Leo Wagner (13 May 1919 – 8 November 2006) was a German politician (CSU). Between 1961 and his resignation from it, formally at the end of 1976, he served as a member of the West German Bundestag. For many years he was part of the inner political circle around the party leader, Franz Josef Strauss.
During the 1970s Wagner became a focus of public interest on account of widespread suspicions involving the interaction between his personal habits and his public duties. Allegations became harder to refute following a trial in 1974/75, at the end of which Wagner was convicted of credit fraud. He received only a suspended sentence. However, during the trial it also emerged that in 1972 Wagner had received a loan of precisely 50,000 Marks from an undisclosed source. Both the amount and the date were significant, since it had become known that another Bundestag member, Julius Steiner had accepted a bribe of that amount from the East German security services in order to vote against his own party in a crucial “constructive confidence vote“ which the Brandt government won by just two votes, somewhat to the surprise of a number of well-informed political commentators and of the chancellor himself. Leo Wagner continued to deny that he had accepted a bribe from East German agents to vote against his own party and in support of the Brandt government, but by the time an 80 minute documentary film of the affair was produced by his grandson nearly half a century later, there was no longer any need to preface reports of the matter with the adjective "allegedly“.
Early life Leo Wagner was born in Munich during the wave of revolutions that swept across German posts and cities during the immediate aftermath of World War I. His father, whom he would later describe as "his inspiration“, had undertaken as series of jobs, most recently as a police inspector. He came originally from Ellingen (Weißenburg-Gunzenhausen) in Middle Franconia. Wagner passed his school final exams in 1937, and went on to enroll at the “Hochschule für Lehrerbildung“ (government controlled teacher training college) in Munich. Leo Wagner was 20 in September 1939 when war broke out. Between 1939 and 1945 he served as a radio operator. During the first part of 1945, as the Nazi regime crumbled in the face of military defeat from east and west, Leo Wagner found himself recuperating in a Hanover hospital from the wounds that left him classified as "war wounded“. Before the war ended he had discharged himself and made his way on foot the 650 km (400 miles) cross-country to Günzburg, the home city of the woman who by May 1945 had become his wife. They had met when his military unit had been stationed in Günzburg earlier in the war. In marrying Elfriede (1922–1980) he acquired two step children who were able to offload retrospectively the social and legal disadvantages of illegitimacy through their mother's marriage.
Remaining in Günzburg, between 1945 and 1961 Wagner worked as a school teacher and, later, as a school head at junior-middle schools built up by himself at the adjacent villages of Bubesheim and Reisensburg. In 1961 he then accepted an appointment as "rector“ of the catholic junior-middle boys‘ school in Günzburg: this was evidently not a full-time position.
Politics Local and regional politics In 1946 Wagner became chairman of the Günzburg local CSU party. The CSU was a centre-right political party that saw itself as a successor to various political parties which through a combination of moderation and fragmentation had been swept away in 1933. In many ways the CSU was the Bavarian counterpart to the CDU operating in other parts of West Germany, and the two parties would generally find themselves in alliance in the national Bundestag, but the CSU was and is robustly independent of the CDU, especially in its dealings with the voters of Bavaria. It was Leo Wagner who had set up the Günzburg party branch, with the backing of the fiery Fritz Schäffer, a leading figure within the party across and beyond Bavaria. A series of local political appointments, sometimes complementary and sometimes overlapping, followed. In 1948 Wagner was appointed deputy "Landrat“. Between 1949 and 1964 he served as a member of the Günzburg municipal council. Between 1954 and 1962 he was also a member of the “Bezirkstag“ (Bayern), the directly elected district parliament for the administrative region of (Bavarian) Swabia. Within the "Bezirkstag“ he led the CSU group. In 1956 he embarked on an eight year period of service as junior mayor of Günzburg. Between 1961 and 1974 he chaired on the party's regional executive committee for Swabia.
National politics Career progression During the 1960s Leo Wagner emerged as a significant figure in national politics, following his election to the West German Bundestag (parliament). In the 1961 election the two main parties, the CDU and the SPD, received an almost identical level of support from voters: however, the CSU received almost 10% of the West German national vote from its Bavarian base, and a three party CDU/CSU/FDP coalition came together to back the continuation of a government dominated by the CDU under the leadership (as before) of Chancellor Adenauer, whose advancing age held out the promise, for ambitious leadership contenders of personnel changes at the top in the not too distant future. Leo Wagner secured a seat as a successful list candidate for Bavaria. He remained a Bundestag member till 1976, elected by party colleagues to serve no fewer than twelve years, between 1963 and 1975, as the parliamentary business manager for the CSU parliamentary group.
