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Thursday, 16 July 2015

Angela Merkel's antecedents


When Merkel hung out with Nazi friends (photos)





11 July, 2015

They say “birds of a feather flock together”, but surely German Chancellor Angela Merkel cannot have Nazi links!

Anti-Nazis Getafe blog has just published a photo reportage showing German Chancellor Angela Merkel in younger days. The photos are from a visit that Merkel and Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger (dressed in red in the second photo) paid to the Elbterrasen youth club when they were ministers of the German government. They appear in photographs with a crowd of skinheads. In one of the photos, dating to 1992 or 1993 in Magdeburg, one of the people does the Nazi salute in the presence of young Merkel.

Antifascist organizations have described the youth club as a Nazi hideout. In the same club, a young anti-fascist had been murdered just months before.





Angela Merkel’s Possible Stasi Past


14 December, 2014

Recently, a reader told me that Angela Merkel used to be a Stasi spy. I decided to scour the web for more information about this. Here is some of what I found:
merkelostenpt
The picture above was taken in 1986. It depicts an outing to the Baltic Island of Rugen by members of the DDR version of The Hitler Youth: the FDJ – or in full, DDR-Jugendverbandes. The top Alpha-male at this gathering was Hans-Jörg Osten. And you’ll never guess who’s perched right next to him. Just as, after the collapse of the USSR, a mere ten years later, little Geli Merkel was perched equally close to the ample buttocks of Chancellor Helmut Kohl….whom she later shafted to take over the CDU leadership.
Very few close observers now doubt that Merkel’s father (the only man on record who defected from West to East Germany) was a Stasi social spy and part-time organiser. Nor do they have many doubts any more that the current German Chancellor Angela Merkel was an active Gruppenfüherin in  the FDJ.
What most Germans don’t know, however, is that Hans-Jörg Osten was her Professor and close confidante at the Academy of Sciences where she was a student. And what they only found out yesterday is that Osten was a paid agent of the Stasi – with documentary evidence from the files to prove it.
ostenStasidoc
In the files (extracted left) her physics professor and fellow FDJ bigwig is unmasked as a spy using the cover name ‘Einstein’.
Today, Hans-Jörg Osten is 56 years old, and a professor at the Leibniz University of Hanover.
The documents go on to say that he was recruited ‘on the basis of the political-ideological cooperation…in his operating activities, he is mainly useful on defence issues, and for the development of people working files. He was always a very reliable worker.’ The ‘defence issues’ thing is a reference to time spent by Osten working in the US. During this period, he was a Stasi spy.
Contemporaries suggest that Merkel had “an unusually close” relationship with her married Professor. Indeed, this tendency of unsere geliebte Geli to stick like a limpet to the big mines before disarming them has been recorded several times before at The Slog.
via The Slog
This analysis seems germane while trying to put together the life of Angela Kasner, eldest daughter of  Lutheran priest Horst Kasner, and current Chancellor of the German Federal Republic, especially since she is most reluctant to talk about it. Born in Hamburg in 1954, and moved to East Germany shortly thereafter as her father obtained a pastorship in Quitzow, near Perleberg, in nearby Brandenburg, she had the Cold War almost embedded in her very bones. He was born in the Pankow district of Berlin, then part of the Soviet sector.
Her mother’s parents still lived in Elblag – formerly East Prussia’s Elbing – in Poland when Angela was born. At the nearby Teutonic Knights’ fortress of Malbork – what Nazi Germany received under the terms of the September 1939 Non-Aggression Pact and its Secret Protocols – 1,900 German Communists, who were returned to Germany under its terms, were apparently executed there, helping explain why Angela was so eager to adopt hard-line Marxism. Her similarly-minded maternal grandparents, it seems, must have not only known what happened to the like-minded returnees before the Soviet conquered the fortress in 1944 but also why they stayed on in Poland, unlike so many other Germans.
The Kasners’ move to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was apparently an effort to better position themselves for whatever happened to their divided country, particularly since they lived further in the GDR, setting up a household in Templin, 80 kilometers north of Berlin. While Horst was trying to improve relations between the West’s and the East’s Lutheran churches, Angela was attending state schools, becoming a member of its Free German Youth (FDJ) program, though she did not take part in its Jugendweihe, the secular coming of age rite, preferring to be confirmed in the Lutheran church.  Apparently, there was growing tension between the stern father, and the ambitious, talented daughter. Angela became so proficient in Russian that she even won a prize.
After Angela graduated from secondary school in 1973, though, details about who she was becoming, and what she was doing become few and far between. She attended the University of Leipzig. She also married in 1976 fellow undergraudate student Ulrich Merkel, explaining that it was considered the thing to do, though they never had any children, and the marriage started breaking down as soon as she got appointed to Berlin’s Academy Sciences where she became FDJ’s secretary for recruiting aka ‘agitprop’  children of its members into its program, showing that she was covertly supporting the GDR’s future. In fact, she was so busy doing other things that it wasn’t until 1986 that she finally completed her Ph.D degree.
