End of the Scandal

In the fall of 1962, the newsmagazine Der Spiegel published a cover story holding its alltime favorite enemy, Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss, responsible for a long list of deficiencies in West Germany's defenses. What happened next reminded Germans of a part of their heritage most of them would rather forget.

Squads of security police stormed into the magazine's Hamburg head quarters and its bureau in Bonn, ransacking files and arresting everyone in sight. Publisher Rudolf Augstein was held without bail, and Military Editor Conrad Ahlers was forcibly sent back from a vacation in Spain. In the Defense Ministry, Strauss issued a hastily prepared memorandum charging that Der Spiegel had betrayed military secrets. In the Bundestag, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer shook with rage as he denounced "an abyss of treason in this land." The public and press reacted in a different way. "Gestapo!" roared newspapers throughout the land. Students marched in protest in Hamburg, Munich and Berlin. Five Cabinet officers resigned, forcing Adenauer to fire Strauss.

Last week, 2 1/2 years after it had begun, the noisy political scandal formally ended in vindication for Der Spiegel. After interminable delays, Chief Federal Prosecutor Ludwig Martin had finally submitted his case to a federal court in Karlsruhe, which threw it out. In its written decision, the court observed caustically that most of the "military secrets" exposed in the story were not secrets at all: they had already been published elsewhere.

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