German Parliament Members Linked to Secret Police : Politics: Communist leader Gregor Gysi, other party lawmakers from east are accused of being ex-informants.

The reformed communist Party of Democratic Socialism, fresh from celebrating its triumph in last week’s federal election, was under siege Monday with allegations that some of its recently elected members of Parliament had been informants for the East German secret police.

The controversy centered on the party’s charismatic leader, Gregor Gysi, after two influential national magazines reported that newly discovered documents have revealed that, as a lawyer in East Germany, Gysi informed on his dissident clients and received gifts from the secret police, known as Stasi.

Political opponents, including former Gysi client and leftist Greens Party legislator Gerd Poppe, called on the PDS leader to quit his seat in Parliament or clear up the charges.

Gysi has long maintained his innocence when it comes to the Stasi, and a parliamentary committee found no proof of any secret police activities on his part when they investigated eastern deputies after the 1990 election.

On Monday, he told ARD television: “I have not cooperated with the Stasi. I have not betrayed clients. Just the formulation of a suspicion cannot be sufficient for me to give up my seat.”

Gysi aide Dieter Liemann dismissed the new charges as a tired campaign aimed at discrediting the reinvigorated party. The PDS won 30 seats in the 672-seat German Parliament on Oct. 16, in large part due to the dynamic style of Gysi, who was voted in for a second term.

“I think this is naturally connected with the election gains,” Liemann said in a telephone interview. “If you want to weaken the PDS, you pounce on the most prominent person.”

The scandal arises just days after the PDS pressured one of its own newly elected deputies, Kerstin Kaiser-Nicht, to give up her seat because of Stasi activities.

During the campaign, the 34-year-old Kaiser-Nicht reluctantly admitted that she had informed on fellow German students while studying Slav languages in Leningrad between 1979 and 1984. Eastern voters elected her anyway, but PDS leaders said that she had shown no remorse for her activities and they did not want to work with her in Parliament.

Another PDS deputy, Rolf Kutzmutz, also has admitted that he was a Stasi informer, but the party is not seeking his resignation because he openly acknowledged that he had reported on material shortages in the former East Germany. His campaign posters stated, “My Biography Does Not Begin in 1989.”

The new Parliament will be sworn in on Nov. 10 in Berlin, and PDS member Stefan Heym is to give the opening address as the eldest member of the Bundestag.

The PDS presents itself as a protest party representing easterners, and many eastern Germans who voted for the PDS said they feel the traditional political parties dominated by westerners do not adequately represent their interests. Many easterners are disappointed with the high costs of capitalism and nostalgic for the social benefits of their old Communist system.

Chancellor Helmut Kohl dismisses the PDS as “red-painted fascists” and “Communist rabble,” and many western politicians do not believe anyone associated with the former Communist party belongs in Parliament.

Now, some members of Parliament are asking if Gysi belongs there.

In Monday’s issue of the conservative weekly magazine Focus, former dissident author Lutz Rathenow wrote that he recently discovered reports in his Stasi file with information from his attorney.

“I only had Gregor Gysi as an attorney,” Rathenow wrote, echoing the charges of several other dissidents.

Rathenow called for Gysi’s law license to be revoked, while Greens legislator Poppe called for him to step down from Parliament.

On television, Poppe said he also had found information in his Stasi file that could only have come from Gysi, who was his attorney at the time.

The weekly magazine Der Spiegel, meanwhile, reported that the office in charge of Stasi files informed the PDS last week that it had discovered receipts for 100-mark (about $70) birthday and Christmas gifts that a Stasi officer had bought for Gysi, and that the receipts “harden the suspicion” that Gysi was an informant.

The receipts were discovered in a file on Gysi called “Sputnik.” Gysi argues that the file reporting on him proves he was not a collaborator.