After the Spiegel affair in 1962 and the associated resignation of Franz Josef Strauß from his ministerial position, Wagner employed his considerable political skills of guile, charm and bulldozer-spirit behind the scenes to pave the path for his friend, the party leader, "back to the cabinet table" at the end of 1966.Andreas Zellhuber (Bearbeitung), Tim B. Peters (Bearbeitung): Die CSU-Landesgruppe im Deutschen Bundestag. Sitzungsprotokolle 1949–1972. In: Quellen zur Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien. Vol. 15/I, Vierte Reihe. Droste Verlag, Düsseldorf 2011, , p. LIII.Ulrich Blank: Für Strauß zur zweiten Kür bereit? In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. 13. April 1966, p. 13.
In 1968 Wagner was the editor-compiler of a volume of the Bundestag speeches delivered by Franz Josef Strauß (who would continue in post as the CSU leader till his death in 1988). Between 1971 and 1975 Wagner was one of five Bundestag members listed as the (at that time) joint CDU/CSU parliamentary business managers. Between 1972 and 1975 his name was indeed the one at the top of this list, identifying him in the words of at least one commentator as the "primus inter pares“ among those named.
In 1965 Wagner was one of those parliamentarians who took a lead in setting up the German-(South) Korean parliamentary group. He followed through on this initiative in 1966 when he teamed up with Max Adenauer and the Bonn-based publisher Hermann Pfatteicher to found the “German-Korean Society“ of which he became president and, subsequently, honorary president.
In 1967 he became involved with Gunter Sachs and the "Flammenpfennig“ association which they founded together and which, along with other schemes, subsequently became known for selling commemorative gramophone records in order to generate money to support the recently launched organising committee for the 1972 Summer Olympics.
Nemesis At home, all was not well. Leo Wagner was a popular councillor and, later, member of parliament with people who came to seek his advice. He received visitors in the large room on the first floor at the family home at Günzburg. Downstairs his wife and daughter became increasingly estranged from him. He was not much at home, but would appear for meals at which his demeanour was, at best, taciturn and distant. There were also ferocious arguments. The couple's child watched her mother change over time from a lively fun-loving woman into a depressive and then an alcoholic. Meanwhile, after becoming a Bundestag member, Wagner took an apartment at Bonn, the city far to the west in which the Bundestag was based at that time. Many Bundestag members did the same, and at least one Bonn apartment block had been set aside for the purpose. Wagner preferred to make his arrangements privately, however, and rented an apartment in the quarter surrounding the Hofgarten (park). Many, though not all, of those who knew him at the time were unwilling to talk about the deterioration in his condition even forty years later. According to one witness he seemed to be terrified to be alone. He frequently received visits from prostitutes at his apartment, and became a regular presence at several night clubs in the Bonn-Cologne area, spending implausibly large amounts of money on champagne. Among political colleagues he acquired a reputation as a formidable womanizer, though it is not clear how many people gained insights into any larger picture. By the time his grandson began to ask questions during the early decades of the twenty-first century, many of those who had known Leo Wagner were long dead, or for other reasons turned out to be out of reach. One who was still very much around forty years later was Theo Waigel, who had been a young Bundestag member during the 1970s (and who subsequently became a leading figure in the CSU). When Benedikt Schwarzer wrote to ask Waigel for help researching the documentary film he was making about his own grandfather's fall from grace, the reply was brief and, in its way, eloquent: “Because of my very negative experiences with Mr. Leo Wagner, I have no wish to become involved in a discussion about him“.
As the decade progressed, rumours about Wagner's increasingly deviant behaviour were circulated among the politicians in Bonn. Back at the family home in Günzburg there was little direct access to the Bonn rumour mill, but Wagner's increasingly desperate wife and his daughter were nevertheless beginning to join some of the dots. Elfriede Wagner took to telephoning her husband at his Bonn apartment in the evenings. When the call was answered by a woman whose voice she did not recognise she would put sown the telephone receiver at once. Alternatively, she would hold off doing this for long enough to yell “you whore” into the telephone mouthpiece first. An unavoidable breakthrough moment came in the Autumn/Fall of 1973 when the normally reliable monthly magazine “Capital“, a publication with a broadly-based focus on economics, at that time under the editorial direction of Ferdinand Simoneit, carried a series of articles under the headline "The strange affairs of the MP Leo W“. Much of what was written was couched in somewhat speculative terms. Nevertheless, the articles included what amounted to an allegation that Wagner has used his parliamentary status inappropriately in order to support attempts to borrow more money than he could afford to repay. It was said that Wagner had accumulated debts in excess of a million marks as a result of his life style and frequent night club visits.Michael H. Spreng, Richard Voelkel: Eine Million Schulden: Hoher bayerischer Politiker geisteskrank. In: BILD. Nr. 45/8, 22. Februar 1975