Quantum chemistry aka quantum physics is a highly theoretical field which combines quantum mechanics with general field theory, and has all kinds of practical applications regarding plasmas, nuclear rehabilitation, and electromagnetism. The Soviet Union had built all kinds of nuclear devices on a crash basis – weapons, power plants, nuclear-powered submarines, radioisotope thermo-electric generators (RTGs), etc. – and were becoming concerned about what to do with them when they were no longer useful.  There were nuclear power generating plants all around the country whose safety was becoming questionable, nuclear-powered submarines around the ports of Murmansk and Archangel which were dangerously rotting away, and spent RTGs littering the Kola Peninsula.
While the Soviets did not have the resources to deal with these problems, they looked to the East Germans –  whose Berlin Academy of Sciences still had a great reputation in the field – to find the know-how, given its contacts in the West. The Berlin establishment traced its origins back to 1700 when the Prussian Academy of Sciences was started, and included among its membership such distinguished scientists as Gottfried Leibniz, Max Planck, and Albert Einstein. Even though it had been revived by the GDR after WWII, it still had over 200 members, including some two dozen from the West. It had grown now to include research in quantum chemistry – where Angela was working at its Central Institute for Physical Chemistry.
To take advantage of Merkel’s potential, Markus Wolf’s foreign section of the Stasi, the Hauptverwaltung Aufkluring (HVA), recruited her, it seems, to handle illegal agents the GDR was sending across The Wall to gather secrets from research facilities in the Federal Republic (FRG), France, Norway, and other Western countries – what she had learned about from her meetings and contacts at the Institute.
The future seemed to be turning in the GDR’s favor since détente had been established between Washington and Moscow, and the two German states had recognized one another’s existence in 1972.  Most important, the Stasi had nursed along Willy Brandt’s bridge-building government towards the GDR until 1974 when its spies in the Chancellor’s Office, the Guillaumes, were exposed, Gunter declaring proudly:  “I am an officer of the (East German) National People’s Army!” (Quoted from Andrew, p. 445.) Despite Wolf’s claims after the GDR’s collapse that this was a grave mistake – what Andrew believes – it was deliberate, thinking that it would just enhance Eric Honecker’s potential in German reunification.
Thanks to the KGB Archives that its librarian Vasili Mittrokhin supplied Andrew, we now know about the extensive use of Stasi ‘Romeo’ spies who provided the KGB with all kinds of information. The glaring exception was the performance of Wilhelm Kahle (codenamed WERNER), a laboratory technician who assumed the identity of a West German resident in the GDR, and worked in the West in various capacities, and capitals, particularly in labs at Cologne and Bonn universities. By the late 1970s, though, his intelligence take had become too thin, though quite extensive, resulting in a ten-volume file in the Archives, that the KGB became suspicious of his bona fides, especially when it learned through his communications with his mother in East Germany that he was fearful of being recalled to Moscow because of the wealth he had amassed in Paris.
In 1978, Kahle was summoned back to Moscow, and given a lie dedector test on a contrived basis just to determine how unreliable he had become. It proved that it was extensive, resulting in its putting its most accomplished agent, codenamed ANITA – who spoke both German and Russian fluently – on the case. It was one of putting a ‘Juliet’ on a runaway ‘Romeo’, apparently a first in intellgence history. After intensive questioning during their liaisons, Andrew wrote, “ANITA’s report confirmed the Centre’s suspicions.” (p. 450)  She wrote that he had become an ideologically unreliable, completely self-serving agent who had no qualms about using others, even targets, for his own purposes.  “As a result of ANITA’s report,” Andrew concluded, “Kahle appears to have been sidelined. He was formally removed from illegal work in 1982.”
The trouble with Andrew’s treatment of ANITA is that he never explained how she had become such an important counterintelligence specialist, who she might be, and why he never explained in the notes the disposition of her case since the Berlin Wall had come down, and the Cold War was over. Then Andrew went out of his way in the notes to make it appear that all ‘Romeos’, except Wolf’s spy FELIX, had been identified – even going out of his way to account for the identity of “Franz Becker” aka Hans-Jurgen Henze (note 57, p. 649) – when there is no idenfication of either Kahle and his superior ‘Romeo’ ANITA.
Also, there are questions about what she might have done for the KGB after Mitrokhin’s records ran out. She could well have been the KGB agent who infiltrated Egon Bahr’s entourage – what Andrew mentioned when he discussed SDP Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s dealing with the newly elected President Reagan over a month’s delay of his visit to Washington – what KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov explained, thanks to the KGB agent’s report “of special importance”, to the Soviet chief Leonid Brezhnev, was “designed to enable Washington to gain time to build up its armaments with the aim of overtaking the USSR in the military field.” (Quoted from ibid, p. 455.)
The KGB source also stated that there were all kinds of Western agents flooding Bonn to stop the growing commercial contacts between the FRG and the USSR, especially the proposed construction of a pipeline to bring natural gas from Siberia to the West – what Schmidt, to Moscow’s delight, was vigorously pressing ahead with.
With the KGB’s agent – stationed in the GDR, and apparently Angela Merkel – tipping off Moscow about Washington’s new arms race, it was hardly surprising that she finally received her Ph.D. in quantum chemistry.  Thanks to her contacts, and the input from various illegals in the West, she had obviously learned alot about what was going on in the field. Just compiling her agent reports into a coherent document would have been enough for the Institute to give her the degree.  More important, the whole field was becoming much more important with the Soviets having to face nuclear rehabilitation with its aging nuclear arms, and everyone having to worry about nuclear meltdowns of atomic plants – what happened at Chernobyl just when she received her doctorate.
