The Swinging Sergeant

At the paymaster's office at Mechernich Airbase near Bonn, Air Force Master Sergeant Siegfried Schmidt, 33, kept track of fiscal affairs for a Luftwaffe supply battalion. A bright, conscientious bookkeeper, he logged the pay for the unit's 125 soldiers, noting promotions, with their commensurate pay increases, Christmas bonuses and, when the recruits' 15-month tours were up, their release pay. Each week Schmidt went to the bank to draw the pay for all the soldiers on the base and duly disbursed the cash.

Since Schmidt started the job in 1968, his superiors had nothing but praise for his work. The twelve officers and five government auditors who regularly checked his bookkeeping found it very efficient. First into the office and last to leave, Schmidt often volunteered when there was extra work to be done.

Outside the office, "Sigi," as his friends called him, had a reputation as a swinger who liked pretty girls and fast cars, and usually picked up the tab on his visits to local nightspots. He showered his girl friends, who fondly called him der Rosenkavalier, with clothing, jewelry and champagne. No one thought it strange that Sigi was able to indulge such playboy tastes on his $790-a-month soldier's pay. After all, he was known to be a lottery addict, and had once boasted of winning $125,000.

Phony Soldiers. Little by little, though, the fun seemed to pall. Sigi complained of sleeping badly and rushed back from his vacations in Austria and Italy. One day, after a routine check uncovered a $125 error in one of his books, a tense Schmidt tooled off to the nearest police station. There he told an incredible story: he had invented thousands of phony troops, put them on the battalion's books, and then drawn their very real pay--some $500,000. Since he had logged in his first "recruits," many of whose names Schmidt picked out of the phone book, he had processed roughly 5,000 imaginary "soldiers," scattering them through several outfits so as to avoid detection.

The German military was still blushing last week as Schmidt, found guilty of embezzlement by a civilian state court in Bonn, began serving a 3 1/2-year term. "You can be sure we've tightened up the system," snapped a Bundeswehr official. Still, few could help admiring the sergeant's ingenuity. Said a Defense Ministry aide: "It was a masterful trick." As for getting the money back, the government can forget it. When he was arrested, Sigi was flat broke.

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