Werner Pätsch

Werner Pätsch (* 1926 ) is a German whistleblower and former employee of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV). In 1963 he uncovered a wiretapping affair.

Life

Pätsch was the son of a police officer, he attended elementary and middle school and trained as a legal assistant .

He entered the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and was there since 1956 case leader ( officer ) in the group procurement in for counterintelligence department in charge IV. As a federal official that held office of a government inspector . Pätsch left the public service after the wiretapping affair in 1963 and has since worked as a programmer in the private sector.

Wiretapping

procedure

After 1949, a large number of former employees of the Reich Security Main Office had been recruited for the protection of the Constitution , a group leader in Department IV was the former SS-Hauptsturmführer Government Councilor Erich Wenger , who boasted of his Nazi past .

Pätsch was involved in spying on German citizens. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution worked with the British and American secret services in Germany and had this information obtained in breach of the constitutionally guaranteed confidentiality of letters and telecommunications . The basis for the cooperation was the Germany Treaty of 1955, in which the western victorious powers granted the Federal Republic extensive, but partially limited, sovereignty .

Pätsch personally had doubts about his criminal activities and revealed himself to the lawyer Josef Augstein in the summer of 1963 and also informed him that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution employed many former National Socialists and SS members . The weekly newspaper Die Zeit reported on the unconstitutional wiretapping practices for the first time in early September 1963. On September 19, 1963, Pätsch left his office in Cologne and went into hiding with Augstein's help.

Augstein went to the press with the findings about the surveillance practices and with information about the Nazi clans. In his hiding place, Pätsch gave an interview to the television magazine Panorama , the broadcast of which was prevented by the federal prosecutor's office . The magazine Stern printed the main content of the television interview under the heading P. no longer hears with in October 1963.

The federal government downplayed the wiretapping affair and Interior Minister Hermann Höcherl declared that officials “could not walk around with the Basic Law under their arms all day”. Die Zeit replied: "Among these constitutional protectors, however, there are people who walk around all day, not with the Basic Law, but with the SS blood group tattoo under their arm."

The retired judge and Nazi victim Max Silberstein was commissioned by Chancellor Ludwig Erhard to review the allegations.

Constitutional Protection President Hubert Schrübbers fired his employee on October 15, 1963 without notice. Pätsch sued the dismissal at the labor court in Cologne. After Pätsch had asked the Federal Prosecutor, he was not in custody taken. In January 1964, he was summoned before a committee of inquiry of the German Bundestag . When Pätsch explained how the Allied secret service agents "soldered" the telephone lines, the meeting was designated as a closed session.

Legal dispute

In 1965, Pätsch was put to a three-week trial before the Federal Court of Justice . The prosecution accused Pätsch of having provided unauthorized persons, including journalists, with secret details about the organization and workings of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and about certain individual cases in 1963. Pätsch had deliberately disclosed official and state secrets and thus negligently violated the welfare of the Federal Republic. Federal Prosecutor Walter Wagner argued:

"If officials were allowed to reveal official secrets [...] with impunity and to justify this revelation of state secrets and this violation of his official duties blasphemously with a lack of conscience and the defense of fundamental rights, then, one must say, the result would be [...] a destruction [...] also of the state order, the preservation of which is also the aim of the Basic Law. "

The judges had to decide whether state secrets should be protected even if they contain unconstitutional practices. In the legal theory of the Federal Republic of Germany, the criminal lawyers Edmund Mezger and Theodor Kleinknecht always considered the disclosure of a state secret to be punishable, even if this state secret is unconstitutional. The lawyer Adolf Arndt , however, postulated:

"For a constitutional state [it is] absolutely a matter of course that the only one worthy of protection can be a secret that is not only in accordance with its constitution, but also with its law in general."

The judges of the 3rd Criminal Senate agreed with this in their judgment of November 8, 1965 in a key sentence:

"There is therefore a core area of ​​constitutional law, in the event of which everyone must have the right to call the public immediately and without any detours, even if this necessarily leads to the disclosure of state or official secrets."

In this respect, German civil servants are called upon to uncover illegal practices. Pätsch was only sentenced to four months in prison for deliberate breach of official secrecy because he had not adhered to official channels - the federal prosecutor had demanded one year in prison. The judgment of the Federal Court of Justice is considered a "break with the state authority tradition".

Further development

The German Bundestag passed the emergency laws in 1968 and restricted Article 10 of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany . The G10 laws permit since the spying to "protect the free democratic order". The Allied secret services are also allowed to spy on if they register them with the Office for the Protection of the Constitution or the Federal Intelligence Service .

For the files of the Pätsch proceedings, the security protection was extended from fifty to sixty years in 2013.

In 2011, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution set up a project on its organizational history, "with special consideration of the Nazi references of former employees in the founding phase , " with which the historian Constantin Goschler was commissioned.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Malte Herwig: Das Gewissen , Süddeutsche Zeitung , November 9, 2013, p. V2 9.
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Gerhard Mauz : A Gulliver in the land of the giants . In: Der Spiegel . No. 47 , 1965 ( online - Nov. 17, 1965 ).
3. ↑ ^{a b} Secret Service in the Telephone (cover story) . In: Der Spiegel . No. 18 , 1963 ( online - 18 September 1963 ).
4. ↑ Wenger's alias: Wolters; Member of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler ; SS man; 1944 fight against French Resistance people in the Vosges; Wenger became a "group leader" in the "Counter-Espionage" department at the Federal Office. Source: taz , January 30, 2015.
5. ↑ ^{a b c d} Peter Stähle: The Pätsch case , Die Zeit , August 20, 1965.
6. ^ Theo Sommer: Only interception official assistance? The time of September 13, 1963; Dominik Rigoll: State Security in West Germany: From Denazification to Defense against Extremists, Göttingen 2013, pp. 179f.
7. ↑ Max Silberstein . In: Der Spiegel . No. 38 , 1966 ( online - 12 September 1966 ).
8. ↑ Cabinet minutes of October 2, 1963 , at the Federal Archives.
9. ^ Pätsch judgment . In: Der Spiegel . No. 13 , 1966 ( online - Mar. 21, 1966 ).
10. ^ David Johst: Secret services among friends. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution is listening: The wiretapping affair surrounding the whistleblower Werner Pätsch in 1963 changed the case law in the Federal Republic . In: Die Zeit, November 7, 2013, p. 20.
11. ↑ History project ( memento from January 20, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) at BfV.