Talk:Uwe Barschel

Very bad, needs good overhaul
The "Death" section is basically a rehash of Ostrovsky's claim. But de:Uwe Barschel discusses several different theories, and Ostrovsky's is actually the weakest. It fits the evidence, but then again every major theory in this case "fits the evidence" - even a straightforward suicide does!

What's really problematic about Ostrovsky's claim is the "lured to Geneva" bit. According to de:, Barschel wound up there by accident:

"On October 8th, in a Gran Canaria holiday resort, Barschel asked for a flight to Zürich, to meet with someone. When told that the flight was completely booked, he asked for a flight to any other destination, e.g. Madrid and Geneva."

(trans. from de:, emphasis added)

If this is true, the only way to square this with Ostrovsky's account is to assume Barschel wanted to go to Geneva all along, but decided to obscure this by travelling via Zürich or Madrid and inventing the story of meeting a contact in Zürich. But why would he then take a direct flight to Geneva at all?

Perhaps the most damning evidence in favor of suicide is that the presumed killers did not make sure Barschel would actually die (by submerging his head for example). Neither do the "traces of force" amount to much (a hematoma where his head rested against the wall, which a simple convulsion would just as well produce). And it makes little sense to assume an elaborate murder plot, yet also assume that "indications that another person had been in Barschel's room at the time of his death" were not removed by the killer(s).

Yet there are also things that argue against a suicide - Barschel was involved in shady dealings, there are persistent rumors of illegal arms trades (and he died at a time when the German government was busy supplying Saddam with all sorts of "dual-use technology" - illegally). Witnesses died.

In short, this article needs to be very NPOV, allowing for a lot of theories to turn out to be the correct one. Because we really do not know what happened. Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 22:05, 26 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree, and think the "conspiracy theories" section gives way too much weight to Ostrovsky, a source of externally dubious credibility. Unless people think otherwise, I'll trim this section down considerably in the next few days. Attack Ramon (talk) 17:54, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

There is also the conclusion of the toxicologist Hans Brandenberger who was involved in the pathological investigation, printed in the German newspaper "Die Welt". There he described the obstacles he had to overcome, such as destruction of obvious potential evidence by the genevan pathologist, like most of the urine and stomach content (which according to him is an unethical and very unusual thing to do for a pathologist) and a general lack of interest to cooperate with his investigation. He also criticized refusal of the pathologist to analyze possible metabolites because it was claimed to be irrelevant for the case. He managed to do this step anyway and ended up largely supporting Ostrovsky's account based on his results.

He maintains that the metabolites indicate that the substances were not given all at once - like officially concluded - but delayed and that Barschel was in no shape that he possibly could have taken the last 2 meds himself because he must have been immobilized by the first cocktail of meds, supposedly consumed dissolved in a bottle of wine about an hour earlier.

The lack of metabolites of the also found cyclobarbital in his urine indicates that someone else must have forced it down his throat after Barschel passed out and that it was just starting to act when he died, unlike the other substances. He also explains that he found the substance methyprylon, a drug marketed as "Noludar" in his urine, which is unusual considering it should be broken down in its metabolites by now, which leads him to his conclusion that it was given him shortly before his death, rectally.

Brandenberger also concludes that Barschel was pretty much beyond saving once the last meds were given because of the sheer amount of substances in his body and also in the way they were applied, even if someone would have found him in time and called paramedics.

http://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article11107132/Das-Gutachten-im-Fall-Barschel.html --84.160.227.116 (talk) 10:57, 8 February 2016 (UTC)


 * English-language article dealing with Hans Brandenberger's claims: The Irish Times - Derek Scally - Mossad accused over 1987 death of German politician, 22 November 2010.

Uncited material in need of citations
I am moving the following uncited material here until it can be properly supported with inline citations of reliable, secondary sources, per WP:V, WP:CS, WP:IRS, WP:PSTS, WP:BLP, WP:NOR, et al. This diff shows where it was in the article. Nightscream (talk) 19:11, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

Early life
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.

Seventeen years later, as Schleswig-Holstein's minister of the interior, Barschel attended Dönitz's funeral.

Barschel was married to Freya Barschel (née von Bismarck; born 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.

Political career
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. He 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.

Barschel himself survived the crash and was able to participate in the campaign.

Controversy
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 the same year. 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.

Death
On 8 October 1987, Barschel visited a travel agency in Gran Canaria to inquire about taking a flight to Zürich, 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. Freya Barschel later told an interviewer from the newspaper Die Welt that her husband 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 Barschel 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.

Alternative theories around Barschel's death
In his book By Way of Deception, former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky nourishes suspicions that Barschel was killed by Israeli assassins, claiming Barschel had too much inside knowledge about an Israeli-Iranian arms deal. In the 1994 book, The Other Side of Deception: A Rogue Agent Exposes the Mossad's Secret Agenda, Ostrovsky claimed that a team of Israeli assassins had murdered Barschel through poisoning and that the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) provided Barschel's telephone number for the Mossad agent to lure him to Geneva.

According to Ostrovsky, Barschel was lured to the Beau-Rivage Hotel by a telephone call received in October 1987 in the Canary Islands from a Mossad agent called Robert Oleff. Barschel met a Mossad agent in the hotel restaurant and was unwittingly provided a glass of wine which contained a sedative. Barschel left for his room and fell unconscious, at which time Mossad assassins broke into the room and used a feeding tube to forcibly feed him barbiturates and poisons, as well as inserted a fever-inducing toxin suppository into his rectum. Once the fever developed, Barschel was placed in the ice-cold water, causing him to die from shock.

"Just who the third party who went to such lengths to make a murder look like a suicide might be, is unclear," Andrew I. Killgore, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, wrote in 1995. Although the Israeli government issued a "formal denial" that it was involved, such a denial, according to Killgore, especially if it was "formal", was widely accepted in the region as confirmation that the opposite was true.

Ostrovsky states that the BND was cooperating with the Mossad to provide arms and military training to Iran in order to weaken both Iran and Iraq, which at the time were engaged in war, and force both countries to slash oil prices. Ostrovsky claims that Barschel was murdered because he refused to allow Israeli arms for Iran to be shipped from Schleswig-Holstein ports. During the Iran-Iraq war, Israel and the United States secretly armed Iran; the US had an interest in doing so to obtain bargaining chips with Iran regarding US hostages in Lebanon, while Israel had an interest in arming Iran in opposition to Saddam Hussein. Iran inherited a vast arsenal of US weapons from its Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Israel, with its large collection of US weapons, was in a prime position to sell HAWK SAMs, M-60 tank spare parts, F-4 Phantom parts and air-to-air missiles to Iran.

In addition, the police investigation found indications that another person had been in Barschel's room at the time of his death. The official autopsy found some traces of force having been applied.