Gerda Munsinger

Gerda Munsinger ( born September 10, 1929 in Königsberg as Gerda Heseler, † November 24, 1998 in Munich) was a German model. It should have been a prostitute and spy in Soviet service. In 1966 she was at the center of the Munsinger affair that care in Canada for quite a stir.

Biography

Towards the end of World War II fled Gerda Heseler from East Prussia in the Soviet occupation zone and arrived some time later to West Germany. She worked there as a maid, waitress and model. At the beginning of the 1950s, she married Michael Munsinger, a U.S. occupation soldiers. Like the time when displaced from the eastern territories usual, the American authorities refused her application for naturalization, as it was perceived as a security risk. The couple moved to Canada and divorced later.

Munsinger lived from 1958 in Montreal, where she worked as a model and in a night club as a waitress and hostess. She learned numerous businessmen and senior government officials, with whom she had love affairs. Among them were Deputy Secretary of Defense Pierre Sévigny and Transport Minister George Hees, members of the Conservative cabinet of John Diefenbaker. Following a review by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police ordered Justice Minister Davie Fulton on 1961, their deportation in the Federal Republic of Germany.

The affair became public in September 1966, when the Liberal Justice Minister Lucien Cardin mentioned her name in a debate and thereby defended against accusations of conservative opposition because of an espionage case. Cardin explained then the Munsinger case the media, claiming that she had since died from leukemia. But Robert Reguly, a reporter from the Toronto Daily Star, felt on Munsinger in Munich, where she lived in perfect health. In various interviews, she revealed her outspoken love affairs with ministers, but dismissed the allegations that she was a Soviet spy, decided back.

Once in Canada, a media frenzy was kindled in their revelations out Munsinger married a second time and lived relatively withdrawn in Munich, where she died in 1998.