Karl Wienand
Karl Wienand was a German politician of the Social Democratic Party and secret agent for the DDR's Ministry of State Security .
Life
Karl Wienand's father, a German communist party member, was frequently detained as an enemy of the Nazi regime and often demonstrated against Robert Ley. The Nazis would later kill the man.After distinguishing himself attending Volksschule, Wienand fils was sent in 1941 to the normal schools in Bad Godesberg and Xanten. He performed military service in the Second World War in a penal battalion and was severely wounded. He suffered a head injury and a dislocated shoulder ; he also needed a leg amputated. He thus qualified as a "70% casualty".
He was widowed twice, and father to five children. One son of his first wife died in an accident. In 1975, he became director of the Bonner "italics=unset".
Party work
Wienand applied to enter the Nazi party on 9 October 1943, and would be enrolled on 20 April 1944. In 1947, Wienand attached himself to the SPD. In 1950, he was selected as SPD block captain for the Rhein-Sieg-Kreis. Already by 1951 he had advanced to the Mittelrhein committee and by 1955 the central party council. In 1990, he resigned from politics. In 2002, he left the SPD, anticipating a censure motion.Per Herbert Wehner, Wienand is a "Mann für heikle Fälle ". In the view of the historian Arnulf Baring, he belongs "zum sozialliberalen Kernbereich, zur Handvoll ihrer wichtigsten Figuren ".
Legislative work
Following the 1953 German legislative election, Karl Wienand at the age of 26 became the youngest representative in the second German Bundestag. From 15 November 1963 to 13 April 1967 he was deputy chairman of the Bundestag's committee on defense. From 3 March 1964 to 27 April 1967 he headed the SPD's parliamentary working group on national security. From 7 March 1967 to 30 August 1974, Wienand was Chief Whip. His time in the Bundestag lapsed beginning 3 December 1974.Honors
; 1952: Bürgermeister of Rosbach in WindeckScandals and aftermath
Wienand was ensnared in a series of political scandals, and has been convicted multiple times.Paninternational
In the Paninternational Flight 112 disaster on 6 September 1971, 22 people died on during an emergency landing on the autobahn outside Hamburg. Wienand, in return for roughly 162,500 Deutsche Marken, had allegedly shielded the airline from the inspection of the Federal Aviation Office. A parliamentary inquiry on the issue but could not reach any firm conclusions due to partisanship.Vote of no confidence
In a vote of no confidence against Chancellor Willy Brandt in 1972, Wienand supposedly paid the CDU representative Julius Steiner 50,000 DM to abstain, the "Steiner-Wienand affair". As much was admitted in a 1973 press conference following Steiner's second resignation from the Bundestag. Later it was revealed that Steiner had obtained 50,000 DM from the MfS; whether he had been paid twice is unclear.Tax evasion
In 1973, Wienand was stripped of his immunity as a Bundestag member following tax evasion. In 1975 he is believed to have owed altogether 102,000 DM in taxes – not to mention taxes on the moneys from Paninternational.Espionage
In 1993, federal prosecutors at the Federal Prosecutor's Office encountered a description of a covert agent in Main Directorate for Reconnaissance records that placed them on Wienand's trail. Starting in June 1959, the MfS had managed Wienand as a possible unofficial collaborator code-named "italics=unset". In 1971, he was accepted as a penetrative unofficial collaborator and renamed in the records as "italics=unset". In 1988, he was reregistered as an intelligence source. The prosecutors alleged proof that from 1970 to 1989 he had secretly worked with the MfS' HVA. The Düsseldorf regional court deemed his punishable work to begin in 1976, as he previously had a protection for official speech; and sentenced him in 1996 on account of his espionage for the DDR to 2.5 years' time and financial penalties equivalent to the amount of funds Wienand had received from the MfS: 1 million DM. According to the memoirs of the HVA head Markus Wolf, Wienand had been in contact with DDR foreign agents since the end of the 1960s. The Federal Court of Justice rejected Wienand's cassatory appeal on 28 November 1997, which was the final court of appeals for the Düsseldorfer jurisdiction. Thereafter German president Roman Herzog commuted his sentence to 5 years' probation on account of Wienand's heart disease.Wienand denied the accusations unto his death.