Markus Wolf

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Markus Wolf (1989)

Markus Johannes ("Mischa") Wolf (born January 19, 1923 in Hechingen ; † November 9, 2006 in Berlin ) headed the Enlightenment Headquarters (HVA), the foreign intelligence service in the Ministry of State Security (MfS ) for 34 years, from 1952 to 1986 ) of the GDR , most recently in the rank of Colonel General.

Life

1923 to 1945

Wolf's father was the doctor and writer Friedrich Wolf (1888–1953), who came from a religious Jewish family from Neuwied in the Rhineland and was an active communist . Markus Wolf's brother was the film director Konrad Wolf (1925–1982). The family lived in Stuttgart until, after the National Socialists came to power in 1933, they first emigrated to Switzerland , then to France and in 1934 to the Soviet Union . There they survived (unlike many other communists who had also fled to the Soviet Union) the time of the Great Terror (autumn 1936 to the end of 1938). The family lived in Moscow in a house on Nizhni Kislovsky Street.

From 1940 to 1942 Markus Wolf attended the Academy of Aircraft Construction in Moscow , then the party school of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, which was evacuated from Moscow to Kuschnarenkowo in the Ural foreland after the German attack in 1941 . There he met his former school friend Wolfgang Leonhard again and fell in love with Emmi Stenzer (* 1923, † 2020), the daughter of the former KPD member of the Reichstag, Franz Stenzer , and married her in Moscow in 1944. From 1943 he was editor and spokesman for the Moscow German national broadcaster .

1945 to 1990

In May 1945, after the end of the Second World War , a few days after Leonhard, Wolf returned to Berlin. Initially, both made careers in the Communist Party of Germany and the Socialist Unity Party of Germany . But while Leonhard broke with Stalinism in 1949 and emigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1950, Wolf remained true to the line. At first he worked under the code name "Michael Storm" at the newly established Berliner Rundfunk , where he stayed until 1949. Wolf was accredited as a reporter at the Nuremberg Trials in 1945/1946 .

After the founding of the GDR, Wolf was appointed first councilor at the GDR embassy in Moscow in 1949 . He held this position until 1951.

From September 1951 Wolf participated in the establishment of the GDR's first foreign intelligence service , the Institute for Economic Research (IWF). He became Deputy Head of Department III (Defense). In 1952, Wolf was appointed head of the IMF as successor to Anton Ackermann . At the age of 29, Wolf became head of a worldwide network of agents with 4,600 full-time employees, over 10,000 unofficial employees and 1,500 spies in the Federal Republic of Germany , including around 50 top sources.

In 1953 the IMF was incorporated into the Ministry of State Security . Its employees were specially selected, were in many cases better trained than other employees of the Ministry of State Security and saw themselves as its elite. Wolf became head of Department XV (Foreign Reconnaissance ), the name of which was changed in 1956 to Headquarters Reconnaissance (HVA). Wolf became major general and, as head of espionage, was also the first deputy of the Minister for State Security, first under Ernst Wollweber , then under Erich Mielke . Wolf paid special attention to industrial espionage in the Federal Republic of Germany and influencing West German politics through targeted false information with the aim of destabilization.

In 1972, according to his memoirs published in 1997, Wolf contributed to the failure of the no-confidence vote against Willy Brandt because the GDR and the Soviet Union wanted to secure the Eastern Treaty. He bribed the CDU MP Julius Steiner with 50,000 DM so that he abstained from voting.

In March 1976 and after the divorce from his wife Emmi, he met Christa Heinrich, a trained seamstress, in Karl-Marx-Stadt ( Chemnitz ). He married her in 1976 and initiated her into his secret service work. This was not a problem for her because she had worked for the Stasi for years.

Markus Wolf (center, with sunglasses) at the funeral of his brother Konrad in Berlin in 1982. Erich Honecker among the guests on the right .

