The Ministry for State Security or State Security Service, commonly known as the Stasi, was the official state security service of the German Democratic Republic. It has been described as one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies ever to have existed. The Stasi was headquartered in East Berlin, with an extensive complex in Berlin-Lichtenberg and several smaller facilities throughout the city. The Stasi motto was Schild und Schwert der Partei, referring to the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany and also echoing a theme of the KGB, the Soviet counterpart and close partner, with respect to its own ruling party, the CPSU. Erich Mielke was the Stasi's longest-serving chief, in power for thirty-two of the GDR's forty years of existence.
Wilhelm Franz Canaris was a German admiral and chief of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, from 1935 to 1944. Initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler, by 1939 he had turned against the Nazis as he felt Germany would lose another major war. During World War II he was among the military officers involved in the clandestine opposition to Nazi Germany leadership. He was executed in Flossenbürg concentration camp for high treason as the Nazi regime was collapsing.
Neue Ostpolitik, or Ostpolitik for short, was the normalization of relations between the Federal Republic of Germany and Eastern Europe, particularly the German Democratic Republic beginning in 1969. Influenced by Egon Bahr, who proposed "change through rapprochement" in a 1963 speech at the Evangelische Akademie Tutzing, the policies were implemented beginning with Willy Brandt, fourth Chancellor of the FRG from 1969 to 1974.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a 1963 Cold War spy novel by the British author John le Carré. It depicts Alec Leamas, a British agent, being sent to East Germany as a faux defector to sow disinformation about a powerful East German intelligence officer.
Egon Rudi Ernst Krenz is a former East German politician who was the last communist leader of East Germany during the final months of 1989. He succeeded Erich Honecker as the General Secretary of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), but was forced to resign only months later when the Berlin Wall fell.
Günter Schabowski was an official of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the ruling party during most of the existence of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Schabowski gained worldwide fame in November 1989 when he improvised a slightly mistaken answer to a press conference question, raising popular expectations much more rapidly than the government planned so that massive crowds gathered the same night at the Berlin Wall, forcing its opening after 28 years; soon after, the entire inner German border was opened.
Walter Friedrich Schellenberg was a German SS functionary during the Nazi era. He rose through the ranks of the SS, becoming one of the highest ranking men in the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and eventually assumed the position as head of foreign intelligence for Nazi Germany following the abolition of the Abwehr in 1944.
Reinhard Gehlen was a German general and intelligence officer who was chief of the Wehrmacht Foreign Armies East (FHO) military-intelligence unit during World War II (1942–45); spymaster of the CIA-affiliated anti–Communist Gehlen Organisation for the United States (1946–56); and the first president of the Federal Intelligence Service of West Germany (1956–68) during the Cold War. Gehlen was regarded as "one of the most legendary Cold War spymasters."
The Federal Intelligence Service is the foreign intelligence agency of Germany, directly subordinated to the Chancellor's Office. The BND headquarters is located in central Berlin and is the world's largest intelligence headquarters. The BND has 300 locations in Germany and foreign countries. In 2016, it employed around 6,500 people, 10% of them Bundeswehr soldiers, who are employed by Amt für Militärkunde. The budget of the BND for 2019 is € 966.482 million.
The German Fatherland Party was a short-lived far-right party in the German Empire, active during the last phase of World War I.
Asbjørn Edvin Sunde was a Norwegian politician for the Communist Party of Norway, communist partisan during the Spanish Civil War, saboteur against the Nazi occupation of Norway during the Second World War, and a convicted Soviet spy. During the Second World War, from 1941 to 1944, Sunde's group, the Osvald Group, carried out approximately 39 acts of sabotage and assassination against the German occupation forces and Norwegian collaborators. In 1954 he was convicted by Eidsivating Court of Appeal of treason and espionage in favour of the Soviet Union, and sentenced to eight years in prison. He was released from prison in 1959 after serving two thirds of his sentence. He was expelled from the Communist Party of Norway in 1970.
M School was an "espionage academy run by the Red Army", c. 1920s.
Walter Nicolai was the first senior IC (Intelligence) Officer in the Imperial German Army. He came to run the military secret service, Abteilung IIIb, and to be important in the pro-war faction of German leaders during World War I. According to Höhne and Zolling, he was supportive in the foundation of the Fatherland Party.
The Gehlen Organization or Gehlen Org was an intelligence agency established in June 1946 by U.S. occupation authorities in the United States zone of Germany, and consisted of former members of the 12th Department of the German Army General Staff. It carries the name of Wehrmacht Major General Reinhard Gehlen, head of the Nazi German military intelligence in the Eastern Front during World War II.
Eberhard Kinzel was a general in the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany during World War II who commanded several divisions. He was a recipient of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross.
Foreign Armies East, or Fremde Heere Ost (FHO), was a military intelligence organization of the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH), the Supreme High Command of the German Army during World War II. It focused on analyzing the Soviet Union and other East European countries before and during the war.
The State of Israel and the German Democratic Republic never had official diplomatic relations throughout the latter's nearly forty years of existence. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall no ambassadors were exchanged. The official policy of East Germany emphasized the necessity to differentiate between Jews and the Israeli state. This approach, stemming originally from the theories of Marx and Lenin on nationalism, class struggle, and the "irreconcilable struggle between socialism and imperialism" also served to counter accusations of antisemitism. In this context, a specific relationship or responsibility of the German people to the Jewish state was denied. Relations can be divided into 3 periods: positive neutrality (1948–1956), confrontation (1956–1985) and movement towards rapprochement (1986–1990).
