Uwe Barschel

Uwe Barschel and his siblings were raised by his grandparents in Börnsen, near Geesthacht; his mother worked as a seamstress and preferred to leave her children's upbringing to her parents. Barschel's father Heinrich, a mathematician, was believed to have been killed during the Battle of Berlin in April 1945. Barschel was described by his teachers and classmates in Geesthacht as calm, serious, ambitious, and career-conscious.

In 1963, Barschel was among a group of Geesthacht students who attended a school assembly which featured former admiral and convicted war criminal Karl Dönitz, speaking at the invitation of a pro-Nazi history teacher. The event, during which Dönitz gave an apologia for Nazi ideology with no rebuttal from students and staff, caused a furore when it was reported by the German and international press.[1] Seventeen years later, as Schleswig-Holstein's minister of the interior, Barschel attended Dönitz's funeral.

Barschel studied public law, economics, political science and education at the University of Kiel. Upon graduating in 1971, he was admitted to the bar and began working as a lawyer and notary. In addition to his legal and political activities, Barschel also developed an interest in science. He was reportedly preparing to withdraw from politics in the middle of the 1987 legislative session, and had almost completed his habilitation thesis at the time of his death.[2]

Uwe Barschel was married to Freya Barschel (née von Bismarck, 1947-), a distant relative of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. The couple raised their four children in the town of Mölln, where Barschel is buried. Barschel's headstone gives his date of death as 10 October at the request of his widow.

Barschel joined the Junge Union, the joint youth organisation of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU), in 1960. He became a member of the CDU two years later. In Schleswig-Holstein, Barschel was chairman of the Junge Union from 1967 to 1971 and deputy chairman of the CDU in 1969. Between 1970 and 1982, he served as chairman of the CDU's district association in, and sat on the district council of, the Duchy of Lauenburg. Barschel was a member of the Landtag in Schleswig-Holstein from 1971 until his death.

On 1 January 1979, Barschel was appointed Minister of Finance by then-minister-president Gerhard Stoltenberg. On 1 July of the same year he took over the Ministry of the Interior and became one of the delegates from Schleswig-Holstein in the Bundesrat. As minister of the interior, Barschel faced what was at the time the largest demonstration of the anti-nuclear movement in West Germany, protesting the Brokdorf Nuclear Power Plant. Barschel chaired the Interior Ministers' Conference in 1981 and 1982, and chaired the Ministerial Conference in 1982 and 1983.

In 1982, after Stoltenberg had been appointed Federal Finance Minister by Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Barschel was elected the new minister-president in October 1982. Aged only 38, he was the youngest minister-president in Germany's postwar history. Under his leadership, the CDU defended their absolute majority at the state elections in 1983, winning the election with 49% of the vote to the Social Democratic Party's (SPD) 43.7%.

Barschel was one of the founding members of the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, appearing at the inaugural event in 1986 to narrate a performance from Camille Saint-Saëns' Carnival of the Animals.

On 31 May 1987, shortly before the start of the 1987 federal campaign, a plane carrying Barschel and his bodyguard crashed on approach at Lübeck Airport. Both of the pilots were killed in the crash, and Barschel's bodyguard succumbed to his injuries at hospital a few days later.[3][4] Barschel himself survived the crash and was able to participate in the campaign.

On 13 September 1987, the day before the election, the magazine Der Spiegel reported an account by Reiner Pfeiffer, Barschel's media adviser, that Barschel had ordered him to spy on the SPD's top candidate, Björn Engholm, with the aim of embarking on a smear campaign implicating Engholm in tax evasion. Pfeiffer further claimed to have been ordered to install a bugging device in Barschel's phone and accuse the SPD of being the perpetrators. The subsequent scandal became known as the "Barschel affair", or Waterkant-Gate (an allusion to the Watergate scandal, with Waterkant (from Low German "waterside").[5][6]

As a result of the unfolding scandal, the CDU saw its absolute majority in Schleswig-Holstein reduced to 42.6% while the SPD's vote rose to 45.2%. The CDU managed to start coalition talks with the Free Democratic Party (FDP), which refused to negotiate with Barschel. On 18 September, five days after the election, Barschel denied all accusations and made the following statement to the press: "I give you my word of honour, I repeat: my word of honour, that the charges brought against me are unfounded." Under increasing pressure, Barschel resigned as minister-president on 2 October.

In 1993, it emerged that Engholm had been aware of Pfeiffer's activities and that an SPD official had paid Pfeiffer DM50,000 to delay bringing his story to Der Spiegel for several weeks, thus presenting Engholm as a victim while negatively impacting the CDU's performance in the 1987 election. Engholm was convicted of lying to the first investigative committee into the Barschel affair and was forced to resign as minister-president. Neither that first inquiry nor the second, convened in 1995, found Pfeiffer to be a credible witness or was able to determine Barschel's guilt.

On 8 October 1987, Barschel visited a travel agency in Gran Canaria to inquire about taking a flight to Zurich, Switzerland, where he was purportedly planning to meet someone. Finding that the flight was fully booked, Barschel took different connecting flights to Geneva, Frankfurt and Hamburg. Barschel's widow Freya later told an interviewer from the newspaper Die Welt that Barschel had been in contact with an informant who had promised to give him exculpatory evidence ahead of a parliamentary inquiry in Schleswig-Holstein into the Waterkant scandal. Freya reported that her husband contacted her from the Hotel Beau-Rivage in Geneva, telling her that he had met this informant at the airport.

On 11 October, the day before his scheduled testimony in Schleswig-Holstein, Barschel was found dead by journalist Sebastian Knauer and photographer Hanns-Jörg Anders, of the German magazine Stern, in the bathroom of Room 317 at the Beau-Rivage. His body was fully dressed and lying in a bathtub filled with water.

Barschel's autopsy uncovered a total of eight drugs in his system, including the sedatives lorazepam, diazepam, diphenhydramine, and perazine, along with the barbiturate cyclobarbitone and the sleep aid pyrithyldione. The Geneva prosecutor determined that Barschel's death was self-inflicted, and that he overdosed on these medications before stepping into the bath. This method of suicide corresponded with a guide published by a German right to die advocacy group. However, Barschel's widow and four children did not agree with this interpretation of the facts, and were convinced that he was actually murdered.[7]

On 12 June 2011 the Public Prosecution Department of Lübeck announced that the Barschel case would be re-opened and re-examined, with more sophisticated techniques such as DNA profiling being employed to find out the actual circumstances of the politician's demise.[9][10]

• List of unsolved deaths

• Thomas Ramge: Die großen Polit-Skandale. Eine andere Geschichte der Bundesrepublik. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag 2003, ISBN 3-593-37069-7, p. 198-227 (restricted online version (google books))
• Article on Uwe Barschel on the website of the Deutsche Welle
• Family Says German Was Slain. Reuters article on the website of The New York Times