Otto Winzer Battles West German Plan to Liquidate GDR

By Vera Kessler · August 13, 2026

Diplomatic license plates and the liquidation of the GDR sparked a thirty-minute clash between Otto Winzer and Walter Scheel that ended in a stalemate hidden from the press.

Finlandia Hall, 3 July 1973. The conversation started at 18:10 and ended at 18:40. For thirty minutes, the foreign ministers of two states that shared a language and a border, but not a political reality, attempted to map out a version of "normalisation."

The record of the meeting—a published English translation from the Cold War International History Project—captures a fragile moment of diplomatic choreography. Otto Winzer, the East German Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Walter Scheel, his counterpart from the West, met at Scheel's suggestion. They were flanked by a small group of aides: Deputy Foreign Minister Oskar Fischer and Dr. Bock for the GDR; Dr. Brunner and Political Director Guenther van Well for the FRG.

Outside the room, a crowd of journalists and photographers waited. Inside, the two men navigated the narrow space between the desire for a "shining example" of coexistence and the deep-seated suspicion that any such cooperation was a Trojan horse for the other side's ultimate goals.

CD Number Plates

For a diplomatic service, the smallest details are often the loudest. The conversation shifted from high-level goals to the specifics of the GDR's representation in Bonn. Winzer raised a point of protocol that appeared, on the surface, to be a mere clerical grievance: the FRG's refusal to grant "CD number plates to the cars of the GDR's representatives."

In the lexicon of diplomacy, the corps diplomatique (CD) plate is a visible marker of sovereign recognition. To Winzer, the absence of these plates was not a technicality but a signal. He told Scheel that behind these "formal questions" lay the "intention of a special inner-German relationship," a status that the GDR could not accept.

Scheel's response was the textbook definition of a diplomatic pivot. He argued that there are no "special number plates for CD cars, but just a certain code of numbers," dismissing the dispute as a "technical question." He assured Winzer that the GDR's representatives would have all rights emanating from international conventions, regardless of whether they were listed in a special category. To the West German minister, the details were an evolution; he suggested that by the time the ministers met again in three years, such petty grievances would be irrelevant.

National Unity

If the license plates were the symptom, the underlying disease was the question of the GDR's right to exist. The conversation darkened when Winzer spoke plainly about the FRG's long-term objectives. He argued that the concept of a "special inner-German relationship" was actually a "concept aiming at liquidation of the GDR as a socialist state."

This was the central tension of the era. The GDR demanded full recognition as a sovereign socialist state, while the FRG, under the leadership of Chancellor Willy Brandt, pursued Ostpolitik—a policy of engagement that sought to improve human conditions without formally abandoning the goal of national unity.

Scheel denied that anyone was talking about "liquidation," but he did not renounce the ultimate aim. He stated that the FRG did "not want to abandon the goal of national unity," though he promised that Bonn would "strictly adhere to the principle of not intervening in the other German state's internal affairs." He framed this not as an aggressive act, but as a historical inevitability, noting that the German nation had survived thousands of years while social systems had changed.

Winzer remained unmoved. He stated that the GDR would not give up its "well-known stance." The two men reached a stalemate on the existential question, agreeing only that they should refrain from "fighting each other about international issues" while they were in Helsinki for the Security Conference.

TV Teams in the East

As the meeting neared its end, the discussion returned to the pragmatic. They spoke of trade, which Winzer described as a "brace for inner-German relations," though he noted that the FRG pursued this cooperation primarily for its own "special interests."

Finally, the conversation touched on the very people waiting outside the door. Scheel had two "minor questions" for Winzer, one of which concerned the permission for two television teams to shoot films inside the GDR. In a rare moment of easy agreement, Winzer replied that this was not a matter of principle requiring ministerial consultation. He noted that his press department was responsible for such requests and that many applications had already been processed and approved.

When the two ministers stepped out of the room at 18:40, they told the waiting press that the "course of the conference was in the centre of our conversation." The record leaves the deeper disputes—over sovereignty, national unity, and the legitimacy of a socialist state—unresolved, tucked away in the notes of a thirty-minute encounter in Finlandia Hall.