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This is NOT the FAZ article, but related:

BERLIN, Feb 17 (Reuters) - The German government sought on Monday to play down weekend media reports that health ministry officials warned privately last August of the risk of a smallpox attack should war break out in Iraq.

Health and Social Security Minister Ulla Schmidt told reporters on the margins of a meeting of the ruling Social Democrats that any threat remained "abstract" and was not backed up by concrete evidence.

Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung newspaper on Sunday published extracts from what it said was an internal health ministry report from August 2002 warning of the risks of a smallpox attack.

"It has to be feared that in such a case (a U.S.-led war on Iraq) that Iraq would react with its available biological weapons, including smallpox," the newspaper quoted the report as saying.

The government did not deny the authenticity of the report on Monday.

Germany's conservative opposition, which has long accused the government of failing to take precautions against a possible smallpox attack and has criticised Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's anti-war stance, seized on the report, saying it would press for an emergency parliamentary debate on Wednesday.

However, the head of the country's respected public health laboratory, the Robert Koch Institute, backed the government's assessment that any threat was remote.

"We see a very, very small risk," Robert Koch Institute President Reinhard Kurth told ARD television. "We see no need for preventative inoculation as long as there is not a single case of smallpox in the world."

Kurth added he was not worried about reports Iraq may have isolated a form of smallpox that affects camels. "If a human were to be infected they could not pass it on...It's not a virus that we have to be worried about," he said.

The government recently announced plans to acquire 100 million doses of smallpox vaccine, more than enough to vaccinate the 82 million-strong population.

A German health ministry spokesman said between 36 and 38 million shots had already been acquired. The goal of 100 million doses should be reached by the end of 2003, he added.

And another, also NOT the FAZ article:

BERLIN (AP) - The German government said Sunday it exaggerated the threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs in an internal report last year that claimed Iraq has smallpox stocks and could use them in germ warfare.

The Health Ministry said it drafted the statement in August to back up funding requests for the stockpiling of smallpox vaccine. But it denied that German intelligence has evidence of Iraqi smallpox stocks, contradicting the report's central assertion.

Nonetheless, opposition leaders seized on the statement's publication in a Sunday newspaper to renew charges that Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's government was playing down the Iraqi threat in public to avoid undermining its anti-war stand.

The internal report warned that a smallpox outbreak could kill about 25 million people - nearly a third of the population - in Germany alone, according to a copy published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

``German intelligence has documented evidence that smallpox samples are stockpiled'' in Iraq, the health officials wrote.

But Health Ministry spokesman Klaus Vater said that while the officials drew on intelligence reports, their risk assessment was hypothetical, ``drastic and imprecise.''

``The Health Ministry had no documented evidence about smallpox samples in Iraq, and it has none now,'' Vater said in a statement.

Germany's top security official, Interior Minister Otto Schily, said German intelligence has no evidence of Iraqi germ warfare stockpiles.

The revelations reignited a bitter dispute between Schroeder's government and the conservative opposition about whether Germans are being told the full truth about the threat posed by Iraq.

Since crushing Schroeder's Social Democratic party in two state elections this month, the conservatives have aligned more closely with U.S. pressure for military action. They accuse Schroeder's government of withholding intelligence on Iraq from the public - a charge the government rejects.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-2410067,00.html