorization amounting to 2.78 billion  DM . Adjusted for inflation, this corresponds to 6.91 billion euros in today's currency.

At the turn of the year 1957/1958, test drives with the first HS 30 took place, during which considerable technical defects became apparent. There were long delays in deliveries, and the Bundeswehr finally received 2,176 tanks for 517 million DM between September 1959 and February 1962.

Immediately after commissioning, high costs were incurred for repairs and retrofitting, which mainly affected gearboxes, cooling systems and chains. The engine was far too weak because it was originally designed for a weight of 9 t (instead of the 14.5 t achieved after changes to the design). A suction turbine made a loud howling noise, engine breakdowns could only be repaired in a workshop with a pit, but not on the practice area because the engine was only accessible from below.

The planned number of more than 10,000 copies, which would have been well above demand, was also questionable.

Exposure

Through research by journalists from the Frankfurter Rundschau and the news magazine Deutsches Panorama , connections were made between the HS-30 procurement and bribe payments to several people. At the request of the FDP , the German Bundestag set up a committee of inquiry in 1967 , which heard numerous witnesses and published a report in 1969.

Among the recipients of bribes for this was the personal assistant to the then Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss , Werner Repenning , of the 2.3 million DM should have received. The CDU politician Otto Lenz is said to have received 300,000 DM; The doctor and alleged arms dealer Otto Praun is said to have received the same amount . He was murdered in 1960; Praun's heiress Vera Brühne and her friend Johann Ferbach were sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder; there are serious doubts about their perpetrators. Lenz himself died on May 2, 1957, before he could testify before the investigative committee, in a poor hospital in Naples , according to a death certificate of " Malaria Perniciosa - Uremia ". His secretary and lover refused to come to Germany for questioning by the committee of inquiry because she felt threatened; she confirmed the bribe to an envoy from the committee.

According to the witness Werner Parrots (producer, CDU politician and former mayor of Heidenheim), who was found dead in Lake Constance in 1974, the CDU is to finance the related to the HS-30 purchase 50 million DM election campaign in 1957 have answered : “On the German side, the tank business was only a means of illegal party financing. What was then delivered was secondary. ”Plappert had already informed the German ambassador to Switzerland early on, who in turn had written to Konrad Adenauer . Plappert handed over his documents to Reinhard Gehlen , President of the Federal Intelligence Service ; the latter filed them with the note "done".

In 1970 the sole owner Louis Birkigt dissolved the Swiss group - 1200 employees, annual sales 100 million Swiss francs .

Documentation

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Georg Hodel: The “Octagon” conspiracy in Concrete Issue 3/2000
  2. ↑ a b Rudolf Augstein : HS 30 - or how to ruin a state . In: Der Spiegel . No. 44 , 1966, pp. 8-24 ( Online - Oct. 24, 1966 ).
  3. ↑ The amount was determined using the template: inflation .
  4. ↑ HS 30: The Unfinished . In: Der Spiegel . No. 47 , 1967, p. 60-82 ( Online - Nov. 13, 1967 , cover story).
  5. ↑ Powder shot . In: Der Spiegel . No. 42 , 1970, pp. 167 ( Online - Oct. 12, 1970 ).