The Germans have always been the world’s greatest record keepers. In World War II, they even filed punctiliously the awful details of the butchery of all those that the Nazi leadership deemed undesirable. The Stasi secret police in the old Communist East Germany kept up the tradition. They spied on Germans in their own state as well as on the other side of the border in West Germany. They bugged telephones and homes, used secret agents and paid an army of informers to report any and every piece of information that might one day be of use to East Germany’s espionage chiefs. The result was an incredible mass of files which occupied tall shelves that stretched for no less than 113 miles. Shortly after he had overseen Germany’s reunification, Chancellor Helmut Kohl had a law passed which opened this gargantuan archive for public inspection. It was prompted by his belief that the best way to heal old wounds would be via truth and reconciliation.
However,, Kohl no longer feels quite the same way about the need for openness. In Berlin yesterday, he successfully argued that the records that the Stasi held about him should not be made public on the grounds that their disclosure would infringe his privacy. He further doubted that the data contained with them would be accurate. The court agreed with him and the Stasi files on him, which apparently run to over 2,000 pages, will remain closed. If it had only been a question of Kohl’s privacy being protected, most people would have sympathized with him. But the interest in what the Stasi knew, or thought that they knew about Helmut Kohl, is prompted by a great deal more than idle curiosity.
Kohl’s fall from political grace occurred when an illegal slush fund was discovered within his Christian Democrat party (CDU) which was operated directly from Kohl’s private office. It is already known that this money was used for bribery and political fixes. However, because Kohl managed a deal with the public prosecutor’s office whereby he admitted his guilt and merely paid a fine, the full details of the CDU slush fund never came out. Most particularly, Kohl always refused to name anyone connected with the slush fund. He only admitted accepting some $900,000 in illegal donations to his party.
There is now speculation that had the Stasi files been opened, they may have shown, that the amount of illegal funding given to the CDU may well have exceeded the amount that Kohl admitted. The issue is whether or not the public prosecutor’s office has examined it, either before it reached its deal with the disgraced chancellor or since.
This, Germans feel, is a most important issue. If the Stasi files on Kohl suggest that he received more than he has admitted to, then the plea bargain would seem to be null and void and he could be open to further prosecution. The feeling is that the German law authorities need to clarify whether or not the files were taken into account, when they reached their deal with Kohl. If they were not, then it is clear that they should be. It is quite one thing to bar scandalmongers from raking through the Kohl file for sensational media stories. It is quite another to keep the forces of law and order from establishing the truth.
Kohl is back in news.
