Robert Havemann was an East German chemist and dissident.
A stay-behind operation is one where a country places secret operatives or organizations in its own territory, for use in case of a later enemy occupation. The stay-behind operatives would then form the basis of a resistance movement, and act as spies from behind enemy lines. Small-scale operations may cover discrete areas, but larger stay-behind operations envisage reacting to the conquest of whole countries.
Ernst Benda was a German legal scholar, politician, and judge. He was the fourth president of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany from 1971 to 1983. He also held the position of Minister of the Interior of Germany from 1968 to 1969.
Rainer Hildebrandt was a German anti-communist resistance fighter, historian and founder of the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. He was involved in the resistance to the communist regime of the Soviet occupation zone since the 1940s, as a member of the Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit.
For Eyes Only is an East German espionage film. It was released in 1963.
Friedrich Panzinger was a German SS officer during the Nazi era. He served as the head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) Amt IV A, from September 1943 to May 1944 and the commanding officer of three sub-group Einsatzkommando of Einsatzgruppen A in the Baltic States and Belarus. From 15 August 1944 forward, he was chief of RSHA Amt V, the Kriminalpolizei. After the war, Panzinger was arrested in 1946 and imprisoned by the Soviet Union for being a war criminal. Released in 1955, he was a member of the Bundesnachrichtendienst. In 1959, Panzinger committed suicide in his jail cell after being arrested for war crimes.
Johann Burianek was a former Wehrmacht soldier and CIA-backed insurgent who planned and committed several attacks against the German Democratic Republic and a member of the anti-communist KGU.
Wolfgang Kaiser was a member of Rainer Hildebrandt's "Struggle against Inhumanty" group which campaigned against the one party dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic.
Helmut Müller-Enbergs is a German political scientist who has written extensively on the Stasi and related aspects of the German Democratic Republic's history.
Karl Wilhelm Fricke is a German political journalist and author. He has produced several of the standard works on resistance and state repression in the German Democratic Republic (1949–1990). In 1955, he became one of several hundred kidnap victims of the East German Ministry for State Security, captured in West Berlin and taken to the east where for nearly five years he was held in state detention.
Gerhard Benkowitz was a school teacher and a resistance activist against the one party dictatorship of the German Democratic Republic. He was a member of the KgU and became a victim of the epidemic of show trials that hit the country in the first half of the 1950s. He was executed in June 1955.
Ernst Tillich was a German theologian.
William Borm was a German politician, of the Free Democratic Party (FDP). He was a member of the Bundestag from 1965 to 1972, and a member of the FDP National Executive Committee from 1960 to 1982. Several years after his death, it was revealed that since the late 1950s he had been an agent of the Stasi, the State Security Service of the German Democratic Republic.
Günther Birkenfeld was a German writer. His books were banned during the Nazi years but he remained in the country and was conscripted for aircraft monitoring during the war. During the postwar period, in what had become the Soviet occupation zone, he was a co-founder, in 1948/49, of the anti-communist Combat Group against Inhumanity .
This is a list of participants, associates and helpers of, and certain infiltrators into, the Red Orchestra as it was known in Germany. Red Orchestra was the name given by the Abwehr to members of the German resistance to Nazism and anti-Nazi resistance movements in Allied or occupied countries during World War II. Many of the people on this list were arrested by the Abwehr or Gestapo. They were tried at the Nazi Imperial War Court before being executed either by hanging or guillotine, unless otherwise indicated. As the SS-Sonderkommando also took action against Soviet espionage networks within Switzerland, people who worked there are also included here.
Harald Poelchau was a German prison chaplain, religious socialist and member of the resistance against the Nazis. Poelchau grew up in Silesia. During the early 1920's, he studied Protestant theology at the University of Tübingen and the University of Marburg, followed by social work at the College of Political Science of Berlin. Poelchau gained a doctorate under Paul Tillich at Frankfurt University. In 1933, he became a prison chaplain in the Berlin prisons. With the coming of the Nazi regime in 1933, he became an anti-fascist. During the war, Poelchau and his wife Dorothee Poelchau helped victims of the Nazi's, hiding them and helping them escape. At the same time, as a prison chaplain he gave comfort to the many people in prison and those sentenced to death. After the war, he became involved in the reform of prisons in East Germany. In 1971, Yad Vashem named Poelchau and his wife Righteous Among the Nations.
Heinz Strelow was a German journalist, soldier and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime.
Tarantel was a German monthly satirical magazine in Berlin, West Germany, which was in circulation between 1950 and 1962. Being a propaganda publication it was started to address the readers in East Germany and was funded by the American intelligence organization CIA.
During the Cold War, divided Germany had been a center of activity for the Soviet intelligence service, the KGB. It worked closely with the Ministry of State Security of the GDR and had a huge center in Berlin-Karlshorst, which controlled and coordinated KGB activities throughout Europe. After German reunification, networks of the Foreign Intelligence Service remained active in Germany. Russian espionage in Germany has increased again since the beginning of the deterioration in relations between the NATO states and the Russian Federation after the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war in 2014, and more and more cases of Russian espionage have become publicly known. Following the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine in 2022, espionage activities in the West are said to have reached or even exceeded Cold War levels. According to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the methods used by Russian services in Germany include cyberattacks, sabotage, disinformation campaigns, covert influence operations and secret operations. The main targets of Russian espionage include digital, military and other critical infrastructure, as well as politics, business, society and science.
American espionage in Germany was significantly intensified during World War II and the following occupation of Germany. As the Iron Curtain ran through the middle of Germany during the Cold War, divided Germany was an important center of US espionage activities. US intelligence monitored the politics of the Federal Republic of Germany as well as conducting espionage and propaganda against the Eastern Bloc. The CIA and other American intelligence services worked closely with the West German BND, which was a close ally of the Americans. Even after German reunification, a significant American intelligence presence in Germany remained. In 2013, the global surveillance and espionage affair revealed that the American NSA had eavesdropped on and spied on almost all top German politicians, including Chancellor Angela Merkel. The revelations also brought to light that the CIA had informants in politics and the security services of Germany.
