How Putin entangled Germany in Schröder’s net

Markus Wehner and Reinhard Bingener are authors of the German book The Moscow Connection. The Schröder Network and Germany’s Path to Dependency

We also decided to include all the corruption schemes that developed in Germany around the former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. They were widely known, but not necessarily connected with Russia. We linked these facts together and put them in the wider context of Ostpolitik, which was the policy put forward and pursued by German Social Democrats during the Cold War period.

Do you think that German society now accepts and understands how corrupt some of these groups have become?

MARKUS WEHNER: In 2016 I published a book titled Putin’s New Cold War (Putins Kalter Krieg). This book was not a huge success mainly because the German public did not want such a book at that time, even though it was published after the annexation of Crimea and the start of the war in Donbas. Now, since the onset of the full-scale invasion, it is clear that Germans are more interested in such books. The questions that people ask themselves now are: Why were we so blind? How could we have allowed ourselves to become so dependent on a state which is a dictatorship? All these questions only appeared after the beginning of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine.

RB: What I think is also interesting is that when we talk to foreign journalists, they use the word “corruption”. In Germany you haven’t heard this term until today.

For me the word corruption clearly indicates a certain process of decay, but at the same time when we talk about corruption in a democratic country, such as Germany, we should also ask about accountability.

MW: We do not see accountability for that in Germany yet. No German politician has stepped down because of his or her policy towards Russia. But I see that many of our readers say that they did not expect the things we write about in the book to happen in Germany. They admit to having lost faith in our political system. I think that many of those who read our book have changed their view on German politics and have started seeing corruption in this broader sense of the word.

Will this change within society translate into a change within the political elite? Would you say that this change, which includes cutting off links with Russia and supporting Ukraine, is genuine?

RB: Yes there is a change, of course, but the question is whether it is really genuine. We have a major shift in security policy as well as energy policy. But is there still this ambiguity towards Russia? I would say yes. Take the example of the Taurus missiles – the long-range weapons that can be fired over a very long distance and could reach Russia from Ukraine. Chancellor Olaf Scholz refuses to deliver them to Ukraine, fearing an escalation in the conflict. We are not fully certain but it is possible that the reason behind this indecisiveness is his plan to keep an open door to talks and relations with Russia, once the war is over and there is a new regime in Moscow.

MW: But we can also see a real change. This year we spent two per cent of our GDP on defence. It is the first time this has happened in ten years since the NATO summit in Wales, where this commitment was made by the German government. We are also delivering more weapons to Ukraine than Great Britain, Italy and Spain. But we can also notice that for some left-wing politicians, especially the Social Democrats, this change is more imposed than genuine. This is the burden of our long tradition of good relations with Russia, but also our long tradition of being a pacifist country. For example, the Green Party, whose members have always had a very clear view on the Russian regime and who supported Ukraine, has also been a part of the pacifist movement. Now it has to change its attitude as well. There is no doubt that for a change to take place – and for it to be a genuine change – our society will need to go through a long and painful process. This will not be easy because there are extreme political parties that are pro-Russian and very popular in the eastern German lands. Among them is the right-wing AfD, the left-wing Die Linke but also the new Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance.

RB: In Germany we ask is this glass half full or half empty? I would argue that in this case it is half full. We can, for example, compare Germany to Austria where politicians have even deeper connections with Russians and have not made any real political changes since the outbreak of the full-scale invasion. By contrast, Germany has seen a real shift, we just don’t know how genuine it is.

In your book you make public what some German politicians, especially the Social Democrats, were saying about Poland and other countries in the region like the Baltic states when there were increasing warnings about the threat coming from Russia. How did they treat these states?

RB: These were flyover countries.

Do you think that something has changed also in this regard? Have German politicians started to listen more to voices from this region?

RB: I would say yes. I think that change is both in the public perception but also within the political elite. However, when you think about this pro-Russian approach you can also explain it historically. I would recommend a very good book by the historian Martin Schulze Wessel, the leading German expert on Eastern Europe, who wrote about the alliance between Prussia and Russia in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. From his writings you can see that the two imperial powers had the same perspective and agreed on exploiting Poland and other states. And I think the long-term effect of this thinking should still be taken into account by those who want to understand German politics in the last few decades.

