Karl Wienand

Karl Wienand (born 15 December 1926 in Lindenpütz; died 10 October 2011 in Trier[1]) was a German politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and secret agent for the DDR's Ministry of State Security (MfS).

Karl Wienand's father, a German communist party member, was frequently detained as an enemy of the Nazi regime[2] and often demonstrated against Robert Ley.

[3] In 1975, he became director of the Bonner "Gesellschaft für kosmetische plastische Chirurgie und Ästhetik mbH Klinik International".

In the view of the historian Arnulf Baring, he belongs "zum sozialliberalen Kernbereich, zur Handvoll ihrer wichtigsten Figuren [to the central core of social liberalism, the most important handful of figures]".

Wienand, in return for roughly 162,500 Deutsche Marken, had allegedly shielded the airline from the inspection of the Federal Aviation Office.

[8] In a vote of no confidence against Chancellor Willy Brandt in 1972, Wienand supposedly paid the CDU representative Julius Steiner 50,000 DM to abstain, the "Steiner-Wienand affair".

Starting in June 1959, the MfS had managed Wienand as a possible unofficial collaborator (German: Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter (IM) Vorlauf) code-named "Streit".

In 1971, he was accepted as a penetrative unofficial collaborator (German: IM mit besonderen Aufgaben) and renamed in the records as "Kontaktperson".

The Düsseldorf regional court (German: Oberlandesgericht Düsseldorf) deemed his punishable work to begin in 1976, as he previously had a protection for official speech; and sentenced him in 1996 on account of his espionage for the DDR to 2.5 years' time and financial penalties equivalent to the amount of funds Wienand had received from the MfS: 1 million DM.

Thereafter German president Roman Herzog commuted his sentence to 5 years' probation on account of Wienand's heart disease.