Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg was the most famous member of the July 20m 1944 plot to kill Hitler. Twenty-six years later his cousin, Hans Christoph Freiherr von Stauffenberg, was involved in a conspiracy to take down another head of state - Willy Brandt, the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. That is just one of the fascinating facts uncovered by Stefanie Waske, a graduate student in political science.
Stefanie Waske summarizes some of her key findings in Die Zeit. Willy Brandt was always viewed as a traitor by the political right since he had fled Nazi Germany for Norway and was active in the anti-Nazi resistance. When he became Chancellor in 1969 a group of reactionaries in the CDU/CSU - primarily aristocrats like Stauffenberg - immediately begin to plot his demise. Brandt's foreign policy of Ostpolitik - the rapprochement with East Germany and Soviet Bloc, only enraged the activists further, so much so that they formed a private secret espionage organization that operated independently from the BND.
What really interests me is the role that Henry Kissinger played in this extra-legal espionage episode. Already in 1969 the leader of the CDU, Rainer Barzel, traveled to Washington to discuss what to do about Brandt. Then Brandt's secretary of state, Egon Bahr, sought Kissinger's blessing to start the Ostpolitik initiatives, and Bahr and Kissinger agreed on a secret communication backchannel that circumvented the respective government bureaucracies. In 1970 an unnamed operative of the CDU's secret operation ( informally known as the "Informationsdienstes für die Opposition") met with Kissinger to discuss plans for toppling Brandt. In contrast to his directives against Allende in Chile, Kissinger urged caution in this case:
"Es mag möglich sein, die gegenwärtige Regierung zu stürzen, offen bleibt aber, ob hierfür nicht Risiken eingehandelt werden, die eine CDU/CSU-Regierung in größte Schwierigkeiten bringen kann (sic!)."
(It is entirely possible to topple the current government, but it is also possible that this could be too risky and cause big problems for a CDU/CSU government.)
But from that point on Kissinger apparently shared Bahr's confidential communications with the CDU "Informationsdienst".
Much of this story is still murky. Who was the operative who met with Kissinger? Kissinger won't say. Where did the band of aristocrats get the financing for this secret program? We don't know, but there is speculation that Axel Springer may have had a hand in this.
Kissinger would later pursue his own path of rapprochement with the Soviet Union, but much still needs to be known about what role, if any, the US played in sabotaging the Brandt administration.
Stefanie Waske's book on her research - Nach Lektüre vernichten! Der geheime Nachrichtendienst von CDU und CSU im Kalten Krieg ("Destroy after Reading! The Secret Spy Agency of the CDU and CSU in the Cold War") - will appear early 2013.