Kießling affair

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The Kiessling affair was a controversy in 1984 to the early adoption of the West German four-star general and former deputy NATO - Supreme Commander Europe , Günter Kiessling (1925-2009), the blackmail because of his alleged homosexuality was accused. After the allegations had been debunked, Kießling was taken back into service and finally honorably dismissed.

course

Kiessling's dismissal

In 1983 the Office for Security of the Bundeswehr (ASBw) investigated a rumor expressed by Ministerialrat Werner Karrasch to Government Director Artur Waldmann of the MAD that Kießling should be homosexual and therefore pose a security risk according to the regulations. The rumor supposedly - and indeed - came from NATO headquarters . In the course of the investigation, the Cologne criminal police questioned employees of various locales - asked by MAD Colonel Heinz Kluss on a small official channel. In the bars “TomTom” and “Café Wüsten” two people identified the photo of Kießling as “Günter or Jürgen, definitely something with 'ü', from the Bundeswehr”. In fact, they mistook him for someone who looked like Kießling.

On the evening of September 14, 1983, Wolfgang Altenburg , Inspector General of the Bundeswehr , summoned Kießling to the Ministry of Defense in Bonn for the next day , where he was confronted with the allegations for the first time. Kießling assured Altenburg and later Defense Minister Manfred Wörner ( CDU ) that the allegations had no real basis. Nevertheless, four days later both agreed that Kießling should call in sick with immediate effect in order to be released from the Bundeswehr on March 31, 1984 . According to this agreement, Wörner prohibited all investigations into the case. The deputy chief of the Office for Security of the Bundeswehr , Colonel i. G. Joachim Krase around.

Lieutenant General Hans-Henning von Sandrart , the deputy chief of operations of the American NATO commander-in-chief Bernard W. Rogers , repeatedly urged that the date of discharge be brought forward to December 31, 1983. The State Secretary Joachim Hiehle , who had been absent for a few months due to illness, took up the case on November 2, 1983 and took over all activities. He succeeded in ensuring that Kießling was retired on December 31, 1983 based on the assumptions, without first hearing him about the allegations. The minister complied with his recommendation.

As part of the conclusion of the case, the then ASBw chief Brigadier General Helmut Behrendt previously prepared a one and a half page summary that repeated the suspicion of homosexuality, but also described a retirement on March 31, 1984 as appropriate. He or his closest co-workers added that the State Criminal Police Office in Düsseldorf could prove Kießling's homosexuality.

This paper and Hiehle's insistence prompted Defense Minister Manfred Wörner on December 8, 1983, to put Kießling into early retirement at the end of 1983. After Kießling was informed of this on December 13, immediately before his release on December 23, 1983, he applied for disciplinary proceedings against himself to clarify the allegations made against him. On the same day, Kießling received his certificate of discharge from the State Secretary. On the same day he took attorney Konrad Redeker as legal counsel and switched General a. D. Ulrich de Maizière as a military mediator.

Public controversy

On January 4, 1984, the Süddeutsche Zeitung published an article by its Bonn correspondent Alexander Szandar through the press agencies, who gave the starting signal for the following media coverage the following day. On the same day, Kießling came to the office of Claus Jacobi at Welt am Sonntag , whom he had briefly known and who, due to his reputation as a conservative journalist, was not suspected of being biased in the sense of a supposedly homosexual general, and asked him for advice. Journalists continued to research the case, and the Department of Defense confirmed the press releases about the retirement. The case got a turning point when Udo Röbel of the Cologne tabloid Express found out through research that Günter or Jürgen could not be the general and that it had to be a mix-up. For this research, Röbel received the Guardian Prize of the German daily press . Oral parliamentary questions from the opposition parties, which the then Parliamentary State Secretary of the Ministry of Defense Peter Kurt Würzbach had to answer, went beyond the usual scope for oral questions. The less enlightening and rather dissuasive behavior of the minister led to the establishment of a parliamentary committee of inquiry, which tried to clear up the affair after February 1st. The committee's final report then revealed the sloppy investigative work of the MAD, the minister's inadequate consideration of all aspects of the affair, and Kießling's total innocence in all of this.

