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Spiegel affair

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The 10 October 1962 edition of Der Spiegel, which contained the article critical of Franz Josef Strauss and triggered the Spiegel affair

The Spiegel affair (German: Spiegel-Affäre) was a political scandal that occurred in West Germany in late 1962.[1]

Franz Josef Strauss, the Defence Minister of West Germany, was criticised in a Der Spiegel article about the state of the Bundeswehr during a personal feud with its editor-in-chief and owner Rudolf Augstein.[2] Strauss was accused of using his influence to suppress freedom of the press when several Der Spiegel staffers were detained for treason and the newspaper's offices were occupied by the police. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer supported Strauss until public backlash and pressure from the Free Democratic Party nearly led to the collapse of Fourth Adenauer cabinet. Strauss was forced to resign in December 1962 and the Der Spiegel staffers were released without trial, though Augstein was held in custody for over a year.

According to some commentators, the Spiegel afair put the post-war West German democracy to its first successful test of press freedom.[3][4] Augstein referred to it as "the biggest judicial scandal in the constitutional history of Germany".

Background

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Rudolf Augstein (right) in 1970 with Chancellor Willy Brandt
Franz Josef Strauss in 1966

Franz Josef Strauss had been the first Federal Minister of Defence of West Germany since October 1956, in the third cabinet of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. This position put him in charge of building up the Bundeswehr, the newly-created armed forces of West Germany, which was an extremely important role at the height of the Cold War. In 1961, Strauss had been accused of accepting bribes during the Lockheed bribery scandals, while negotiating the purchase of F-104G Starfighters for the German Air Force. Strauss was not indicted despite claims from Lockheed associates of him receiving payments, and he filed a defamation lawsuit against his accuser.

Strauss first clashed with Rudolf Augstein, the owner and editor-in-chief of the influential Der Spiegel magazine, in 1961 when it raised accusations of bribery in favor of the FIBAG construction company, which had received a contract for building military facilities. A Bundestag enquiry was held but found no evidence against Strauss and the issue was dropped.[citation needed]

Scandal

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The quarrel between Strauss and Augstein escalated when the 10 October 1962 issue of Der Spiegel presented an article by Conrad Ahlers titled "Bedingt abwehrbereit" ("Conditionally Ready to Defend"), about a NATO exercise called "Fallex 62", which included details about the performance of the Bundeswehr and "a NATO commander’s assessment that found the West German forces to be only partially ready to defend the country."[1][5][6][2] The article argued that the Bundeswehr's poor performance was due to inadequate equipment, and was therefore critical of Strauss.

Der Spiegel was accused of treason (Landesverrat) "by publishing details that a hastily compiled Defense Ministry document claimed were state secrets".[2] At 9 p.m. on 26 October, its offices in Hamburg, as well as the homes of several journalists, were raided and searched by 36 policemen, who confiscated thousands of documents.[5][7] Augstein and editors-in-chief Claus Jacobi and Johannes Engel were arrested. The author of the article Conrad Ahlers, who was vacationing in Spain, was arrested in his hotel during the night. Augstein was held in custody for 103 days and the offices of Der Spiegel remained under police occupation for four weeks, while the magazine continued to appear each week, produced not without some difficulty, elsewhere.[8]

News of the arrests caused protests throughout West Germany, which accused the government of attacking freedom of press. Adenauer was informed of Strauss' actions, though he initially denied all involvement, even before the Bundestag. Adenauer, in another speech, complained about an "abyss of treason" ("Abgrund von Landesverrat").[citation needed] Wolfgang Stammberger, the Minister of Justice, was deliberately left out of all decisions on the matter. Stammberger belonged to the smaller Free Democratic Party (FDP) in Adenauer's coalition government, while Adenaur and Strauss belonged to the Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union of Bavaria sister parties, respectively. Strauss was finally forced to admit that he had phoned the military attaché of the West German embassy to Spain in Madrid and urged the attaché to have Ahlers arrested. This was clearly illegal – as Minister of the Interior Hermann Höcherl paraphrased, "etwas außerhalb der Legalität" ("somewhat outside of legality"). Since Strauss had lied to the Bundestag, on 19 November the five FDP ministers of the cabinet resigned, demanding that he be fired. This put Adenauer himself at risk, being publicly accused of backing the suppression of a critical press with the resources of the state.[9]

Conclusion

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On 26 November 1962, the police ended their occupation of the Der Spiegel offices, while Augstein, Ahlers and three others remained under arrest.

On 16 December 1962, Adenauer formed a new coalition with the FDP, but Strauss and Stammberger were left out of power.[citation needed]

Augstein was finally released on 7 February 1963, having spent 103 days in custody.

