Konrad Adenauer, the first West German chancellor and founder of the Christian Democrats, used the state intelligence service to spy on the rival Social Democrats, a new study finds.
, who was later mayor of Berlin and chancellor of West Germany. But Henke said the commission’s revelations go far beyond that report, since it found that Adenauer and Gehlen penetrated the entire SPD leadership.
“Adenauer is the idol of the German people and the [Christian Democrats]. Historians know he was a very harsh politician,” said Henke, who has worked as a historian for more than 40 years. “This is too much. This was against the law. You have a foreign intelligence service which is sniffing into your opposition in party politics. For 10 years, he knew what would be the next move of his political opponents.
In the early 1960s, Gehlen, the head of the BND, began to worry that the spying scheme could be discovered as the twilight of Adenauer’s chancellery set in. To ensure that the secret stayed out of the public eye, Gehlen hired Ortloff, one of the SPD informants, to work at the BND, with a high salary. The other informant, Ziegler, was sent to Mexico, with a cushy income.
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