Clemens Laby

Clemens Laby (born November 22, 1900 in Beuthen OS ; died January 17, 1984 in Bonn ) was a German mining engineer and spy of Western secret services against the GDR . His code name was "Gerber", his secret service identification "V-4907".

Life

education

Clemens Laby worked as an intern at the end of high school around 1920 at the Oheimgrube in Katowice , then studied mining at the Technical University of Berlin and graduated with a diploma. In 1926 he went to the Polish coal administration. After the annexation of Poland by the Wehrmacht , Laby came to the German coal administration in Upper Silesia. From October 1942 to January 1945 he was a member of the administration of the Siersza coal union . Laby fled towards the end of the Second World War from the advance of the Soviet troops to the west and at the end of 1945 got a job with the forerunner ofGerman central administration for the fuel industry in East Berlin. There he was promoted to personal advisor to head Gustav Sobottka and gained deep insights into hard coal production in the Soviet occupation zone .

Agent for the BND

His motivation for transferring information from the Central Administration for the Fuel Industry to the Gehlen Organization (predecessor of the Federal Intelligence Service ), which is currently being formed , is not known. The lawyer Karl Laurenz , whom Laby later hired as a spy, met him there in 1945 as a security expert for coal mining for the Technical Mining Inspectorate. According to Laurenz's criminal trial in 1955, Laby left the central administration in 1949 because he had to move from West to East Berlin , which he did not want. In the same year he was already a full-time employee of the western secret service. His code name was "Gerber". Laby's documents and contacts seemed so important to Gehlen that an intensified cooperation only failed because of Laby's high fee demands. It was only with the CIA “Jupiter” program that significant funds flowed to the Gehlen organization. In 1951 Laby received 800 DM per month plus expenses.

In return, the CIA demanded intelligence monitoring of fuel production in East Germany. In addition, Laby let his contacts from earlier play: A speaker in the GDR Central Coal Administration ran under the code name “Brenner”; he recruited his colleague "Graff" in the main office for chemistry to replace him, who in turn recruited Fürst from the GDR Ministry of Heavy Industry, Fürst recruited V-4961 in 1953, etc. The headquarters of the BND in Pullach, founded in 1952, valued the importance of this information very highly a. She knew the fuel production in the GDR in detail.

As a member of the Catholic student fraternity AV Hansea Berlin, Laby maintained connections with the Cartell Association of Catholic German student fraternities , where colleagues from the Upper Silesian mining industry met who later became managers of the West German coal industry, such as Anton Große-Boymann and Heinrich Kost , and from 1947 to the British administrative standing North German Coal Corporation , the predecessor founded in 1949 International Ruhr authority , changed.

End of agent activity

In 1950 he named his successor Kurt Hielscher alias "Carbon I" while spying on the hard coal department of the GDR. From Essen , where he worked in the West German coal mining management, he himself kept many strings in hand. He already knew the GDR professor of mining Otto Fleischer from his studies and later from his time in the central administration of the fuel industry . Fleischer suffered from the ailing condition of mining pits and machines and sought contact with the West. Laby advised Fleischer against moving from Zwickau to the West - on the grounds that the latter was needed to convey information from the mining industry in East Germany. In the grounds for the judgment in the later trial against Fleischer and colleagues it said:

“At the beginning of 1947 a meeting took place between Laby and the defendants Fleischer and Kappler in Zwickau, during which Laby explained to the defendants that the Ruhr industry was not thinking of supplying material for the expansion of the national coal industry. It was now a matter of proving that the building of the national economy would not be possible without the help of the capitalist Ruhr industry. All three then agreed to include more people in their plan. […] Laby was interested in collecting news about the development of the Zwickau-Oelsnitzer hard coal mining for the coal mining management [in the west]. The documents and verbal information that Fleischer then delivered to Laby made it possible to gain a detailed overview of the entire situation in the Saxon coal mining industry and of the conditions in the Freiberg mining academy. [...] By giving up the intended purchases from the West, the American secret service was able to put the materials urgently needed for the Saxon hard coal mining on their so-called reserve list and thus prevent delivery to the German Democratic Republic. "

Fleischer was arrested at the end of 1952 and Hielscher in 1953. Around this time, Laby's intelligence work slowly came to an end. He was a member of the Association of Displaced Persons , founded in 1950, and worked in the Federal Emergency Department of the Ministry of Displaced Persons , from where he occasionally provided Pullach with information about refugees that he thought were worth recruiting. Then his tracks are lost. Laby died in Bonn in 1984. He left his wife behind.

Looking back in 1963, the Federal Intelligence Service noted that “the former V-4907 identified himself with his name and the BND or the forerunner organization like no other. Incidentally, he always behaved fairly. "

Web links and literature

• Ronny Heidenreich: The GDR espionage of the BND. From the beginning to the construction of the wall. Chr. Links, Berlin 2019. ISBN 978-3-96289-024-7
• Gábor Paál, Maximilian Schönherr: The show trial against Otto Fleischer. (mp3; 47 MB, 54:53 minutes) SWR2 Wissen: Archivradio, May 16, 2018 (the first part of the program is about C. Laby.). 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The Federal Intelligence Service (BND) gave up a request from the WDR in 2011 during a radio feature about the espionage case Barczatis / Laurenz , played in the Laby a central role, known the name Laby dip not in BND archive. This Wikipedia article was therefore originally created with the help of other sources, including the university archive of the TU Berlin , where the matriculation extract about Laby's studies and dates of birth can be found. The files of the GDR Ministry for State Security about Laby can be found among others. a. under the signature MfS HA IX Tb 2166 and 2167 at the BStU as well as under the signature HdRA 51 in the Zwickau city archive. It was not until 2019 that the first scientific work from the BND archive appeared, in which Laby takes up an entire chapter and obviously played an important role in Gehlen's time. The BND archive shows Laby's birthday one day later, on November 23, 1900.
2. ↑ The GDR espionage of the BND - From the beginnings to the building of the wall. Retrieved February 6, 2020 . 
3. ^ Predecessor of the GDR Ministry of Energy
4. ↑ Not to be confused with the photographer of the same name
5. ^ BStU process tape MfS HA IX Tb 2166
6. ^ Archives of the city of Zwickau. Grounds for the judgment against Fleischer, p. 16