Treason!


Driven by significant psychological problems caused by alcohol abuse, high debts and the death of his wife, a high-ranking employee at the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hansjoachim Tiedge, flees...



...on August 19, 1985 with the interzonal train to the GDR.


At the Helmstedt-Marienborn border crossing he faces the GDR border troops. Four days later, the GDR news agency ADN announced Tiedge's transfer.

In the subsequent interrogations by the GDR "Reconnaissance Headquarters" (HVA), Tiedge, most recently group leader for East German counterintelligence, reveals everything he knows about his former employer, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

What the West German defector doesn't know - and what his interrogators don't tell him either: The GDR "Main Reconnaissance Administration" (HVA) had an even better placed spy in the Federal Republic at the time.

The information provided by Tiedge therefore went only in a few details beyond the information that the HVA received from the long-standing and still undisclosed top agent in the BfV Klaus Kuron, a senior officer in West German counterintelligence...



...and direct subordinate Tiedges, already has!

Tiedge's former boss Heribert Hellenbroich...



...just appointed President of the BND, has to resign. Hellenbroich was aware of Tiedge's alcohol problems and debts, but he kept him in office. Hellenbroich's successor at the BND was Hans-Georg Wieck.

In connection with Tiedge's escape, several other espionage cases ("secretaries' affair") were uncovered in the same month.

Because now the knowledge gained by Kuron could be used by the HVA without endangering Kuron himself. The secretaries who spied for the HVA were all about to be exposed, which Kuron knew and of course had told the GDR secret service.

At the beginning of August 1985, Johanna Olbrich (aka Sonja Lüneburg)…



...the secretary of the Federal Minister of Economics, Martin Bangemann, went to the GDR, as did the secretary, Margarete Höke...



... who was employed in the Office of the Federal President.

The chief secretary of the Association of Expellees, Ursula Richter, also fled to the GDR...



... and her friend Lorenz Betzing, who worked for the Bundeswehr Administration Office.

In the GDR itself, the MfS agent Horst Garau, "turned around" by the West Germans, was…



...and his wife Gerlinde arrested.

Garau was sentenced to life imprisonment and his wife to three and a half years. Garau allegedly committed suicide by hanging himself in the MfS prison in Bautzen in 1988, but under circumstances that have never been convincingly clarified.

In the GDR, a legend was invented for Tiedge that he had already been active as a “peace scout” for many years so as not to endanger Tiedge's colleague Klaus Kuron.

Tiedge spent the first two and a half years in the GDR in Prenden, where he was accommodated in the HVA line building at Bauersee.

Shortly before the political changes in the GDR, Tiedge, who now called himself Helmut Fischer and lived in a luxurious house in Karolinenhof (East Berlin).



... received his doctorate in 1988 at East Berlin's Humboldt University, of all things, with a dissertation on the defense work of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

After the fall of communism in 1989, he initially continued to live undisturbed in his house, where, however, the ARD journalist Werner Sonne tracked him down.

Finally, on August 23, 1990, Tiedge was flown by the KGB to the Soviet Union.

Tiedge, who openly admitted to having been a "traitor", was convinced that his conversion was the right move for personal reasons; most recently he lived isolated near Moscow...:



In his case, the statute of limitations for treason in Germany had expired in 2005 and criminal prosecution in Germany against him in this regard was no longer possible; however, Tiedge himself had concerns as to whether his contact with the KGB would have been viewed by the German judiciary as a repeated act that would have caused the relevant statute of limitations to start anew.

Tiedge died near Moscow on April 6, 2011.

Klaus Kuron remained undiscovered to the end. He only surrendered to the West German authorities after the fall of the GDR and was sentenced to 12 years in prison and a fine of DM 692,000 by the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court on February 7, 1992:



After serving two-thirds of his sentence, he was released on parole in 1998.