Hansjoachim Tiedge

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Hansjoachim Tiedge (born June 24, 1937 in Berlin ; † April 6, 2011 near Moscow ) was a German intelligence officer and defector . In 1966 he joined the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) in Cologne . Responsible for countering GDR espionage since 1979 , he defected to the GDR on August 18, 1985 .

Life

Tiedge was a fully qualified lawyer . Driven by significant psychological problems caused by alcohol abuse, high debts and the death of his wife Ute geb. Sachwitz (1938–1982) (probably caused by Tiedge himself by a blow to her head with a pasta strainer), the government director and department head IV B of the BfV fled to the GDR on August 19, 1985 with the interzonal train . At the Helmstedt-Marienborn border crossing , he faced the GDR border troops . Four days later, the GDR news agency ADN announced the transfer of Tiedge. In the interrogations that followed, Tiedge, most recently group leader for counter-espionage in the GDR , revealed all of his knowledge about his former employer, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. According to the CIA , Tiedge is said to have made contact with the HVA months before his escape. However, the information provided by Tiedge only went beyond the information that the MfS already had through the top agent in the BfV Klaus Kuron , a direct subordinate of Tiedge, in only a few details . Tiedge's former boss, Heribert Hellenbroich , who had just been appointed President of the BND , resigned and was given early retirement. Hellenbroich was aware of Tiedge's alcohol problems and debts, but he left him in office. Hellenbroich's successor at the BND was Hans-Georg Wieck .

In connection with Tiedge's escape, several other espionage cases ("secretary affair") were discovered in the same month. The knowledge gained by Kuron could now be used by the MfS without endangering Kuron. At the beginning of August 1985, Johanna Olbrich (alias Sonja Lüneburg), the secretary of Federal Minister of Economics Martin Bangemann , left for the GDR, as did the secretary Margarete Höke , who was employed in the office of the Federal President . Ursula Richter , the chief secretary of the Association of Expellees, and her friend Lorenz Betzing , who was employed by the Federal Armed Forces Administration Office , also fled to the GDR . In the GDR, the turned MfS agent Horst Garau and his wife Gerlinde were arrested. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and his wife was sentenced to three and a half years. Garau was killed in 1988 in the MfS prison in Bautzen under “circumstances that have never been convincingly clarified”, with the GDR official version of “suicide by hanging”. His widow suspects murder. The legend was invented for Tiedge that he had already been active for many years as a “ scout of peace ” so as not to endanger the top agents Joachim Krase (at MAD until 1984 ) and Tiedge's colleague Klaus Kuron.

Tiedge spent the first two and a half years in the GDR in Prenden , where he was housed in the HVA management facility on the Bauersee . In 1988 Tiedge, who in the meantime called himself Helmut Fischer and lived in a luxurious house in Karolinenhof ( East Berlin ), received his doctorate from the Humboldt University with a dissertation on the defense of the protection of the constitution. After the turning point and the peaceful revolution in the GDR in 1989, he initially continued to live undisturbed in his house, where, however, the ARD journalist Werner Sonne tracked him down. Finally, on August 23, 1990, Tiedge was flown to the Soviet Union by the KGB .

Tiedge, who freely admitted to having been a “traitor”, was convinced that for personal reasons he had taken the right step by converting; at last he lived in isolation near Moscow . Since 2005, the statute of limitations in his case of treason in Germany and a related criminal prosecution in Germany against him was no longer possible; however, Tiedge himself had doubts as to whether his contact with the KGB would have been viewed by the German judiciary as another offense that would have caused the limitation period to start again.

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Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Tomb of the wife and daughter in the Find a Grave database . Retrieved October 15, 2019.
  2. ^ Scandal at the Office for the Protection of the Constitution 1985 - Spy Tiedge resigns
  3. ↑ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of April 13, 2011 (accessed July 19, 2019)
  4. ↑ Klaus Marxen , Gerhard Werle (ed.): Criminal justice and GDR injustice: Documentation. Espionage, Volume 4 , 2004, p. 108.
  5. ^ Rainer Blasius: Overrated defector. On the death of the "chief of defense" Hansjoachim Tiedge . Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 13, 2011
  6. ^ Stefan Aust: Germany, Germany. Hoffmann and Campe, 2013, ISBN 978-3-455-85076-5 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  7. ↑ a b Georg Mascolo, Georg Bönisch: Of course I am a traitor . In: Der Spiegel . No. 49 , 1993, pp. 97 ( online ).
  8. ↑ Der Verräter - Der Fall des Hansjoachim Tiedge , in the MDR broadcast on August 13, 2002
personal data
SURNAME Tiedge, Hansjoachim
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German agent, employee of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and defector
DATE OF BIRTH June 24, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH April 6, 2011
Place of death near Moscow