Steiner-Wienand affair
The Steiner-Wienand affair relates to a vote in the Bundestag on April 27, 1972. The opposition leader Rainer Barzel ( CDU ) wanted to become Chancellor in a constructive vote of no confidence, but missed the expected absolute majority by two votes. The managing director of the SPD parliamentary group Karl Wienand was later accused of bribing the CDU member Julius Steiner not to vote for Barzel. In the 1990s it became known that Steiner had received the bribe from the Ministry of State Security ; Whether he also received money from Wienand remained unclear.
situation
Since October 1969, the SPD chairman Willy Brandt was Federal Chancellor of an SPD-FDP coalition . This had only a narrow majority and lost several SPD and FDP MPs to the CDU / CSU parliamentary group in the years to come . The CDU chairman Rainer Barzel believed in April 1972 that he had enough MPs behind him to obtain an absolute majority in a constructive vote of no confidence (through corresponding statements by two FDP MPs). This would have made him Federal Chancellor instead of Brandt.
One of the most controversial issues of the time were the Eastern Treaties , with which the new federal government wanted to de facto recognize the German Democratic Republic, among other things . The Union parties had great reservations about it. However, the GDR leadership wanted Brandt to remain in office. At a secret conference in Moscow in 1970 , for example, State Security Minister Erich Mielke demanded that the ratification of the Eastern Treaty be supported by all intelligence means . In addition, reports the head of espionage at the time, Markus Wolf, the Soviet head of state and party leader Leonid Brezhnev personally convinced the GDR leadership to lend Brandt a hand in the no-confidence vote.
Vote of no confidence
On April 27, 1972, a vote of no confidence in Chancellor Brandt took place in the Bundestag at the request of the Union parliamentary group . The SPD parliamentary group chairman Herbert Wehner had stipulated that the entire SPD parliamentary group should remain in their seats and not take part in the vote in order to immediately recognize any deviants.
When Bundestag President Kai-Uwe von Hassel announced the results of the vote at 1:22 p.m., the opposition - despite the conditions described above - did not get the majority expected by everyone, but missed it by two votes. The absence of the two votes seemed all the more astonishing after the government missed them again the next day in a budget vote. Thus, the then Chancellor Willy Brandt was initially able to continue to govern. After a vote of confidence , Federal President Gustav Heinemann dissolved the Bundestag, and in the subsequent Bundestag election in 1972 , the SPD-FDP coalition was clearly confirmed in November.
People involved
Which two members of parliament did not vote for Barzel in 1972 remained unclear at first. In June 1973, Julius Steiner admitted at a press conference that he had abstained from the vote. For this he received 50,000 DM from the parliamentary manager of the SPD, Karl Wienand . This triggered the Steiner-Wienand affair, as Karl Wienand rejected these allegations. In the 1990s it became known from MfS files that Julius Steiner had received the DM 50,000 bribe directly from the Stasi. This was confirmed in 1997 by the former GDR secret service chief Markus Wolf in his book. It is permanently unknown whether Steiner received money from both the GDR and Wienand, or whether he lied about Wienand's payment. At that time, on June 15, 1973, the Bundestag set up the Steiner-Wienand Committee of Inquiry. Because it was unable to confirm either of the assumptions, even after 40 public meetings, it was disbanded on March 27, 1974 without any result.
According to the latest analysis of the Rosenholz files, the second deviator was the CSU MP Leo Wagner , against whom the Federal Prosecutor's Office made this accusation as early as 2000, as it became known that 50,000 DM had appeared on his account at the time. A CSU politician who was friends with Wagner claimed, however, that he lent Wagner this sum. Wagner himself rejected the allegations as "inaccurate and fictitious". Since espionage was already barred by the statute of limitations at this point in time, despite the statements of a Stasi officer that such an offer of bribery had been made to the indebted Wagner in 1972 and the statement by the last chief of espionage in the GDR, Werner Grossmann , that there had been contacts with Wagner, no legal proceedings were found Exam takes place.
A former KGB man revealed in 1995 that he had wanted to give the SPD negotiator Egon Bahr one million Deutschmarks; this MP was supposed to bribe the opposition with the money. However, Bahr refused. According to the Federal Prosecutor General, Markus Wolf is also said to have tried to induce the renegade FDP MP Erich Mende to vote against Rainer Barzel.
literature
- "They are all so suspicious" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 23 , 1973, p. 24-29 ( online ).
Individual evidence
- ↑ Markus Wolf : Chief of espionage in the secret war. Memories . List, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-471-79158-2 . , P. 261.