In 1979 Wolf was identified by Werner Stiller at the Federal Intelligence Service on a photo taken by the Swedish Intelligence Service. It showed him shopping in Stockholm. After there hasn't been a current photo of him in the West since the 1950s and he was nicknamed the "man without a face", this was sensational. Since then, his travel options to western countries have been severely limited. This picture was launched by the BND in the news magazine Der Spiegel and also made Markus Wolf known to the West German public.

A rare photo showed Wolf on March 12, 1982 at the funeral of his brother in the Berlin-Friedrichsfelde cemetery . The photo was taken by the star photographer Harald Schmitt , who reported in his photo book Seconds, the Story , that the negatives for the photos "mysteriously" disappeared from the Stern archive.

In May 1986 Wolf was given leave of absence at his own request. He divorced his wife Christa in August 1986 and started his first book, The Troika . In October 1986 he married Andrea Stingl, with whom he stayed until his death. Stingl four months had for attempted illegal emigration in Stasi sat -haft. This and Wolf's women's relationships in general were a thorn in the side of his superior Erich Mielke . In November 1986 Colonel General Wolf was released from the MfS. In later newspaper interviews, Mielke indicated that Wolf's lifestyle also led to his departure from the Stasi.

Shortly afterwards he met his youngest son, his half-brother Thomas Naumann , while filming the DEFA documentary about his father Friedrich Wolf ( Forgive me, I'm a person by Lew Hohmann ) .

Wolf speaks at the major Berlin demonstration on November 4, 1989

In the spring of 1989, Wolf published The Troika . The book surprised by its self-critical openness. To present the book, Wolf planned to travel to Germany as well. In June 1989, however, the Federal Court of Justice issued an arrest warrant against him on the application of the Federal Public Prosecutor Kurt Rebmann on charges of being a secret service agent .

In September 1989, in an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung , he spoke of his joint responsibility for the deficiencies in the GDR. Later he even took part in events of opposition groups and described himself as an “advisor” to the new SED politicians, but did not hold any offices himself. On November 4, 1989 - five days before the Berlin Wall opened - Wolf appeared as a speaker at the large demonstration on Berlin's Alexanderplatz . He was whistled by the audience when he demanded, among other things, that the SED should initiate a “turnaround” and begin a dialogue on “fundamental reforms of a renewed socialism”.

Wolf claimed he received a seven-figure offer from the CIA in May 1990 , a new identity, and a house in California. On September 27, 1990, shortly before reunification , he fled with his son Franz from his first marriage, his wife Andrea and his father-in-law with real passports across the GDR border to Czechoslovakia . Before the border, Wolf changed from his Volvo to an old Lada . The first hiding place was a holiday apartment in Kitzbühel , Austria , which his friend Heinrich von Einsiedel had bought for him. After that, Wolf was helped by his old contacts with the Soviet secret service, and a KGB courier brought him and his wife from Austria to Hungary and from there by plane to Moscow. They remained in exile for a year until the Soviet Union also collapsed after the failed August coup against Mikhail Gorbachev .

1991 to 2006

In September 1991 Wolf again sought refuge in Austria and applied for political asylum there , which was refused. After almost exactly a year in exile, he and his wife returned to Germany, also on the advice of their lawyers, to face the German federal authorities. Federal Prosecutor Joachim Lampe took him into custody at the Bayerisch Gmain border crossing . Johann Schwenn took over his defense.

Grave of Konrad and Markus Wolf in the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery in Berlin

Almost two years after his arrest, the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court began the trial in May 1993 with great media interest on charges of treason and bribery . The accusation of treason relates primarily to the cases of the spies Klaus Kuron , Günter Guillaume and Alfred and Ludwig Spuhler. The court followed the indictment and sentenced Wolf to six years' imprisonment. The now 70-year-old no longer had to be detained. Two years later, the Federal Constitutional Court made a fundamental decision: Employees of the HVA who then lived in the GDR were no longer prosecuted, as the espionage was carried out on behalf of the sovereign GDR state and in accordance with its laws. The verdict against Wolf was overturned.

