The Political Domestic Espionage of the Organisation Gehlen 1946-1953. From the beginning, the Organisation Gehlen was supposed to be a foreign intelligence service. But to almost the same extent as its actual task, it devoted itself to domestic espionage, which was the domain of the later founded Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Illegally, Reinhard Gehlen had opposition efforts in the Federal Republic investigated and influenced in order to safeguard Chancellor Adenauer's policies. This extended to the character assassination of rivals and people whose thinking did not correspond to the world view of the authoritarian-conservative leadership clique in Pullach. Using hitherto inaccessible files, Klaus-Dietmar Henke shows how this domestic espionage, passed off as "counterintelligence", got completely out of hand and evaded all democratic control.
Born in 1947, studied modern history and political science in Munich, 1979-92 research assistant at the Institute of Contemporary History, 1992-96 Head of the Department of Education and Research at the Federal Commissioner for National Socialism. Education and Research at the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Files, 1997 - 2001 Director of the Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism, 1997 - 2012 Professor of Contemporary History at the Technical University of Dresden, since 2011 Spokesperson of the Independent Commission of Historians for Research into the History of the BND.
