There are strict rules for handling confidential documents. According to a media report, Chancellor Scholz and his wife, the Brandenburg Minister of Education, do not take them that seriously. They should throw internal documents in the bin of their apartment building.
Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his wife Britta Ernst, Minister of Education in Brandenburg, apparently disposed of confidential papers at their place of residence in Potsdam without making them unrecognizable. As the “Spiegel” reports, the couple’s neighbors have repeatedly found internal papers in the general household waste of the residential complex in downtown Potsdam for months, including printouts from Britta Ernst’s appointment calendar, e-mail correspondence and draft speeches by the Chancellor’s wife.
Some of the documents that Ernst threw away were torn up but not shredded. Shortly after the G-7 summit in Elmau, Bavaria, a piece of paper with photos and “brief profiles of the partners” of the heads of state and government found their way into the garbage of the household. The paper had been classified by the Foreign Office as “classified – only for official use”.
According to the magazine, the chancellor couple’s neighbors discovered the documents by accident. They would have been scattered on the ground around the garbage cans. The reason for this was assumed that a fox could have tampered with it. In addition, Scholz and Ernst would have disposed of the waste paper in the residual waste.
Strict rules apply in Germany for handling confidential documents. Such classified information is to be destroyed in such a way “that the content is neither recognizable nor can it be made recognizable,” according to the federal administrative regulation on so-called “material secret protection”.
Authorized to handle classified information is only “who has passed a security check to determine the required reliability,” says the website of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Neither the Chancellery nor the Ministry for Education, Youth and Sport of the State of Brandenburg have commented on this so far.
