God's Spies

The Stasi's Cold War espionage campaign inside the Church

Elisabeth Braw

• Publisher: Lion Books
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780745980096
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

When the Berlin Wall came down, the files of the East German secret police, the much-dreaded Stasi, were opened and read. And among the shocking stories revealed was that of the Stasi's infiltration of the Church. Almost 10% of the Lutheran Church's workforce were, it appears, busy involved in spying on each other, and on the Church's congregations. The Lutheran Church was the only semi-free space in East Germany, where those who rebelled against the regime could find a way of living at least a little out of the government's iron grip. Even the organisations that smuggled Bibles were infiltrated.

CHAPTER 1

ESTABLISHING THE STASI

April 1952. The German Democratic Republic – East Germany – was barely three years old. A strapping young man took the train to East Berlin from his home town of Oschatz near East Germany’s border with Czechoslovakia. In East Berlin, he changed to a local train that took him to Potsdam, a city outside East Berlin famous for its Versailles-inspired Sanssouci Palace – an enduring legacy of the eighteenth-century king Frederick the Great. In 1952, Sanssouci still resembled Versailles, what with its cheery rococo buildings and stunning terraced gardens. But arriving in Potsdam, the young man didn’t head towards the Sanssouci or any of the city’s nineteen other palaces.

The young man’s name was Joachim Wiegand. Even though this was his first visit to the city of Frederick the Great, he most certainly didn’t have relaxation in mind. Instead, he steered his steps towards the Eiche-Golm neighbourhood and its recently erected concrete buildings.

He walked past several military-like installations guarded by young men like him. With East Germany still lacking armed forces, the paramilitary Barracked People’s Police had taken over the barracks used by Nazi Germany’s Wehrmacht only a few years previously.⁷ But even though the barracks were populated by young men of about the same age as Wiegand, they were not his destination. Neither were the Soviet garrisons. The Red Army was officially East Germany’s liberator and protector, but its soldiers were not allowed to fraternize with locals. If Wiegand had decided to stop at the gates of the Red Army’s 34th Artillery Division for a chat with his contemporaries, he would have been asked to leave, or worse.

More nefarious Soviet activities were also taking place in Potsdam. In Leistikow Street, a half-hour walk from the Sanssouci, Soviet military counter-intelligence had appropriated a vicarage and turned it into a jail where it held suspected spies. The vicarage’s windows and doors had been sealed by bricks, with only tiny openings for the inmates to see the daylight. Though passers-by such as Wiegand couldn’t see them, around three dozen Germans and Russians were being held in the vicarage, which now housed thirty-six cells. They were often beaten too. Until the mid-fifties, between 900 and 1,200 mostly innocent people would be imprisoned here.

Soon, Wiegand had arrived at 28 Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse, another former Wehrmacht site.⁸ The lanky twenty-year-old with the thick dark hair and winning smile presented himself to an official. Raised by a single mother, Wiegand had been forced to start working at a young age, assisting at a farm near his home town. Until now, the idea of further education had never entered his mind. But soon he found himself in a classroom with other young men. Like Wiegand, they came from working-class backgrounds; most of them had been working as farmhands, bricklayers, welders. They were to have incalculable consequences for their country. Wiegand’s new school was the Schule des Ministeriums für Staatssicherheit, the School of the Ministry for State Security. The teachers and students already called it the MfS School, using the Ministry for State Security’s acronym. Joachim Wiegand had dedicated his life to the MfS – or the Stasi, as most people call it.

The MfS School was the Stasi’s new cadre factory. Founded in 1951, the MfS School would “give cadres political knowledge and convey to them the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin as instructions for action” – as Wilhelm Zaisser, East Germany’s first Minister of State Security, had declared upon opening the school, adding that it would also teach the students operative work. Like their communist comrades around the world, the German Democratic Republic’s communists loved the word “cadre”, an originally Latin word that Western dictionaries define as “a small group of people specially trained for a particular purpose or profession”. If you were deemed to be a promising communist, you were selected as a cadre.

Zaisser was himself a veteran communist warrior. Born in 1893, he had initially worked as a teacher in Germany before becoming a communist official, serving the Communist Party in China, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union. The Moscow communists had then dispatched him to the Spanish Civil War, where right-wing Nationalists were fighting left-wing Republicans. Despite his lack of previous combat experience, Zaisser excelled at the task and rose to lead the Republicans’ international brigades.⁹ His nom de plume: General Gomez.