MW: I would add that Lars Klingbeil, the co-leader of the Social Democratic Party who has been a part of this Moscow connection group and who was very close to Gerhard Schröder, in the last two years has said on several different occasions that we should have listened to Poland and the Baltic states. And that we should be doing so in the future because it was a mistake not to listen to them. So from time to time, you hear such statements. But I have an impression that these words are not always liked by the older party members, who were socialized in the Social Democratic Party at the time of Willy Brandt and Egon Bahr’s Ostpolitik. We write about this in our book as well, stating that they do not differentiate enough between the first phase of this policy, which was of course right and important, and the second stage when the Social Democrats supported the communist regimes and were against the Solidarność movement in Poland. They established partnerships with the communist regimes, even with the East German communist regime, disregarding the opposition, including the small opposition in the GDR. They wanted to preserve the status quo and perceived the freedom movements as a threat to this attempt at diplomacy. That is why even today German Social Democrats do not want to destroy this myth of Ostpolitik as the best thing ever.

RB: I think it has also something to do with the guilt that is profoundly present in German society and which has been exploited by Russia. Germany fought all these wars in the East but its longest and most difficult enemy was Russia. Thus, for the generation that survived the war the word “East” meant Russia, while other nations, like the Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians, were forgotten. However, since the beginning of the full-scale war, there’s been a large shift in the perception of the German public that is now starting to acknowledge the existence of the perspective of the Ukrainians or the Belarusians and those who live in the Baltics.

You also write about the business part of this German-Russian connection, which is clear and understandable. However, you note the ideological component suggesting that by building bridges with Russia, German politicians were convinced that they were contributing to building a better world. How strong was this motivation to build bridges in your view? How much was it enforced by the knowledge that in parallel to engaging in dialogue, you could also get richer?

RB: It is impossible to look into someone else’s mind. But I think that these people really believed that politically they were doing the right things. The financial part that you mention is less clear. For example, we just learnt about a German journalist who worked for public television but also had a contract with a publisher known for publishing pro-Putin books. However, at this point all of his activities, although morally dubious, were legal. Only later it was revealed that there was a second contract that he had signed with one of these tax havens. He then received 600,000 euros from an account which could be tied back to a Russian oligarch. There is suspicion that these transfers were managed by Heino Wiesel, who was a part of Schröder’s network. So you see that there may be multiple levels to this whole financial story. This is possibly only one individual case but we suspect that there may be a certain scheme at work. We will see…

MW: Unfortunately, we didn’t get any documents from the Cayman Islands to prove it. However, to answer your question, I think the ideological part is quite important because if we speak about Ostpolitik we are talking about a certain myth. Clearly, a myth is something you believe in and there is no room for doubt. For the German Social Democrats, Ostpolitik has been such a political myth. Without Ostpolitik, there would have been no reunification of Germany. So it was something that had to be good. That is why German Social Democrats did not recognize the role that President Ronald Reagan or Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher or Pope John Paul II played in the collapse of the Soviet Union. They believed that westerners could talk to Gorbachev or Yeltsin exactly because of Ostpolitik. There might have been some truth to this idea of course, but we also need to stress that Ostpolitik was not the main reason why the Cold War ended.

It’s hard not to get the impression that the German elite was completely defenceless against the Russian agents manipulating it. Is Germany becoming more resilient now? Or is there a risk of repeating the same mistakes?

MW: I don’t think that Germany was the only target in this spy game. Let’s not forget about Berlusconi in Italy, Sarkozy in France, and also what was going on in Austria. That is why we have to see this problem in a broader context of hybrid warfare. We have to win this war before it starts. But it is only now that we are seeing Russian propaganda, disinformation, its brutal warfare, and so on. We had it all the time, but we did not see it. And now it is very late.

RB: Yet, I think that in the end Putin miscalculated. In 2022 Putin believed that the West was much weaker than in fact it was. He was also probably convinced that Germany would back down because of energy relations. So there were miscalculations on both sides.

Are the Germans, or more broadly the West, now discovering their strength?

RB: Germany is in a difficult situation because we are an exporting nation. We depend on markets more than other countries. We have a problem with Russia, but we also have a problem with China. And we may face problems with the United States. These three markets together have been the backbone of the German economy and therefore it is a very serious issue for us. What will happen in the autumn when we have our elections? It is a difficult topic for Germany but it will also be a difficult topic for our neighbours. They do not have to decide our political future, but they will be affected by our decisions. And we will see how strong we are, because if our export companies don’t flourish, the whole European economy, and therefore European politics, will be in trouble.

You are talking about challenges such as Russia, China and the uncertain fate of relations with the US, but where is Germany looking for solutions? Maybe they can be found in the European community or Germany can build its power by competing with its neighbours?

