The Guillaume affair: Like a GDR spy, the Federal Chancellor brought down

The Guillaume affair: Like a GDR spy, the Federal Chancellor brought down

50 years ago the most spectacular German-German agent bomb burst. When Willy Brandt ended up after a business trip at Cologne-Bonn Airport at noon on April 24, 1974, his head of Chancellor Horst Grabert and Interior Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher were waiting on the Rollfeld. "You could already see that you had something special to tell me," recalls Brandt later. In the early morning, Brandt's speaker Günter Guillaume and his wife Christel were arrested. Both are spies of GDR state security. "The news was a hammer," Brandt writes in his "memories". On May 6, 1974, the Social Democrat resigned from the Office of Chancellor.

Even 50 years later, the so-called Guillaume affair is considered one of the most spy cases of the Federal Republic. Neither before nor after it had succeeded in an agent from the communist area of rule to penetrate so far into the innermost center of political power. The communist area is history, the whole scandal looks like a distant echo of the Cold War. On the one hand. On the other hand, the case is still fascinating. How could a Federal Chancellor and Nobel Prize winner, who was revered at that time, to plunge about it?

Günter Guillaume was born in Berlin in 1927 and in 1956 as an alleged refugee with his wife Christel from the GDR to Frankfurt am Main. In fact, both were on behalf of the Ministry of State Security, "Hansen" and "Heinze". They opened a tobacco shop and entered the SPD in accordance with the order. Günter Guillaume managed the election campaign by the SPD transport minister Georg Leber and then received Leber's recommendation for a reference post in the Chancellery. Guillaumes GDR past, inconsistencies in the security check and even whispered about his mediocrity did not stop the man.

In October 1972 he rose to the Chancellor's personal speaker, responsible for Brandt's appointments as SPD boss, as Kristina Meyer reports in her review of the secret service affair. However, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution already had concrete suspicions against Guillaume in May 1973. He was on the trail of him, almost a year before his arrest in the apartment in Bonn-Bad Godesberg. Brandt was informed, but the investigators asked him to leave Guillaume in office to seek evidence against him. In the summer of 1973, the speaker even drove the brands on vacation to Norway and handled there with secret documents. When the pressure grew in spring 1974 to put the suspected spy, the investigators still didn't have enough in their hands. They were lucky, Guillaume exposed themselves when he opened the door in the police in the morning mantle. He was "citizens of the GDR and her officer," said the then 47-year-old according to Brandt's "memories".

"Opportunities to fight for the matter of socialism and peace to the last possibility, was honored." Günter Guillaume died in 1995. Christel divorced in 1981 and died in Berlin in 2004. Brandt remained despite the withdrawal as Chancellor SPD leader. Helmut Schmidt took over the government office. Genscher became foreign minister. Günter and Christel Guillaume were sentenced to long -term prison terms in 1975, but were released into the GDR in 1981 in exchange against Germans. Stasi Minister Erich Mielke received her like heroes.