Explosive files surfaced
Adenauer had the SPD spied on for years
04/08/2022, 10:07 p.m
Confidential documents from the SPD party executive regularly landed on Konrad Adenauer’s desk. The first German chancellor is said to have studied them extensively. Spies even reported complaints from comrades that their campaign papers were unsexy to the CDU.
According to a report in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the first chancellor of the Federal Republic, Konrad Adenauer, had the SPD spied on for almost ten years. This was done with the help of an informant at the top of the party, the newspaper reported. Almost 500 confidential reports from the SPD party executive reached the chancellery in this way. Adenauer, who ruled from 1949 to 1963, was often informed on the same day about talks and projects of the SPD via the informer of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND). This emerges from the files of the CDU-affiliated Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation, which the historian Klaus-Dietmar Henke evaluated and which the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” was able to see. Henke is spokesman for the independent commission of historians researching the history of the BND.
It was already known that Adenauer, through his state secretary Hans Globke, had domestic opponents monitored and incriminating material collected about them. Reinhard Gehlen, head of the Gehlen organization named after him, which emerged from the BND, was one of his informers. According to “SZ”, the documents now being evaluated reveal a new dimension of the illegal domestic secret service work by Adenauer’s government against political competition. Siegfried Ortloff and Siegfried Ziegler were at the center of the years of espionage against the SPD leadership.
Ortloff worked for the SPD executive board and was responsible for defending against communist infiltration. According to the report, Ziegler was a member of the Gehlen organization and at the same time SPD district chairman in Starnberg, he established contact between Gehlen and Ortloff. Both would have delivered the confidential information from the top circles of comrades to Gehlen, which found its way to Adenauer through his State Secretary Globke.
Lacks the inevitable “shot sex”
The numerous comments made by the Chancellor in the files show how intensively he dealt with the reports prepared by Globke, the newspaper writes. Adenauer found out, for example, what was being discussed in the SPD executive committee about the change to majority voting that was being considered at the time, who would stand as SPD candidate in the election of the Federal President or that the Social Democrats criticized their own campaign magazine in 1957, among other things because it “The ‘shot of sex’ that is indispensable today” was missing, as the report said. The confidential information that the then party leader Erich Ollenhauer did not intend to run again as a candidate for chancellor in the 1961 federal election was also on the Chancellor’s desk in a timely manner.
State Secretary Globke was one of the most controversial figures in Adenauer’s government. The lawyer wrote the commentary on the “Nuremberg Race Laws” during the National Socialist period. After the war, the former Wehrmacht General Gehlen built up the West German foreign intelligence service, which, however, also spied illegally at home.
Adenauer’s surveillance of the SPD coincided with widespread anti-communism in the Federal Republic, which the chancellor was persistently promoting. The fear of communist infiltration was great, it was no coincidence that the SPD had its own staff in Ortloff to defend against it. The suspicions did not stop at the SPD either. Adenauer accused the Social Democrats of being financed by the GDR, which he had to withdraw after the 1953 election.