During this affair, the actor Alexander Ziegler came into the public eye: When Defense Minister Manfred Wörner ordered General Günter Kießling's early release because of his alleged homosexuality, possible witnesses (including the innkeeper Udo J. Erlenhardt) were questioned. On January 20, 1984, Ziegler announced to Wörner and members of the BMVg in the ministerial office that he had the minutes of a telephone conversation with the former prostitute Achim Müller on February 12, 1979, from which General Kießling's homosexual inclination was clearly evident. That is why Ziegler was heard by Minister Wörner on January 20, 1984 (accompanied by his Düsseldorf lawyer Friedhelm Spieß), in the presence of the State Secretary in the Federal Chancellery Waldemar Schreckenberger , the General Inspector of the Federal Armed Forces , General Wolfgang Altenburg , and other people. Wörner himself was only briefly present at the conversation because at the same time a current hour of the German Bundestag took place on the release of Kießling. Ziegler succeeded in portraying his presumptuousness as important, but later the accusations collapsed: when the public learned that Wörner had received Ziegler, but had previously and not had time to have a personal conversation with Kießling, Wörner's credibility and The ability to officiate in public has been completely lost. Since mid-January 1984 the public has not been convinced by Wörner's references to findings that were available to him.

The Ziegler-Wörner conversation completely destroyed the minister's last credibility that he could solve the affair. Kießling then withdrew his application for disciplinary proceedings and his lawyer withdrew all complaints. The former was inconclusive after an assessment by the chief legal advisor: no allegation could be proven or proven in any way. In the cases examined in the disciplinary proceedings against Kießling, all allegations were found to be unfounded. Even the illusion-free analysis of the situation by Colonel Jürgen Reichardt as press spokesman for the minister showed, without contradiction, that there was no possibility of "subsequently being able to present public evidence in a matter that should have remained unprovable and therefore had to remain".

After - mainly as a result of the lack of "evidence" on the part of the minister, the reporting that focused on this as well as their reports about a doppelganger who could be mistaken for Kießling, Kießling's busy media work and the relentless work of his lawyer, the renowned Bonn administrative lawyer Konrad Redeker - It became clear that the allegations against Kießling could not be proven and that the connection between homosexuality and security risk was questioned both in parliament and in public, the affair was ended by the intervention of Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1984: Kießling was terminated from 1. February 1984 back into active service and immediately afterwards on March 26, 1984 honorably retired with the big tattoo . Kohl had previously rejected Wörner's resignation.

In his later life, Kiessling was a former soldier avoided by the army generals. For the 1985 anniversary of the Bundeswehr, Kießling was the only four-star general who was not invited.

Kießling later said: "I am not full of hate, but I am still deeply disappointed because the politically responsible acted in disregard of the rule of law." Only the then head of the Military Counterintelligence Service , Brigadier General Helmut Behrendt, experienced the consequences has been. State Secretary Joachim Hiehle had called in sick at the height of the scandal and was welcomed into retirement on April 1, 1984 by the Minister.

To date, the background to the affair has not been fully clarified. The deputy chairman of the staff council Werner Karrasch, who had brought the rumor of Kiessling's homosexuality to a member of the MAD, remained unmolested. Other sources such as B. German officers at the NATO headquarters in Mons, could not yet be identified as the originator or jointly responsible. Rumors according to which the affair is said to have been “completely orchestrated by the Stasi” cannot yet be substantiated. The deputy head of the ASBw, Colonel Joachim Krase , who died in 1988 , was exposed as an agent of the Stasi after his death . Nevertheless, he had tried early to stop all investigations against Kießling.