Now Zaisser had returned to Germany – or rather, he had returned to the part of the country that was now East Germany. Under his direction, the MfS had devised a curriculum that mixed intelligence classes, weapons training, and sports with Polit-Unterricht, a course in communist ideology. “After each thought of Lenin that we discuss, the teacher asks us: ‘What did Stalin say about it?’ We quickly react and soon add Stalin’s opinion without being prompted,” one student described such lessons.¹⁰ The students were, of course, also taught about the operations of Western intelligence agencies.

When returning home during school breaks, Wiegand told his friends in Oschatz and Meissen (the nearest larger town) nothing of the education he was receiving. In fact, doing so would have been a terrible idea. Officially, the MfS School didn’t exist, and MfS officials habitually referred to it as the Eiche School. Even at this early stage, the school had the logistics in place: there was an auditorium and seminar rooms, and barracks where the students slept. Students were assigned to guard duty on a rotating schedule. In order to maintain secrecy, the MfS School didn’t let its students leave the compound during the school week. Every now and then the students played football, and an occasional collective excursion to the cinema was an eagerly awaited luxury. Perhaps predictably, one of Wiegand’s classmates got lonely. To his delight, a young woman began appearing at the school gates. They struck up a conversation, then a friendship. The young man fell in love. But his superiors were watching: the young woman was a French intelligence agent, the other students were told. The Stasi cadet was given a sentence. Was the woman really a French spy? Whatever the truth, Wiegand and his classmates got the message: they must be on their guard.

Until 1989, some 10,000 students – 99 per cent of them men – would attend the MfS School and go on to stable careers with the omnipresent Stasi. But, as they sat at their rudimentary school desks in the Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse, the MfS School students in Wiegand’s class had little idea that they would make history as perhaps the most meticulously organized secret police agency in history.

I have come to visit Wiegand at his home in Berlin and ask him about those early days. Like his fellow students, Wiegand hadn’t applied for the school or even considered a Stasi career. “Earlier that year, an official had approached me and asked if I wanted to work for peace and against fascism”, he explains. “Of course I wanted to protect peace. Who’s against peace? And I had experienced this horrible war.”

It had been a horrible war indeed. Petrified residents of Oschatz had waited in horror when Allied bomber planes flattened nearby Dresden in February 1945 as commanded by Britain’s “Bomber Harris”, Air Marshal Arthur Travers Harris. Red Army forces advancing from the East had subjected civilians to more callousness still, brutally raping tens of thousands of teenage girls and women, even elderly ones. When Red Army soldiers entered Meissen after capturing it on 6 June 1945, they looted it.

Wiegand’s friendly recruiter had explained that he was from the Ministry for State Security and offered Wiegand a job. The official had also promised him a salary of 700 East German marks per month, a huge increase from the 30 marks he had been making as farmhand. After confidentially consulting with his grandfather, the young man had signed on the dotted line: not only did he want to work for peace; the salary would also help him support his widowed, impoverished mother.

Settling into his new student life, Wiegand had eagerly soaked up the knowledge conveyed by his teachers, though in many subjects the teachers were barely more knowledgeable than their students. The MfS School, in fact, lacked precedent in Germany. Wiegand’s teachers were communists of the old kind, mostly working-class men who had amassed considerable experience as communist underground activists fighting the Nazis. The school’s director, Colonel Erwin Koletzki, had served several jail sentences in Nazi Germany for communist activity and possessed a wealth of subversive experience which, at least partly, made up for is lack of formal education. Some of the other teachers had attended communist schools in the Soviet Union, but most were learning about secret police work along with their students.

As the years went by, the MfS School would grow more ambitious. In 1965, it became a university, rebranded rather grandly as the Potsdam College of Jurisprudence.¹¹ The university promptly began offering not just degrees but doctoral programmes as well. By the time it was closed on 31 March 1990, the Potsdam College of Jurisprudence had bestowed doctoral degrees on 476 Stasi officers, who had written a total of 174 doctoral dissertations covering every conceivable aspect of intelligence work, always with an appropriately communist angle. Some dissertations had enormous value for the Stasi, but in other cases the slender volumes amount to nothing more than academic masquerading by officers unworthy of a PhD. As the fateful year of 1989 drew to a close, the Potsdam College of Jurisprudence’s last doctoral candidate received his PhD. Like all other degrees awarded by the university, it was soon declared void.

