A SENIOR adviser to Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, has been accused of passing confidential documents to East Germany in the 1980s which revealed how the British Army and RAF would react to an attack by Soviet-led Warsaw Pact forces.

The details were among more than 100 pages of material allegedly given to the East Germans by Karsten Voigt, 63, a former MP who now works for the German foreign ministry as co-ordinator of German-American relations. He spent yesterday at an international security conference attended by Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary.

The German magazine Focus claimed this weekend that in 1987 Voigt passed two highly sensitive documents to a contact in East Berlin before they were discussed in Nato’s military committee, a senior planning body within the alliance.

The documents contained precise details of how British and other Nato countries would react to a Soviet attack on western Europe, according to a source who has seen them.

One document headed Follow-on Forces Attack showed that the RAF and British Army in Germany would not have attempted to engage the first wave of thousands of Soviet tanks and armoured vehicles.

They would instead have concentrated on knocking out the second line of the Soviet advance, including fuel supply lines and food. The documents allegedly described how units of both the army and air force would be deployed.

Potentially more damaging to the Nato defence strategy were sections describing the precise conditions under which Nato would have been prepared to use nuclear weapons against Warsaw Pact forces.

A member of Schröder’s Social Democratic party (SPD), Voigt was an MP from 1976 to 1998, serving on the foreign affairs committee, and was also a member of Nato’s parliamentary assembly.

Deeply involved in arms control talks, he was often in contact with senior officials from East Germany’s communist regime. They included Gunter Rettner, a senior Communist party official, to whom he allegedly handed the documents.

“The documents given to the GDR (East Germany) show in short form what Nato knew about the Warsaw Pact,” a former member of the German general staff told the magazine.

“At the same time, they revealed how the West would react to an attack by the East. The handing over of these documents seriously compromised Nato’s security.”

Focus said the allegations were contained in a dossier that federal prosecutors handed to the justice ministry last December. The ministry declined to comment and has not said whether it intends to prosecute Voigt.

Suggestions that such sensitive Nato material was being leaked to America’s cold war foes could prove an embarrassment to Schröder in the run-up to next week’s visit to Germany by President George W Bush.

Voigt confirmed yesterday he had passed documents to East Berlin but denied their contents were of a secret or sensitive nature. He claimed the documents had been drawn up not by Nato’s military committee but by its parliamentary assembly, which would not have been privy to such sensitive material.

“These reports were intended for the public,” Voigt said. “It’s true that I gave the reports to Herr Rettner and I also gave them to other people as they were intended for distribution.”

The magazine said the allegations against Voigt were based on documents found by members of the German intelligence service in archives in East Berlin in June 1998, three months before the elections that brought Schröder to power.

It claimed a decision was taken at the time not to order an investigation. The original documents have since disappeared from the archives.

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