Two Stubborn Men

It might well have happened in Hitler's Germany. Armed with arrogance, pistols and arrest warrants, special security police swooped down at night on the Bonn bureau of Der Spiegel (The Mirror), a weekly newsmagazine, and summarily carted staffers off to jail. In Der Spiegel's Hamburg headquarters, other police sealed off rooms, ransacked them with a thoroughness that included upturning the wastebaskets. In Torremolinos, Spain, about 1,300 miles away, local police, acting on an urgent request from West German authorities, routed a vacationing Spiegel subeditor and his wife from bed and locked them both behind bars. By last week, this series of police-state actions had rocked the republic of West Germany to its official core.

From Karlsruhe to West Berlin, the fearful word Gestapo was heard again in the streets. "The man who presses our doorbell in the early morning hours." said the daily Frankfurter Rundschau, "is not necessarily the milkman. It might be political police." West German Minister of Justice Wolfgang Stammberger, who had not been told in advance of the nighttime raids, hotly offered his resignation to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer--who had not been informed either. At week's end, unappeased by several conferences with the Chancellor, Minister Stammberger was sticking to his decision, and other Cabinet members threatened to withdraw their support from Adenauer's delicate coalition government.

Raking the Ranks. Behind all this Nordic furor stood two stubborn men, stiffened by an antagonism as ridiculous as it was real. One was Franz-Josef Strauss, 47, West Germany's bull-bodied, bull-tempered Minister of Defense, who for all his bulk has a skin thin enough to invite puncturing. The other was Der Spiegel's frail, blond Publisher Rudolf Augstein, 39, who has seldom missed a chance to play the matador to Defense Minister Strauss's bull.

Der Spiegel was created in 1947 as a publication loosely patterned after TIME, but it soon changed into a Teutonic version of Confidential magazine. Editorially, it stood against almost everything and for almost nothing--except, perhaps, recognition of East Germany, which it has frequently proposed. Never particularly friendly to the U.S., Der Spiegel blasted President Kennedy's action on Cuba as hypocritical, weak, and an incitement to thermonuclear war.

But the magazine's favorite pastime was raking the ranks of West German officialdom, from Chancellor Konrad Adenauer on down. No one was shelled more ruthlessly than Franz-Josef Strauss. From the day in 1956 that Strauss took over the Defense Ministry and boasted that Germans would never again play "foot soldiers to the American atomic knights," Augstein and Der Spiegel attacked. The magazine jeered at inconsistencies in Strauss's defense policies. It sneered when Strauss arrogantly pulled rank on a West German cop who stopped the Defense Minister for a minor traffic offense. It accused him of helping a friend land juicy contracts for the construction of U.S. military housing facilities in West Germany. In a 1961 cover story, Der Spiegel characterized Strauss as a power-hungry, unscrupulous warmonger who "aims at the Nazi instincts" surviving in the German Republic.

Thus gored and goaded, Strauss struck back. Three times he filed defamation charges, and with some effect. Just last week, a parliamentary investigation committee cleared Strauss of Der Spiegel's claim that he had helped his friends get housing contracts. But by that time, Der Spiegel had said something far worse about Franz-Josef Strauss.

In a cover story on Bundeswehr Inspector General Friedrich Foertsch, Der Spiegel reviewed September NATO military exercises, reported signs of chaotic neglect in West Germany's civil defense organization, and argued that the country's NATO troops were in a dismal state of unpreparedness. Practically all Der Spiegel's evidence was classified "top secret," a fact duly noted by West German Acting Federal Prosecutor Dr. Gerhard Wesgram in Karlsruhe.

By law, Wesgram was required to investigate, and he did. When NATO headquarters in Paris reported that Der Spiegel had indeed divulged secrets, Prosecutor Wesgram drafted arrest orders charging Augstein and other Spiegel staffers with "suspicion of treason," "treasonous falsifications," and "active subornation," or bribery. Then Wesgram spread his dragnet.

Ironically, it did not snare Augstein--although his home was combed and all suspect material, including an unpublished theme that Augstein had written as a student, was impounded. When Augstein learned of the raids, he delivered himself into police custody, with impressive insouciance: his liveried chauffeur, toting a well-stocked overnight bag, followed him through the station door.

Imperious Execution. Friends of Publisher Augstein promptly accused Strauss of an act of vengeance. But such motivation was not at all certain. Although Strauss probably knew of the raids, and did nothing to stop them, their imperious execution was strictly the work of Prosecutor Wesgram. At week's end, Augstein was still behind bars, where he can legally be held without bail until his trial, which may be months away. But from his cell, Augstein blithely sent out orders to boost Der Spiegel's press run from the usual 500,000 to 850,000. The magazine also filed a complaint in Federal Constitutional Court against the government's highhandedness. In Bonn, Defense Minister Strauss kept mute.

Der Spiegel stood accused of what were indeed serious offenses. But however richly the publication may have merited government action, most Germans were shocked by police-state tactics wholly repugnant--and wholly unnecessary--in a democratic society.

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