In 1996, Wolf applied for a visa to the United States in order to be there when his memoirs were published by Random House and to visit his half-brother Lukas, whom he had not seen since the 1930s. The visa was refused on the grounds that he had a terrorist past.

In 1997 there was another two-year suspended prison sentence for deprivation of liberty , coercion and assault in four cases. In the same year Wolf was imprisoned for three days for failure to testify in the espionage trial against SPD politician Paul Gerhard Flämig .

Towards the end of his life, Wolf lived in Berlin, where he died on the night of November 9, 2006 at the age of 83. On November 25, his urn was buried in the grave of his brother Konrad in the Pergolenweg grave complex of the Socialist Memorial at the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery in Berlin.

His step-daughter Claudia Wolf has been the assistant and second wife of the Swabian entrepreneur Hans Wall since 1993 . His son Franz Wolf became known as a financial trustee in connection with the offshore leaks .

Works

  • The Troika: The Story of a Non-Made Film . Structure, Berlin / Weimar 1989, ISBN 3-351-01450-3 .
  • On our own behalf: Confessions and Insights . Schneekluth, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-7951-1216-8 .
Signature of Markus Wolf, 1995

literature

Web links

Commons : Markus Wolf  - Collection of Images

Obituaries

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Simon Erlanger: Ex-GDR spy chief Markus Wolf Relationship to Judaism: The roots are always present. Jüdische Rundschau , Basel, October 30, 1997
  2. ^ Hans-Dieter Schütt: Markus Wolf. Last conversations. Das Neue Berlin, 2007, pp. 79–90.
  3. ↑ Hans-Joachim Noack: “Everyone has to regret somehow” . In: Der Spiegel . No. 37 , 1991, pp. 30-34 ( online - September 9, 1991 ).
  4. ^ A b Anne Applebaum: History Will Judge the Complicit , The Atlantic , 2020, accessed June 9, 2020
  5. ↑ Markus Wolf: Chief of espionage in the secret war . List Verlag, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-471-79158-2 .
  6. ↑ a b c d Man without a face - Markus Wolf: Places, dates and events. MDR Zeitreise , September 15, 2015, archived from the original on December 20, 2016 ; accessed on January 2, 2017 .
  7. ↑ GDR espionage: That makes them shake a lot . In: Der Spiegel . No. 10 , 1979, p. 70 ( Online - Mar. 5, 1979 ).
  8. ↑ Wolfgang Seiffert: A strategy with staying power? In: Der Spiegel . No. 15 , 1989, pp. 59-61 ( Online - Apr. 10, 1989 ).
  9. ↑ Wolf in the wanted book . In: Der Spiegel . No. 46 , 1989, pp. 16-17 ( Online - Nov. 13, 1989 ).
  10. ^ Obituary: Markus "Mischa" Wolf . In: Der Spiegel . No. 46 , 2006, p. 226 ( Online - Nov. 13, 2006 ).
  11. ↑ Speeches at the Alexanderplatz demonstration: Markus Wolf (12:10 p.m.) , website of the German Historical Museum , Berlin, accessed on January 2, 2017.
  12. ↑ Wolf has to go to court . Neue Zeit, February 1993, p. 2 .
  13. ↑ Principles on the resolution of the Second Senate of May 15, 1995
  14. ^ US State Department press release ( November 5, 2004 memento in the Internet Archive ). On: secretary.state.gov, June 9, 1997. Among other things, on the rejection of a US visa for Markus Wolf (English).
  15. ↑ Former East German spymaster dies at 83rd MSNBC , September 11, 2006, accessed on February 26, 2017 .
  16. ↑ Anna Kemper and Esther Kogel Boom: "We are in the heart of all communists, right?" . In: Potsdamer Latest News , October 2, 2009, p. 29.
personal data
SURNAME Wolf, Markus
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wolf, Markus Johannes (full name); Wolf, Mischa
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Colonel General, head of the GDR's foreign intelligence service
DATE OF BIRTH January 19, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Hechingen
DATE OF DEATH November 9, 2006
Place of death Berlin