But such academic affairs were far off in the future when Joachim Wiegand and his fellow young proletarians became only the second class to attend the MfS School’s nine-month officer course. The course was intended to be longer, but there was a shortage of teachers. Yet even this perfunctory education made Wiegand and his fellow rookie officers better trained than most of men with whom they were soon to serve at Stasi offices around the country. Like the teachers at the MfS School, most of East Germany’s communists had little formal education, having only learned a trade and perhaps attended a communist party school in the Soviet Union. Older Stasi officers had acquired skills in the dark arts of secret police work from their Soviet comrades-cum-occupiers.

Upon graduation from the MfS School, Wiegand was assigned by the MfS to its regional headquarters in Rostock, a northern port city. Sleepy and remote though Rostock may appear, the MfS station there conducted crucial work. Located only 100 kilometres as the crow flies from the West German city of Lübeck, and 181 kilometres from the larger port city of Hamburg, Rostock was the perfect vantage point from which to observe Western European intelligence agencies’ activities in West Germany.

I have come to visit Wiegand again. In communist times, the Lichtenberg train station near his home was a major rail hub. With only the U-Bahn and a few local trains stopping here now, it has a ghostlike atmosphere. Each platform features a square announcer booth which, in East German days, also featured an official calling out arriving and departing trains and exhorting passengers to board without delay. Today, most of the announcer booths are empty; there isn’t much to announce anyway.

Exiting this transportation relic, I head out onto a street that features a couple of takeaway places. In hipper parts of Berlin, there’s bustling commerce with trendy eateries, vegan supermarkets, law offices – but not here. After a short walk, I reach the Frankfurter Allee, an imposing thoroughfare lined by high-rises from East German times.

Soon I’ve reached Wiegand’s street, a bombastic architectural project featuring row upon row of identical multistorey buildings accompanied by modest car parks. In East Germany, owning a car was a luxury. Other cities have tried to smarten up such streets and neighbourhoods by renovating the buildings and painting them in cheerful mixes of bright colours but here, in Wiegand’s street, the buildings look just like they did in the 1970s, though these days the car parks feature more BMWs than East German Trabants.

Just off the Frankfurter Allee, the Ministry for State Security, operating from twenty-nine buildings, ran its efficient machine. The mission of its 91,000-member staff: keeping the country’s regime in place. That meant, for example, preventing East Germany’s 16 million citizens from openly criticising the regime. Today, the main building houses a Stasi museum, with long-standing Minister of State Security Erich Mielke’s office a particularly popular attraction.

Having entered Wiegand’s flat, I’m further immersed in the German Democratic Republic. In fact, it’s as though the GDR never ceased to exist. The home, where Wiegand lives with his wife, Gerda, has two bedrooms and a living room that is furnished in the quintessential East German style. A dark wall-to-wall cabinet-television and bookcase dominates the room, with demure carpeting and a small dining table taking supporting roles. The colonel, fit and friendly, greets me at the door, as does Gerda, who immediately offers me coffee and cake. Wiegand takes my coat. As was customary in East Germany, I take off my shoes and put on a pair of slippers reserved for guests, and Wiegand and I sit down in the living room.

Apart from government ministers and leaders of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany – the SED – East German officials didn’t live in opulence, and this apartment has been the Wiegands’ home for over four decades. Gerda brings us the coffee and cake, then excuses herself and diplomatically leaves to run errands. She’s a supportive spouse, a woman who’s seen the Stasi at its apex, with her husband playing a crucial part. She’s seen it dissolved, ridiculed. Mere association with it is still enough to ruin a person’s career and reputation. Many of Wiegand’s agents, men and women he shared meals w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Prologue
• Dramatis personae
• 1. Establishing the Stasi
• 2. Pastor agents
• 3. A growing threat: seminaries
• 4. The fine art of recruiting
• 5. East Germans, escaping
• 6. Agents’ vanities
• 7. Cunning infiltration
• 8. An exotic foreign assignment
• 9. Target: international organizations
• 10. Intercepting Bible smugglers
• 11. A literary underground railroad
• 12. Agents and their rewards
• 13. Spying and doing one’s part for East Germany
• 14. An indispensable Bible smuggler (and Stasi spy)
• 15. Losing motivation
• 16. A crucial foreign mission
• 17. Churches spreading opposition
• 18. East Germany on its knees
• 19. The Berlin Wall collapses
• 20. Destroying the evidence
• 21. Anxiously waiting pastor spies
• 22. God’s spies: what was the point?
• Index