Pure Pfeiffer

Reiner Pfeiffer (born February 9, 1939 in Lünen , Westphalia ; † August 12, 2015 in Hambergen , Lower Saxony ) was a German journalist who became known to a wide public through his role in the Barschel affair .

biography

Reiner Pfeiffer was born the son of a police officer. Little is known about his childhood. The middle school, in which he was once reset, he finished prematurely. According to his own statements, Pfeiffer wanted to become a priest and attended the Franciscan high schools in Garnstock and Bardel . He then went to a police school, which he left without a degree. As an editor he later worked for the Westfälische Rundschau without an internship. From 1967 to 1969 Pfeiffer worked as a public relations officer for Krupp in Essen and from 1969 to 1976 for the Bremen aircraft manufacturer VFW . Afterwards he was employed by the Bremen CDU for public relations and in 1976 became editor of the then CDU- owned weekly newspaper Weser-Report . But he didn't work there very long. After he had left the Weser Report , Pfeiffer worked as a freelance editor, helped his wife as a salesman in their ice cream parlor and earned his living as a funeral orator at a funeral home.

A year and a half later, Pfeiffer was employed again as a political editor for the Weser Report . After losing his job there, on September 30, 1986, he received an employment contract with Axel Springer Verlag for the project editing of the planned newspaper Der Tag on January 1, 1987. However, the group management decided at the end of the year to drop the plans. In December, Pfeiffer was then referred to the Kiel state government as a media officer. After his involvement in the Barschel and drawer affair , Pfeiffer was unemployed, but until the end of 1988 received a monthly payment of 5,700 Deutschmarks for loss of earnings from the news magazine Der Spiegel . Pfeiffer then worked temporarily as editor-in-chief of an advertising paper and as a credit broker in Oyten near Bremen . Pfeiffer lived with his partner in Hambergen near Bremen since the early 1990s .

Reiner Pfeiffer died on August 12, 2015 at the age of 76 after a long, serious illness.

Barschel affair

Pfeiffer became known for his key role in the Barschel affair. Compared to the news magazine Der Spiegel he stated, on behalf of CDU Prime Minister Barschel the candidate of the SPD , Björn Engholm to have discredited. Pfeiffer filed an anonymous complaint against Engholm for tax evasion and had him shadowed by detectives. He obtained a bugging device, which was supposed to be built into Barschel's telephone in order to simulate a bugging attempt by the SPD. On February 5, 1987, Pfeiffer called Björn Engholm under the name Dr. Wagner and informed him that one of his patients, who had AIDS , had stated that she had been intimate with him.

Pfeiffer often asserted that Prime Minister Barschel was the client of this, in part criminal, machinations; several investigative institutions later questioned Pfeiffer's credibility in this regard. It was not possible to prove Barschel's authorship.

The second Kiel investigative committee had to partially revise the assessments of the first committee. Since then, some have assumed that Pfeiffer acted on his own initiative and played a double game between the CDU, SPD and Spiegel .

Others, such as the chairman of the SPD in the first committee of inquiry into the Barschel affair, Gert Börnsen , assumed that at least the complicity or Barschel's political responsibility is a certain fact without being able to substantiate this assessment with verifiable facts.

Drawer affair

After Barschel's death, Pfeiffer received between 40,000 and 50,000 D-Marks in cash from SPD state chairman Günther Jansen (the exact amount is still unknown). Jansen claims to have collected the money as donations for Pfeiffer's plight and kept it in a drawer. At two meetings he then handed over the collected money. The transfer of money became public in 1993 as a drawer affair, when a former partner of Pfeiffer's life mentioned these payments in an interview with Stern . The drawer affair gave rise to a second committee of inquiry in Kiel in the early 1990s, which ultimately exonerated the former Prime Minister Barschel and incriminated the key witness Pfeiffer.

Björn Engholm , Barschel's successor in the office of Prime Minister, and meanwhile also Federal Chairman of the SPD , was the second Prime Minister of Schleswig-Holstein to fall over Pfeiffer. He had already known about Pfeiffer's machinations against himself before the state elections, but later denied this before the first parliamentary committee of inquiry and was thus possibly guilty of false statements; a criminal court clarification was not carried out because the suspicion of a criminal offense only became known after it had already expired under criminal law.

Employees and aliases

The Barschel and the drawer affair not only limited Pfeiffer's credibility, but also made it public that Pfeiffer had already worked with the impostor Gert Postel in earlier times . This collaboration continued during his time as a media consultant at Uwe Barschel and has played a role that has not yet been clarified in the Kiel affair and in Barschel's death. Among other things, Postel had the code name Dr. Wagner used, with whom Pfeiffer had called Engholm. Pfeiffer and Postel are said to have used the code names Roloff and Gelsenberg in earlier times. A man by the name of Robert Roloff used to live in the neighborhood of Pfeiffer's parents. In his last phone call with his wife Freya von Bismarck (from the Geneva Hotel Beau-Rivage ) in connection with his (alleged) meeting with Roloff, Barschel emphasized that he had already known the alias Gelsenberg (for Pfeiffer) from Kiel. Freya Barschel reported in an interview with the journalist Karsten Kammholz from the newspaper Die Welt on August 17, 2007: “[...] we had already flown via Geneva on the outward journey. His informant wanted to meet him there. My husband was to receive exonerating material from him. Important photos. The informant was called Roloff. He had called my husband several times before. But the meeting turned out to be a trap. We were already in Gran Canaria when he [Barschel] received a call. I don't know where the informant got our number there. "

Barschel had contact with Pfeiffer as early as 1976 through two interviews that Pfeiffer conducted for the Weser Report with the then Schleswig-Holstein Interior Minister.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The man for the rough is dead , bild.de, accessed on August 23, 2015
2. ↑ What became of Reiner Pfeiffer? Hamburger Abendblatt , September 13, 2007, archived from the original on October 17, 2008 ; accessed on October 31, 2012 .  
3. ^ Gert Börnsen: Every means right , Frankfurter Rundschau, September 18, 2007
4. ↑ Reiner Pfeiffer dies: Barschel's former media officer leaves unanswered questions . faz.net. August 23, 2015. Retrieved March 8, 2016.
5. ↑ M. Müller, R. Lambrecht, L. Müller: The Barschel case . Propylaea, 2007 (p. 244)
6. ↑ World Article, August 17, 2007
7. ↑ Herbert Wessels: A political case. Deutscher Studien Verlag, Weinheim 1988 (p. 41 and p. 82)

Web links

• Reiner Pfeiffer in the Internet Movie Database (English)