Wolfgang Lotz (agent)

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Wolfgang Lotz in 1950, with his wife Rivka and son Oded

Wolfgang Lotz (born January 6, 1921 in Mannheim ; † May 13, 1993 in Munich ) was a German - Israeli agent . Lotz, who in later years the name of Ze'ev Gur Arie assumed was also because of a reddish Schnauzbarts "Rusty" ( Engl. Rusty called) and carried beyond the nickname of the "Champagne Spy" also used by himself.

Life

He was born in Germany as the son of a theater director and a Jewish actress. After the seizure of power of the Nazis his mother fled with him in 1933 in what was then British Mandate of Palestine , where he a member of the Haganah was.

Lotz served in the British Army during World War II . After the end of the war he initially worked as an arms smuggler and, after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, joined the Israeli armed forces as an officer , where he was recruited in 1956 by the Israeli foreign intelligence service Mossad .

As part of a Mossad operation, Lotz, who had German citizenship , was smuggled into the so-called German colony in Egypt with the help of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) , where he was entrusted with the tasks of espionage and carrying out terrorist attacks : he was supposed to be in Egypt at the time working German armaments specialists , especially rocket technicians, to give up their work, whereby he resorted to means such as letter bombs and explosives packages and there were also deaths. In the "German Colony" in Cairo, he posed as a former Wehrmacht officer . As a brilliant teller of jokes and anecdotes, he was soon very popular. Thanks to the generous budgeting by the Mossad, he was able to dispose of considerable sums and made himself generally indispensable through generous parties.

In the Egyptian officer - Kamarilla the former military riders and German led horse breeder one who supplied the ladies and little ones with horses and many donations. This soon earned him a special position, which he used, for example, to forward the exact locations of the Egyptian military air fleet to Israel. His reports were critical in the destruction of the entire Egyptian military fleet, which was literally devastated.

In September 1962 he married Waltraud Neumann from Heilbronn.

On February 22, 1965, Lotz was arrested by the Egyptian Abwehr and later sentenced to life imprisonment by a state security court in Cairo. The death penalty would have been safe for him if his true identity as an Israeli spy had been revealed. During the trial, for camouflage reasons, he incriminated Gerhard Bauch, the then BND resident in Cairo, who had been informed of his assignments, which Bauch has always denied and stated that he was not at all about the operation from the BND headquarters in Pullach was instructed by Lotz. However, Bauch was declared a persona non grata and had to leave Egypt on March 17, 1965.

Lotz was exchanged on February 3, 1968 for several hundred Egyptian officers who had been captured by Israel during the Six Day War in 1967 .

In 1978 Lotz moved to Munich , where, among other things, he published a number of paperback books for Playboy Verlag. A novel manuscript based on his adventurous life, written on behalf of Moewig Verlag , has been lost. He also worked in the sports department of the Kaufhof on Marienplatz . During the 1982 Lebanon War , he was given a special mission by his old friend Ariel Sharon . Together with an assistant, he took German journalists to the front in Beirut and explained the Israeli view of things, which differed significantly from the German version of the ARD reporter Gerhard Konzelmann . Back in Munich, he fell in love with the journalist Herma Haddorp, with whom he lived until his death in 1993. He died of complications from a heart condition contracted while imprisoned in Egypt. He was buried with full military honors in Israel.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ C. Schrenk: The 1960s in Heilbronn. Heilbronn 2018. p. 288.

literature

  • The Champagne Spy Israel's Master Spy Tells His Story New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1972
  • Five thousand for Lotz. Report by the Israeli master spy Wolfgang Lotz , Frankfurt / Main 1975
  • Shlomo Shpiro (Ed.): The Champagne Spy: Israel's Master Spy Tells His Story June 2006, 2nd edition, ISBN 0-85303-653-5 .
  • Thorsten Schmitz: Mossad agent Wolfgang Lotz. The spy who fell in love , Süddeutsche Zeitung. September 29, 2007. 
  • The champagne spy. Documentary, Germany / Israel 2006, director: Nadav Schirman
  • Handbuch für Spione , Playboy Report (Original A Handbook for Spies) Moewig Vg., Munich 1981 ISBN 3-8118-6615-X
  • Doron Geller: Wolfgang Lotz - 1921-1993 . Jewish Virtual Library. Retrieved March 23, 2014.
  • Operation Damocles - Israel's Secret War Against Hitler's Scientists, 1951-1967 , by Roger Howard, Pegasus Books LLC, New York 2013, ISBN 978-1-60598-438-4

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Lotz, Wolfgang
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Israeli secret agent
DATE OF BIRTH January 6, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Mannheim
DATE OF DEATH May 13, 1993
Place of death Munich