Hans Voelkner

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Hans Voelkner (born August 21, 1928 in Danzig ; † November 15, 2002 in Berlin ) was a secret agent of the GDR foreign espionage .

Life

Voelkner comes from a West Prussian working class family. His parents, the circus artists Käte Voelkner and Johann Podsiadlo, were members of the Red Orchestra resistance group in France . His uncle was the communist writer Benno Voelkner . In 1942 his parents were arrested and sentenced to death by a field court in Paris in 1943 and executed by the National Socialists .

Voelkner came to a National Socialist children's home . In January 1945 he was drafted into the Reich Labor Service , where he was arrested and imprisoned by the SS in February after attempting to flee to the Red Army . He then had to take part in the death march from Danzig to the Dreibergen penal and execution center .

After the institution was liberated on May 3, 1945, he came to Paris with French prisoners who had also been liberated, where he was interned until May 1946. From 1949 he lived in Leipzig , where he was again arrested and sentenced by a Soviet military tribunal for espionage and sabotage as an agent of the Sûreté nationale to six years in prison in Bautzen and released in 1955.

From 1962 he worked for the GDR foreign espionage as an instructor and courier for an intelligence "source" at NATO in Paris .

“It was my job to keep in touch with partners for whom traveling to socialist countries would have been a risk. Information had to be received from them, processed and compressed and its safe transport guaranteed. The results of the work had to be analyzed together with the partners and new tasks had to be determined. Finally, and this was a constant part of our work, human contacts had to be cultivated. There were personal problems, questions about the political situation or even just the need to talk to a friend openly again. "

In 1969 he was arrested in Paris by officers from the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST - Directorate for the Surveillance of the Territory) and sentenced to 12 years in prison by the State Court of the Republic of France.

In 1974 Voelkner was pardoned by the French President and exchanged for agents from Western services. After returning to East Berlin , Voelkner worked at the Institute for International Politics and Economics (IPW) in Berlin until 1990.

Works

  • Hans Voelkner: Salto mortale. From the spotlight to the invisible front , Military Publishing House of the GDR, Berlin 1989
  • Hans and Rosemarie Voelkner (eds.): Innocent in Stalin's hands. Letters - Reports - Notes , Brandenburgisches Verlagshaus, Berlin 1990
  • (Co-author in) Klaus Eichner / Gotthold Schramm (ed.): Scouts in the West . Edition Ost , Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-360-01049-3

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Quote from Hans Voelkner: Salto mortale
  2. ^ Karl Wilhelm Fricke : Historical revisionism from an MfS perspective: Former Stasi cadres want to reinterpret their history. (pdf; 129 kB) In: Germany Archive . HSH Foundation, June 7, 2006, pp. 490–496 , archived from the original on June 27, 2013 ; accessed on March 23, 2018 (review).
personal data
SURNAME Voelkner, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German secret agent (GDR)
DATE OF BIRTH August 21, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Danzig
DATE OF DEATH November 15, 2002
Place of death Berlin