On 13 May 1965, the Bundesgerichtshof (highest German court of appeals) refused to commence trial proceedings against Augstein and Ahlers, ruling that during the affair Strauss had exceeded his competencies and committed "Freiheitsberaubung" ("deprivation of personal freedom").[1] However, because of his belief of acting lawfully ("Verbotsirrtum"), he was exempt from punishment. The case also came before the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany, which issued a groundbreaking ruling in August 1966 that laid down the basics of the freedom of the press for decades to come.[10]

Aftermath

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The Spiegel affair had temporarily halted Strauss' political career, and was remembered by many when Strauss ran for Chancellor in 1980, clearly losing against his Social Democratic Party opponent (and incumbent) Helmut Schmidt. However, it is mostly remembered for altering the political culture of post-war West Germany and – with the first mass demonstrations and public protests – being a turning point from the old Obrigkeitsstaat (authoritarian state) into a more liberal democratic state. The British historian Frederick Taylor argued that the Federal Republic under Adenauer retained many of the characteristics of the authoritarian "deep state" that existed under the Weimar Republic, and that the Spiegel affair marked an important turning point in German values as ordinary people rejected the old authoritarian outlook in favour of the more democratic values that came to be seen as the bedrock of the Federal Republic.[11]

Augstein became one of International Press Institute's 50 Hero of World Press Freedom laureates in 2000 for his role in the Spiegel scandal.[12] The scandal was the closure of a reactionary period and the parochial culture in West Germany.[13]

Movie adaptation

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The Spiegel affair was adapted into a German television film, Public Enemies [de], which was broadcast in May 2014 on Arte and ARD. The film was criticized by Rudolf Augstein's daughter, Franziska Augstein [de] for containing many historical inaccuracies, in particular for inappropriately focusing on personal conflicts between Strauss and Augstein to the detriment of covering the actual political and judicial conflict in the society.[14]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b c Marek, Michael; Görtz, Birgit (10 October 2012). "A scandal rocks the young federal republic". Deutsche Welle. Retrieved 26 August 2013.
  2. ^ a b c Krewel, Mona (23 March 2014), "Spiegel Affair", Encyclopædia Britannica.
  3. ^ Kipp, Almut; Haller, Benjamin (23 September 2012), "Schmidt: 'Demokratische Instinkte heute tiefer'", Hamburger Abendblatt (in German), DE.
  4. ^ Turner, Henry Ashby (1987), The Two Germanies Since 1945 (excerpt), Yale University Press, pp. 84–86, ISBN 978-0-30003865-1 – via Google Books.
  5. ^ a b Gunkel, Christoph (21 September 2012). "50th Anniversary of the 'Spiegel Affair': A Watershed Moment for West German Democracy". Der Spiegel. Retrieved 26 August 2013.
  6. ^ "Bedingt abwehrbereit" [Conditionally ready to defend]. Der Spiegel (in German). 10 October 1962. p. 34. Archived from the original on 27 September 2021. Retrieved 10 March 2021.
  7. ^ "Sie kamen in der Nacht". Der Spiegel (online). 7 November 1962. pp. 55–84. Retrieved 18 February 2021.
  8. ^ Georg Bönisch; Hans Halter [in German]; Per Hinrichs; Georg Mascolo [in German]; Dietmar Pieper; Alexander Szandar; Klaus Wiegrefe [in German] (21 October 2002). "Spiegel-Affäre ... 'Dummheiten des Staates'". Vor 40 Jahren marschierte die Staatsmacht in die SPIEGEL-Zentrale ein. Herausgeber Rudolf Augstein und weitere angebliche Vaterlandsverräter wurden inhaftiert. Die Aufklärung des Skandals kostete den damaligen Verteidigungsminister Strauß das Amt – und demokratisierte die Republik. Der Spiegel (online). pp. 63–68. Retrieved 18 February 2021.
  9. ^ Oswald, Bernd; Dau, Daniela (17 May 2010), "Von Gier und Größenwahn", Süddeutsche Zeitung (in German).
  10. ^ Pöttker, Horst [in German] (10 July 2012), "Meilenstein der Pressefreiheit – 50 Jahre 'Spiegel'-Affäre", Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte [de] (in German), vol. 2012, no. 29–31, BPB.
  11. ^ Taylor, Frederick (2011), Exorcising Hitler, London: Bloomsbury Press, p. 371.
  12. ^ "Rudolf Augstein", Laudatory submission for Hero of World Press Freedom Award, AT: Free Media.
  13. ^ Esser, Frank; Hartung, Uwe (2004). "Nazis, Pollution, and no Sex: Political Scandals as a Reflection of Political Culture in Germany". American Behavioral Scientist. 47 (1040): 1040–1071. doi:10.1177/0002764203262277. S2CID 143578000.
  14. ^ Augstein, Franziska [in German] (26 April 2014), "Verfilmung der "Spiegel"-Affäre – Das Duell", Süddeutsche Zeitung (in German).

Further reading

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  • Birkner, Thomas, and Sebastian Mallek. "The Spiegel Affair, 1962: The incident that changed German journalism history and mediatized politics." in Critical Incidents in Journalism (Routledge, 2020) pp. 203–215. [ISBN missing]
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