literature

  • Discussions and findings of the German Bundestag in the matter of Kießling. Application, report and discussion in the matter of the Federal Minister of Defense. Report and recommendation of the Defense Committee as 1st committee of inquiry. Consultation and decision of the plenary (= to the point. Topics of parliamentary consultation. 84, 2). Edited by the Press and Information Office of the German Bundestag. Bonn 1984.
  • Helmut R. Hammerich : “Always on the enemy!” - The Military Counter-Intelligence Service (MAD) 1956–1990 . 1st edition. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht , Göttingen 2019, ISBN 978-3-525-36392-8 , pp. 261–283 (sub-chapter The inglorious case study: The Wörner-Kießling affair in the chapter "Prevention is better than cure": Personal and material security ).
  • Friedrich Koch : Sexual denunciation. Sexuality in the political debate. 2nd Edition. European publishing company, Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-434-46229-5 .
  • Heiner Möllers : The Kießling Affair 1984. On the role of the media in the scandal surrounding the dismissal of General Dr. Günter Kießling. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte . Vol. 64 (2016), H. 3, pp. 517-550, DOI: 10.1515 / vfzg-2016-0024 .
  • Heiner Möllers: The Kießling Affair. The Bundeswehr's biggest scandal. Links, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-96289-037-7 .
  • Jürgen Reichardt : Hardthöhe Bonn. In the vortex of an affair. Osning, Bonn 2008, ISBN 978-3-9806268-5-9 .
  • Klaus Storkmann : “A disgusting piece of smear.” The Wörner-Kiessling affair. In: Military History . 2013, no. 4, pp. 18-21 ( PDF ( Memento of March 27, 2014 in the Internet Archive )).
  • Klaus Storkmann: Cui bono? Decisions and backgrounds of the Wörner-Kießling scandal in 1983/84 as reflected in new research. In: Austrian military magazine . 2014, H. 6, pp. 716-721.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Georg Fülberth: 1984 - XY unsolved. In: Friday. April 2, 2014, accessed February 27, 2020 .
  2. ↑ Wörner - "exposed to ridicule" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 5 , 1984 ( online ).
  3. ^ A b Wolfgang Wiedemeyer : From the morass to the abyssal swamp. Deutschlandfunk , January 3, 2009, accessed on November 6, 2009 .
  4. ↑ West Germany: General Unease. Time , January 23, 1984, accessed November 6, 2009 .
  5. ↑ Heinz Kluss, 84th obituary in: Der Spiegel , 5/2019, January 26, 2010. ( available online )
  6. ↑ Thomas Ramge : "Scandal: Something with ü". Die Zeit , October 23, 2003, accessed on November 6, 2009 .
  7. ↑ Rolf Zundel : "The way of a rumor". Die Zeit , February 24, 1984, accessed November 6, 2009 .
  8. ↑ Sven Felix Kellerhoff : When a federal minister interrogated "stick boys". In: Welt Online . February 2, 2018, accessed February 3, 2018 .
  9. ^ Wörner affair: With deadlocks . In: Der Spiegel . No. 11 , 1984, pp. 27 f . ( online ).
  10. ↑ a b The Federal Government of the Federal Republic of Germany: Decision recommendation and report of the Defense Committee (12th Committee) as the 1st committee of inquiry according to Article 45a, Paragraph 2 of the Basic Law . Printed matter 10/1604. Publishing house Dr. Hans Heger, Bonn June 13, 84 ( bundestag.de [PDF]).
  11. ↑ a b Claus Jacobi: Günter Kiessling is dead. The general who thought of suicide and won , Die Welt, August 28, 2009; first published in the series “50 Years of the Federal Republic. Claus Jacobi remembers ”under the title “ 1984 - The General Thought of Suicide and Victory ” on September 5, 1999 in Welt am Sonntag.
  12. ↑ Stefan Niggemeier: Claus Jacobi, Günther Kießling & die Schwulen , August 28, 2009, www.stefan-niggemeier.de
  13. ↑ Udo Röbel : 50 years of EXPRESS How EXPRESS saved the honor of a general [1] Express
  14. ↑ In the vortex of the gay affair surrounding General Kießling , Mittelbayerische Zeitung on May 17, 2009
  15. ↑ Former general accuses Bundeswehr leadership of displacement. In: deutschlandfunkkultur.de . September 15, 2008, accessed on February 3, 2018 (interview with Günter Kießling): "He [Helmut Kohl] had nothing to say other than throwing this resignation into the trash."
  16. ↑ Once humiliated Bundeswehr general died. FOCUS Online, August 28, 2009, accessed on March 1, 2020 .