Now Kohl himself was under attack for refusing to come clean about a network of slush funds he controlled. By his stubborn silence, Schuble told his longtime mentor, Kohl was leading the party into “an abyss.” Later that morning, after a “tearful” meeting of the party leadership, the ex-chancellor gave up the fight. “I’ve decided to… resign from the honorary chairmanship of the Christian Democratic Party,” he declared. “I’ve been a member of the CDU for 50 years and it remains my home. I made mistakes, which I’ve admitted in public. I have always tried to do my duty.”
Kohl’s resignation from the ceremonial post marked the most dramatic turn yet in a fast-developing scandal that some have called Germany’s Watergate. Since the “Spendenaffre” broke in mid-November, the country has been held rapt by one revelation after another of financial shenanigans and alleged influence peddling at the highest levels of government. There have been lurid tales of secret foreign bank accounts, suitcases stuffed with Deutsche marks, clandestine meetings with a fugitive weapons dealer in Canada fighting extradition to Germany. Parliament is investigating whether millions in undisclosed donations were used to influence the sale of tank parts to Saudi Arabia and an oil refinery to the French firm Elf-Aquitaine.
The heap of allegations has sunk Kohl’s Christian Democrats into the worst crisis in the party’s 54-year history. A recent poll found that the CDU’s popularity has fallen to 29 percent, a record low, and prosecutors have begun raiding the homes and offices of party officials in search of incriminating evidence. On Thursday, the treasurer of the CDU’s faction in Parliament, Wolfgang Huellen, hanged himself at his home in Berlin; police promptly opened an investigation into Huellen’s alleged funding abuses. “This isn’t just a CDU crisis, it’s a state crisis,” says Hans Herbert von Arnim, a professor of politics at the School of Public Administration in Speyer, Germany.
The biggest casualty of the affair is Kohl, Germany’s chancellor for 16 years until his defeat in 1998, and the dominant figure in postwar German history. Bullheaded and combative, with a force of personality to match his physical girth, Kohl pushed through German reunification, reconciled the country with its neighbors, persuaded Germans to surrender their beloved mark for a new Continental currency, the euro, and placed Germany at the epicenter of a newly integrated Europe. Just weeks ago his countrymen voted him one of the 10 “greatest Germans” of all time, along with Einstein, Bismarck and Martin Luther.
Now, analysts and politicians say, Kohl’s legacy may be forever tarnished by his role in the scandal–and his arrogant handling of its fallout. By refusing to name the anonymous donors who funneled money into secret slush funds for years, Kohl conveyed the impression of an obstinate and possibly corrupt wheeler-dealer with a brazen disrespect for Germany’s Constitution. “In Kohl’s understanding, the state and society came only second to the party,” says Gunter Hofmann, a correspondent for the weekly Die Zeit. “He had no democratic ethics, no feeling for democratic rules that put the law first.”
The Spendenaffre came to light in mid-November, after German tax investigators probing a shadowy German weapons merchant named Karlheinz Schreiber uncovered a suspicious $500,000 payment to CDU treasurer Walther Leisler Kiep in 1991. Kiep and another CDU official reportedly received the cash from Schreiber in a metal suitcase in the parking lot of an Italian restaurant in Switzerland, and deposited it into a secret party bank account.
Kohl initially dismissed allegations of a network of secret funds controlled by the CDU as “a lot of noise about nothing.” Within weeks, however, he was forced to admit that he had personally accepted more than $1 million in secret payments to the party during the 1990s, a violation of German laws that require the declaration of any donation more than $10,000. Kohl insisted he did nothing wrong. The money bought no influence, he said, nor was it used for personal enrichment. Then, to the dismay of party members, he refused to identify the sources of the illegal cash. “It is impossible for me to break the promise I gave the people who financially supported my work for the CDU,” he maintained. Schuble, who called for a complete investigation, was last week forced to admit he had received a paper bag stuffed with $50,000 from Schreiber. He rejected calls to step down.
The revelation of the half-million dollars the CDU received from Schreiber helped spark investigations of what may be a much wider pattern of CDU illegality. (Schreiber has denied any wrongdoing.) Last week Manfred Kanther, a former leader of the Christian Democrats in the central German state of Hesse admitted that in the early 1980s, to evade new transparency laws, he had stashed $3.7 million in political donations and membership fees into secret bank accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
Over the years the money was invested in the stock market and grew to more than $8 million, much of which flowed back undeclared into CDU coffers in Hesse. A CDU official in Hesse initially claimed that the money had been sent into the country from “rich German-Jewish emigres,” but Kanther confessed that the story was a lie. Kanther, a former Interior minister once known as Germany’s Mr. Law-and-Order, resigned his parliamentary seat last week. Roland Koch, the governor of Hesse whose 1999 campaign was allegedly financed with the secret funds, insisted he knew nothing about the sources of the cash. Meanwhile, independent auditors reviewing CDU finances have discovered an additional $5 million in undeclared political contributions to federal coffers.
The web of deceit reflects a political culture nurtured by Kohl during his two decades at the party’s helm. Behind his exuberant and genial facade, analysts say, Kohl was an autocrat who rebuilt the Christian Democratic Party from the ground up during the 1970s and ruled it like a private fiefdom. Generous to those who supported him, he was ruthless against perceived rivals and enemies. He built a network of near-absolute allegiance through patronage, favors and his detailed knowledge of personal weaknesses. “He collected information about people like a detective,” says Stephanie Wahl, a political scientist at the Institute for Economics and Society in Bonn. “It was difficult to oppose him.”
What has not been clear until now, observers say, is the degree to which Kohl cemented his power with huge sums of cash. According to observers, Kohl doled out money to party branches and individuals on a regular basis, leaving little record of where it went. “What Kohl did, he did on the phone and with cash,” says Edwin Scheuch, a political analyst at the University of Cologne. “He even dialed the numbers himself.” Kohl apparently justified the expenditures as vital to the national interest–a philosophy that may explain his purported allegiance to his donors rather than the Constitution. As a member of the cold-war generation, Kohl saw the CDU as a bulwark against communism, socialism and economic chaos, and increasingly came to identify the party’s strength, and his own, with the good of Germany.
The irony, of course, is that Kohl’s party-first politics has now left the Christian Democrats in utter disarray. Schuble, Kohl’s successor as party leader and a man who once harbored ambitions of ruling Germany, will almost certainly lose his job. Koch, the governor of Hesse whose victory was allegedly secured with illegal funds, may also have to go. The Christian Democrats now seem doomed to defeat at the hands of the newly resurgent Social Democrats in upcoming state elections in Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia, and face millions of dollars in fines. Even so, some observers believe that the scandal will ultimately prove beneficial to the CDU–and the entire German political system. “They have to make a brutal change of leadership so that a younger and more courageous generation will come to power,” says Matthias Dopfner, editor in chief of Die Welt, a leading German daily. “The catastrophe may have a positive impact.”
The future of Kohl’s legacy seems less hopeful. The former chancellor is under a criminal investigation by federal prosecutors and a parliamentary ethics probe that could last two years. He will almost surely have to resign in disgrace from his seat in Parliament. CDU leaders have threatened to sue Kohl if he refuses to reveal his donors’ names. Even a jail sentence for breach of trust is a possibility. For a man once regarded as an incorruptible statesman, the taint must be difficult to bear. “I think we will have to rewrite the history books,” says Hofmann of Die Zeit. “From now on we will have to confront both sides of Helmut Kohl. We will have to ask ourselves, ‘What price did we pay for stability?’ " The answer: a high one.
