West Germany: The Issue Is the Rule of Law

Chancellor Konrad Adenauer saved his regime from collapse over the Der Spiegel “treason” scandal last week. But nothing der Alte did or said could muffle the growing noise surrounding his government’s role in the affair.

Still in jail were Publisher Rudolf Augstein and the top editors of his brash newsmagazine, which had angered the government by its incessant criticism and allegedly had broken the law by its publication of “secret” details of the strength of the West German army (TIME. Nov. 9). Still scouring Der Spiegel’s Hamburg headquarters for evidence were the squads of police that last month had pounced on the staff in a series of midnight raids.

Reversing the Rule. The noisiest, angriest Bundestag session in years greeted Adenauer as he rose to state the government’s case. The opposition shouts of “Gestapo!” and ”Neofascist!” only made the old man angrier. “Who is this Herr Augstein, anyway?” cried der Alte. “He makes money out of committing treason and I think that is indecent.”

At that, an angry young Bundestag Deputy from Düsseldorf rose to protest. He was Wolfgang Döring, 43, deputy leader of the Free Democratic Party and a friend of Augstein’s. “Mr. Chancellor, you are the first to arrive at a verdict that only a court has the right to determine.” Then, in a shaking voice, Döring told of his half-Jewish wife, who lost 22 of her 26 living relatives in Nazi concentration camps, and fled to Britain during the war. She did not want to return to Germany, Döring told the Bundestag. “For weeks and months I tried to make it clear to her that all the worries and doubts were unjustified.” Now, he said, his wife’s old fears were returning.

What alarmed the government’s critics most was gradually emerging evidence that the crackdown on the magazine had been essentially political. From the start, many thought it strange that Minister of Justice Wolfgang Stammberger was not told in advance by his own underlings of plans to prosecute Augstein. As it turned out, it was not strange at all.

Augstein is a vigorous backer of the Free Democratic Party, the small group that shares power in an uneasy coalition with Adenauer’s Christian Democrats. Had Stammberger known in advance of the planned arrests, he might well have blocked the scheme. Afterward. Stammberger became so angry that he threatened to quit and take his four F.D.P. colleagues with him out of the coalition Cabinet. But in the end Adenauer salved his hurt feelings by firing a couple of the second-level ministerial officials involved in the arrests. They were obviously political scapegoats. The compromise hardly satisfied Der Spiegel’s editors, who splashed Augstein’s photograph on the cover of the following week’s issue, ran a 24-page story on the affair.

A Call to Málaga. Adenauer admitted that even he knew nothing of Operation Spiegel until just before the arrests were made. Who, then, was behind it? Little by little, the emerging facts pointed at a man who had been Augstein’s main target for years: that baroque Bavarian, Franz Josef Strauss, West Germany’s Defense Minister. Last week Strauss admitted that he himself had telephoned West Germany’s military attaché in Madrid on the night of the arrests, ordered him to “inform” Spanish authorities that a warrant of arrest on suspicion of treason had been issued against Spiegel Editor Conrad Ahlers, who was vacationing on the Spanish coast. Even though he willingly would have returned on his own, Spanish cops locked Ahlers up for 28 hours, sent him back under escort to Germany, where he was promptly arrested.

Since there is no extradition agreement between Spain and West Germany for political crimes, all this was, as the government admitted, “somewhat outside legality.” But, said Adenauer, “whether Ahlers was arrested in Málaga or Hamburg does not bother me much,” and he suggested blandly that procedural flaws in the case could always be investigated afterward.

Even Adenauer’s firmest friends were alarmed to hear this staunch old democrat voice the essentially totalitarian philosophy that the end justifies the means and that, even in peacetime, due process of law can be set aside to protect the state. Almost unanimously, German editors felt that whatever good intentions lay behind the government’s deeds, it all had the sound of an echo from Germany’s tragic past. There was no denying that a security breach had been committed, and there were even charges that Der Spiegel had bribed an army officer to divulge military secrets. But the government had taken its actions in a needlessly heavy-handed manner. The nation’s alarm was, in a sense, reassuring evidence that Germans today want to live under the rule of law.