Josef Kiefel

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Josef Kiefel (born October 2, 1909 in Gotzing ; † March 3, 1988 in East Berlin ) was a German colonel in the Ministry for State Security of the GDR and from 1953 to 1960 head of Department II of the MfS .

Life

As a working class child, he grew up in Upper Bavaria. From 1923 to 1926 he trained as a locksmith and then worked as a miner , machinist and road worker.

From 1927 he worked in various organizations such as the factory workers' association and the Red Aid and in 1929 became a member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). After the German National Socialists had gained strength , he emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1931 . There he was drafted into the Red Army in 1942 and completed a special course of the NKVD . From 1944 he was deployed as partisan and agent of the group "Andreas Hofer", together with Joseph Giefer and the radio operator Rudolf Gyptner , in the hinterland of occupied Poland . He was wounded several times before he could join the Red Army at Radom on January 17, 1945 .

After the end of the Second World War he stayed in Moscow and returned to Germany in July 1946 . There he became a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) in the Soviet occupation zone and took on official duties , including as an instructor for the SED state committee for Saxony-Anhalt in Halle and as a seminar teacher at the state party school in Wettin . In 1947 he began working for the German People's Police (DVP) and was deputy head of Dezernats "political police" (K 5) in the State Office of Criminal Saxony-Anhalt in the former City of Halle (Saale) , of which he took over from the 1949th At the end of 1949 he became deputy head of the main administration for the protection of the national economy in the state of Brandenburg . The official seat of this state administration was in Potsdam .

From August 1950 he became head of Department VIa (information determination) of the Ministry for State Security of the GDR. 1952 changed as head of the so-called department II (western work) and took over the main department II on November 23, 1953, which was responsible for counter-espionage . He headed this department until February 13, 1960, and was also responsible for the recruitment of the former SS officer and agent of the Gehlen Organization (OG) Hans Sommer in the summer of 1954 as an informant, who provided the names of around 800 OG agents in the GDR betrayed. Another spectacular occurrence during his service time was the escape of the MfS agent Hans Wax to the GDR.

During the uprising on June 17, Kiefel was seriously injured in the head. This health restriction contributed to the fact that he was no longer considered fully fit for duty in the late 1950s and was therefore released from the important position of head of counter-espionage in 1960. Due to his numerous "merits", Stasi chief Erich Mielke and the head of the higher-level Enlightenment Administration (HVA) Markus Wolf could not and did not want to part with him without further ado. In a one-off process within the MfS, Department XXI was set up especially for Kiefel with the tasks of "Combating Western Agent Centers" and "Internal Security", and he was given the management of it. After he finally retired in 1970, this special department was dissolved again and its areas of responsibility transferred to the office of the management of the MfS .

Honors

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Armin Wagner and Matthias Uhl: BND contra Soviet Army: West German military espionage in the GDR , Ch. Links Verlag; 3rd edition (September 2007), ISBN 3861534614 , p. 65
personal data
SURNAME Kiefel, Josef
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German secret service agent of the GDR State Security
DATE OF BIRTH October 2, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Gotzing
DATE OF DEATH March 3, 1988
Place of death East Berlin