Case of the Sky-Blue Mercedes

On the front page of half a dozen West German newspapers last week, the glum visage of Sherman Adams was matched by a portrait--no less glum--of a German bureaucrat named Hans Kilb. It was no accident. For six years husky Lawyer Kilb, 48, had served as appointments secretary and personal aide to West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Last week West Germany's chief prosecutor slapped Kilb in jail "for investigative purposes." The charge: suspicion of corruption.

Kilb's troubles began last spring with a police investigation of reports that he had been accepting regular gift packages of coffee and other goodies from the company that operates West Germany's railway sleeping cars. Soon after the investigation started, the West German civil service decided that Kilb had been in Adenauer's office long enough, got him named director of security for the European Atomic Energy Community in Brussels. But the unforgiving police doggedly continued their investigation, discovered that more than a year ago Kilb acquired a Mercedes 190 SL sports car and, after it had been damaged in an accident, the Daimler-Benz Co. replaced it with a sky-blue Mercedes 220 S cabriolet. What even the most dogged search failed to uncover was any evidence that Bureaucrat Kilb had paid Daimler-Benz so much as a pfennig for either car.

Kilb's defenders were quick with an explanation: the company had insisted on loaning Kilb the cars to make sure that he would not inconvenience Adenauer by arriving late at top-level government appointments. The fact that Kilb might be in a position to influence the Bonn government's plans for restricting the size of trailer trucks--a subject of considerable interest to Daimler-Benz, as one of West Germany's major manufacturers of trucks--had nothing to do with the case, they said.

Doing his best to keep a stiff upper lip, Press Chief Felix von Eckardt reassuringly announced that Adenauer himself would probably agree to testify on the matter--provided his Cabinet gave its consent. In case the Cabinet didn't, Adenauer's Socialist opponents were preparing a batch of questions to throw at der Alte in the Bundestag. Among them: Was it true that Adenauer's daughter, Frau Lotte Multhaupt, had also enjoyed the use of a "borrowed" car?

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