Leo Wagner continued to deny that he had accepted a bribe from East German agents to vote against his own party and in support of the Brandt government, but by the time an 80 minute documentary film of the affair was produced by his grandson nearly half a century later, there was no longer any need to preface reports of the matter with the adjective "allegedly“.
[5][6] Leo Wagner was born in Munich during the wave of revolutions that swept across German posts and cities during the immediate aftermath of World War I.
[7] Wagner passed his school final exams in 1937, and went on to enrol at the “Hochschule für Lehrerbildung“ (government controlled teacher training college) in Munich.
In the 1961 election the two main parties, the CDU and the SPD, received an almost identical level of support from voters: however, the CSU received almost 10% of the West German national vote from its Bavarian base, and a three party CDU/CSU/FDP coalition came together to back the continuation of a government dominated by the CDU under the leadership (as before) of Chancellor Adenauer, whose advancing age held out the promise, for ambitious leadership contenders of personnel changes at the top in the not too distant future.
[11] After the Spiegel affair in 1962 and the associated resignation of Franz Josef Strauß from his ministerial position, Wagner employed his considerable political skills of guile, charm and bulldozer-spirit behind the scenes to pave the path for his friend, the party leader, "back to the cabinet table" at the end of 1966.
[12][13][14] In 1968 Wagner was the editor-compiler of a volume of the Bundestag speeches delivered by Franz Josef Strauß (who would continue in post as the CSU leader till his death in 1988).
[17] In 1967 he became involved with Gunter Sachs and the "Flammenpfennig“ association which they founded together and which, along with other schemes, subsequently became known for selling commemorative gramophone records in order to generate money to support the recently launched organising committee for the 1972 Summer Olympics.
He frequently received visits from prostitutes at his apartment, and became a regular presence at several night clubs in the Bonn-Cologne area, spending implausibly large amounts of money on champagne.
By the time his grandson began to ask questions during the early decades of the twenty-first century, many of those who had known Leo Wagner were long dead, or for other reasons turned out to be out of reach.
When Benedikt Schwarzer wrote to ask Waigel for help researching the documentary film he was making about his own grandfather's fall from grace, the reply was brief and, in its way, eloquent: “Because of my very negative experiences with Mr. Leo Wagner, I have no wish to become involved in a discussion about him“.
Back at the family home in Günzburg there was little direct access to the Bonn rumour mill, but Wagner's increasingly desperate wife and his daughter were nevertheless beginning to join some of the dots.
An unavoidable breakthrough moment came in the Autumn/Fall of 1973 when the normally reliable monthly magazine “Capital“, a publication with a broadly-based focus on economics, at that time under the editorial direction of Ferdinand Simoneit, carried a series of articles under the headline "The strange affairs of the MP Leo W“.
Nevertheless, the articles included what amounted to an allegation that Wagner has used his parliamentary status inappropriately in order to support attempts to borrow more money than he could afford to repay.
Whether Wagner's next move was driven by self-knowledge, advice from others concerned for his personal welfare, or simply – as an unsympathetic report stated at the time[2] – an awareness that the press were closing in on him, on 29 January 1975 he applied for leave of absence from his public offices.
While Wagner remained in the care of his doctors in Bonn, his wife in Bavaria, still living with their children, became ever more alcohol dependent, blaming herself for her husband's behaviour because she had “not been beautiful enough for him“.
As Wagner's trial progressed, there was much discussion over the timing of his mental breakdown, with defence lawyers insisting that it had been a gradual process, initially unrecognised despite reports of several bizarre outbursts at public events.
[21] In the end Wagner was convicted of credit fraud[5] and issued with an eighteen month suspended sentence – equivalent to a conditional discharge subject to probation-based restrictions.
[23] In April 1972 the Brandt government, which had operated with a wafer-thin (and for various disparate reasons shrinking) majority in the Bundestag since its election in 1969, faced a parliamentary vote of no confidence which it was expected to lose.
It was known that Chancellor Brandt's so-called “Ostpolitik”, which involved mutual recognition between West and East Germany twenty years after the two provisional countries had come into existence de facto, was desperately unpopular with several members of his own SPD (party) and the leader of the CDU/CSU coalition in the Bundestag saw an opportunity to force a general election by defeating the government in a “constructive vote of no confidence”.
Bundestag members from the CDU and CSU such as Leo Wagner were expected to vote in support of their party leaderships in order to ensure that the government fell.
Intelligence work targeting West Germany was directed by ”Department HV A”, a large specialist sub-department of the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi), functioning under the leadership (for more than 34 years) of the spy-chief Markus Wolf.
[24] In June 1973 a Bundestag member called Julius Steiner admitted in a press conference that he had abstained in the crucial vote because he supported the Brandt government policy on relations with East Germany.
The widespread suspicions that the confidence vote had been won by the government because of bribes provided to opposition Bundestag members by the eastern intelligence services therefore remained, before 1990, matters for speculation both in the press and elsewhere.
[25] In March 1975 the news magazine Stern published a speculative allegation that Leo Wagner had, like Julius Steiner, accepted a bribe from the East German intelligence services, in return for which he had abstained in the 1972 parliamentary confidence vote against the Brandt government.
This was apparently based on the disclosure at Wagner's credit fraud trial (which had concluded two months earlier) that in 1972 the accused had received a “loan of precisely 50,000 Marks from an unidentified source”.
[26] In November 2000 the respected news magazine Der Spiegel revived the hitherto speculative reports that Wagner had been the second Bundestag member, along with Julius Steiner, who had abstained in the 1972 confidence vote against the Brandt government.
It quickly became apparent from follow-up investigations that the journalist Georg F. had been a long-standing “Unofficial collaborator“ (IM / paid informant) for the Stasi when he made his approach to Wagner.
Several of the entries hinted at the identity of “IM Löwe“ as being that of Leo Wagner, though apparent gaps in the surviving records meant it was never clear if he had already been on the Stasi payroll as far back as 1972.
In March 1983 “IM Löwe“ had provided valued information on the future intentions of the CSU party leadership following that month's Bundestag elections.
The Americans initially guarded the Rosenholz files jealously, but by 2003 German investigators had a complete set (passed across on 381 CDs) and the data were made available more to scholars more generally.