This odd turn of events, however, did nothing to allay the suspicions of both Brandt and the press later that Wehner had played some kind of underhand role in the Chancellor's resignation. The version in the press was that Wehner had conspired in one way or another with his protégé, Günther Nollau, the President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (the counter-espionage service). It was suggested that in 1973 Nollau had informed Wehner of the suspicions against Guillaume before he told Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the Minister of the Interior, to whom he was formally responsible. Nollau always vehemendy denied this. He insisted that he had told Genscher on 29 May, and Wehner not until 4 June. He remembered the latter date very clearly, he said, because it was his own birthday. Genscher, however, seems a little sceptical of this in his memoirs. 'What did worry me,' he says, 'was that Nollau kept Wehner informed of the investigation. What would Wehner do with this knowledge, since as everyone knew, he was increasingly critical of Willy Brandt's chancellorship?' Arnulf Baring, the standard historian of the period, is inclined to agree. Nollau's forewarning of Wehner, which might have been on 23 May, the very day that the file landed on Nollau's desk, he finds 'exceedingly likely'.

Genscher didn't like Nollau, and blamed him afterwards for telling untruths about the amount of information he had passed on about the case. His behaviour, he said, 'confirmed many of the prejudices raised against him previously'. Brandt didn't like him, either, and refers to him sarcastically in his memoirs as 'supposedly able'. Nollau certainly pursued the case with remarkable ineptitude and desuetude, if nothing worse. His appearance in subsequent television interviews inclines one to share all the prejudices and suspicions that were expressed against him; just as well, you feel, as with Wienand, that he was not in the second-hand car trade, or he might not have got as far as he did.

Guillaume also came to believe that there was a conspiracy - but in his version Wehner, Nollau and Genscher were all in it together. Nollau, he is reported to have said in the evidence he gave when his old employer Markus Wolf was in his turn tried for treason in 1933,1 was the confidant of Genscher as well as of Wehner, and both of them wanted to force Brandt out. 'Nollau held out the knife, and Genscher gave Brandt the necessary push to make him run on to it.' He himself, he said, in a slightly different version of the metaphor, had been used as the club with which Brandt had been struck.