Unfortunately for Merkel, her hopes for Honecker’s all-German socialist republic did not work out, at least as far as we know now. Thanks to the Reagan arms buildup, and Gorbachev’s refusal to engage in an arms competition after the near fatal non-nuclear showdown with the Anglo-Americans – what was to be triggered by the assassination of Sweden’s statsminister Olof Palme – the communist Soviet bloc, and its individual states underwent deadly collapse, triggered by the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Merkel, to cut her losses from potential blowback, suddenly got involved in politics, joining East Germany’s new party, Democratic Awakening. Following the first democratic election in the GDR, she became deputy spokesperson for the pre-unification Prime Minister Lothar de Maiziere, a long-time Christian Democratic politician, and suspected agent of Erich Mielke’s Stasi – an allegation which led to his disappearance from politics after Helmut Kohl’s CDU/CSU gained control of a united Germany.
Kohl’s promotion thereafter of Merkel, aka his ” Madchen”, cost him dearly though.  He had to engage in all kinds of bribes to get the Stasi to destroy embarrassing files, especially those relating to ANITA. and when he refused to identify who supplied the money, he was finished politically after 16 years in office.Then the intelligence coordinator of the Chancellor’s Office, Ernst Uhrlau – who went on to become the director of Germany’s foreign intelligence service (BND)  – went to the greatest lengths to retrieve a Stasi index file of its agents (Operation Rosewood) that the CIA had, and was refusing to turn over.  “It is unacceptable in the long run,” Uhrlau explained to the Associate Press on December 10,1998 regarding the possibilities of blackmail, “for the German government that relevant files are sitting in the United States, and a possible or likely double in Russia.”  After a two-year effort, the files were returned to Berlin.
It was not prepared for the fact that Moscow long had held the most dangerous ones, those regarding ANITA, and they had been released to the world by the tome that Christopher Andrew wrote, thanks to the Archive Mitrokhin he had access to. This book was doubly troublesome because by that time Merkel had married, it seems, her old flame, WERNER aka Wilhelm Kahle and now divorced Joachim Sauer. They had had at the same time similar totally unexplained careers at the Central Institute of Physical Chemistry. Sauer is even more tight-lipped about his life than she is, even declining to mention that he was born in East Germany in Senftenberg, 50 kilometers north of Dresden – where he called his mother when he got into the KGB’s soup.
Of course, this would explain why Sauer has adopted such a low-profile existence to Merkel’s growing importance and popularity. He seems afraid that someone, especially one of his ‘honey trap’ victims might still recognize him. It would also explain why his wife has the best relation with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and why she is apparently being blackmailed by the Mossad when it comes to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, EU policy towards Iran, and missteps by the Pope when it comes to The Holocaust.
In fact, she has followed a policy so favored by the Social Democrats in the current economic meltdown that her CSU Economics Minister Michael Glos suddenly resigned two weeks ago – what the press explained in terms of an alleged lack of input when it came to economic policy-making, but he explained ominously:  “She always believed I didn’t have a clue about a lot of things.”
It seems that as other people learn more about who Angela Merkel really is, she will have increasing political difficulties. She seems to have taken just too many risks in our ever-changing world.
via Cryptome
Of course Angela Merkel herself would never admit her shady past, if she had one, given the amount of possible clues to her past, she herself has tried to squelch anyone thinking that she used to be a Stasi agent.
Mrs Merkel, who grew up in East Germany and became the first chancellor from the East in 2005, recalled how the Stasi approached her after an interview for a job as a scientific assistant at the Technical University in Ilmenau.
After the interview, she was shown to a room where she was expecting to claim her travel expenses but a Stasi officer was waiting for her.
I said very quickly that it was not something for me,” Mrs Merkel said in a recording of an ARD television chat show.
It is the first time she has publicly mentioned the approach. A number of east Germans in political life have come to grief after Stasi files identified them as former informants.
Mrs Merkel, a physicist, said she had worked out an answer in advance as she was aware the Stasi might approach her. The plan was to say she could not keep her mouth shut and would tell all her friends.
This explanation seems ridiculous to me, you simply don’t just say “No” to an authoritarian regime and get away with it with absolutely no repercussions. This explanation itself from the mainstream tends to make me believe the tenuous reports of Merkel’s Stasi past. Merkel’s explanation seems like a contrived lie.
What would it mean if Merkel used to be a Stasi agent? Does it mean she once had leftist ideals? Of course not, she is just a power hungry harpy that clawed her way to the top, joining whatever side benefited her the most at the time. People like Merkel don’t believe in anything except power and influence.
But in reality, who knows the truth, the lives of our evil leaders are so murky and filled with lies and conspiracies, that no one  really knows what is going on or how we were led to this point.

Even CNN raises the question.

As a matter of interest the German original that the article is based on has been disappeared from the internet.



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