Manfred Rotsch

Manfred Emil Rotsch (born June 19, 1924 in Bockau near Aussig ) is a German engineer and spy . During his decades as an aircraft designer at Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm (MBB), he revealed technical and military secrets to the KGB , of which he had been an agent under the code name "Emil" since the early 1950s. When he was exposed and arrested in 1984, he was probably the longest-serving KGB agent in West Germany.

Life

Rotsch grew up in the Sudetenland and, after serving in the Second World War, studied aircraft construction from 1949 at the Technical University of Dresden , where he was involved with the FDJ . It is considered likely that he was recruited as an agent by the Soviet intelligence service during his studies. In May 1954 Rotsch was smuggled into the Federal Republic as a "refugee" and he managed to build a career in the West German aviation industry. Initially employed at Heinkel in Stuttgart , he forwards construction plans for the Fouga Magister military aircraft assembled there to East Berlin. Via the development ring south , it later came to the Junkers aircraft and engine works in Munich, which were incorporated into the MBB Group in 1969. As a department head at MBB, he was involved in the construction of the Panavia Tornado fighter-bomber, among other things , and Rotsch also had access to the company's space program documents. After his arrest, papers on the Jäger 90 project and studies on unmanned drones were found in his desk .

The agent wrote his reports with secret ink on the back of his regular letters to a fictional relative "Aunt Ulla" in East Berlin, but also used dead mailboxes in Munich and Speyer . Meetings with his command officer took place regularly in Salzburg . Manfred Rotsch disguised his espionage activities with an inconspicuous private life and an outwardly conservative attitude: he lived with his wife and three daughters in a single-family house in Poing , was a passionate gardener and chess player and, as an activist of the Christian Social Workers, moved to his works council in 1978 Company one. Politically, he was involved in his home community with the CSU and the Sudeten German Landsmannschaft .

In 1981 the high-ranking KGB officer Vladimir Ippolitowitsch Wetrow came into contact with the French secret service DST and subsequently handed over several thousand internal KGB documents under the code name “Farewell”. The evaluation clearly showed that the Soviets had to have a high-level source in the Messerschmitt works; this was communicated to the MBB Group in June 1983. After extensive research, Rotsch was identified as an agent in the summer of 1984 and, after several months of shadowing, was arrested on September 20, 1984 - just ten days before his planned retirement. In the course of his arrest, serious safety deficiencies in the armaments industry came to light: Rotsch had not been checked for over 16 years.

In July 1986 Rotsch was sentenced by the Bavarian Supreme Court to a prison term of eight and a half years for betraying state secrets. Just one year later, on August 12, 1987, he was exchanged in Berlin for the doctor Christa-Karin Schumann, Winfried Baumann's former partner . In November 1987 Rotsch crossed the border again to live as a pensioner in the Federal Republic.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jürgen Borchert: The cooperation of the Ministry for State Security (MfS) with the Soviet KGB in the 70s and 80s. A chapter from the history of SED rule . Berlin, Lit Verlag 2006 ISBN 3-8258-9812-1 p. 163
2. ↑ Janusz Piekalkiewicz: World history of espionage . Vienna, Komet Verlag, 2002 ISBN 3933366313 p. 512.
3. ↑ Mystery of the tornado spy Der Spiegel 49/1984.
4. ↑ Piekalkiewicz (2002), p. 513f.
5. ↑ Spy in the Fog The Time 50/1984