MW: I think that our strategic thinking in all these years was very weak, and I hope that now we are developing better strategies on how we should deal with these regimes who want to change the status quo and want to change our political system. During the Merkel years our success was based on three lies. The first was that security was the domain of the US. We simply outsourced it to the US and stopped treating it as our own responsibility. The second lie was that business with China is very important, while the third one was that we had to rely on cheap energy from Russia. Now we see that all these assumptions have cracked. Of course, we have to think about what our future will be like. I’m certain that the parties that are in the centre of German politics are aware that we can succeed only in a united Europe.

RB: I think we have four options. The first option is that Germany should stand on its own two feet in terms of security. However, I don’t think any of our political parties really see the problem this way. The second option is to bend down to Russia but here even the right-wing extremist parties do not seem to opt for this. But we also have two European options. And I think probably Poland has the same choice. The first one is the creation of an alternative nuclear umbrella, maybe in cooperation with France. And the fourth option is reliance on transatlantic cooperation. I can see that the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats opt for options three and four. We don’t say it publicly, but there are pros and cons to both of them and the future will show which one is chosen.

You mentioned China as a problematic business partner. If the Russians manage to corrupt German politicians wouldn’t the Chinese try to do the same?

RB: Russia was clearly focusing on politics and energy, while China is focusing on technology. Therefore, you have different methods and different espionage activities. The Chinese have more difficulty here because they don’t have these deep cultural relations with Germany as Russians do. They also cannot play with our German guilt, nor with the admiration that the Germans have for Russian culture. It is harder for China. But you can be attracted to the fact that they are so effective, that they do things without all these difficult discussions we have.

MW: I agree that China has the same goals towards Germany as Russia does but it is much more difficult for Beijing to achieve them. On the one hand, the Chinese are not treated as romantically in Germany as Russians are, but on the other hand, there is this myth of Chinese speed and effectiveness. There is a belief that they can achieve their goals because they are not limited by the discussions and debates that we have to conduct. Merkel has always said that China is a reliable partner.

Since you mentioned Merkel, can you tell me how she functions in this new situation?

RB: She has all but vanished from public life. She’s writing her memoirs and they should be published sometime in the autumn. Everybody is very keen to read them. In our book we focused on the Social Democrats because it is a very special story, but it doesn’t mean that there is no other story. There is a Merkel story too, because she was the chancellor for 16 years. In my view Merkel was fully aware of Putin’s nature and that is the difference between her and the Social Democrats. She also always mentioned human rights and after the annexation of Crimea introduced sanctions in Germany and convinced other EU states to do the same. Most importantly, we did not see any signs of financial gain by Merkel personally, nor in her inner circle. So that is a different story.

MW: Merkel is different, for sure. For example, she went to the hospital to see Alexei Navalny after he had been poisoned and was recovering in Berlin, which offended Putin. But on the other hand, you might say that she bears a great amount of responsibility for where we are now because she understood how Putin’s system works and how Putin thinks. Nevertheless, she thought that if you give him a certain role you can prevent this big confrontation.

RB: She couldn’t stop Schröder personally but she could have stopped Nord Stream 2. She didn’t do it also because of this pattern. This was characteristic of her politics; she loved having coalitions with the Social Democrats and allowing them to do their social stuff but also allowing them to do their Russia stuff. She believed that by letting them do that she was depriving them of topics which could lead to a mobilization against her party (CDU) in the next elections.

So she was playing with monsters, just like many politicians in the world. And it later turned out that these monsters were growing big and could bite.

MW: And this is what I would probably call her fault. Of course, it was important for her to stay in power and to show that she can stay in power, although there were some doubts that she could. Her own party did not expect that she would stay in power for so long. In this context she was making a decision to not spend more on defence because it was very unpopular. And popularity was very important to her.

It is easier for us to criticize her because we know how it all ended.

MW: That is true but remember that during one of the rare public discussions at Deutsche Theatre, Merkel said that if diplomacy fails, it does not mean that trying wasn’t the right thing to do. So that’s her view.

RB: I think that there were things that she did that are understandable and things that she did that are not understandable. I think her attempts to prevent a war in Ukraine by buying time or compromising with Putin are understandable. I think that at that time it was understandable and sensible, even when it proved wrong with time. But her decisions to cut defence spending, even after 2014, are not understandable and difficult to defend.

MW: The same can be said about the decision to build Nord Stream 2 in 2015 and sell gas storages and all this stuff. These things are really impossible to understand.

Markus Wehner is a political correspondent for the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, focusing on German domestic policy and German-Russian relations. He previously worked as the Moscow correspondent of this newspaper.

Reinhard Bingener is a journalist with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Jarosław Kociszewski is the editor-in-chief of the Nowa Europa Wschodnia online magazine.

German Russian Relations, Germany, Russia, Russia's invasion of Ukraine