Markus Wolf. "Journalist for Nuremberg". Part 2
“Soviet everyday life and the Russian mentality influenced me in childhood and adolescence … For many more years I felt at home in Moscow, and Muscovites were closer to me than Berliners,” writes Markus Wolf in his book “Playing on a foreign field. 30 years at the head of intelligence."
Former cadets of the Comintern school spoke their native language and knew Russian brilliantly.
Few people know that in Moscow in the building on Shabolovka 34, where the television center was located before the war, in 1943 there was a radio station of the National Committee "Free Germany". The radio broadcasts were conducted in German and broadcast to German-speaking audiences in Europe. The announcers spoke on behalf of the German people, urging them to save Germany and confront the National Socialists.
Markus Wolf got a job as an announcer and commentator for the Moscow radio for Deutscher Volkssender (German People's Radio Station of the German Communist Party).
Where you need it most
After the end of the war, Marcus was going to recover at MAI and continue his studies, and then build aircraft. At the end of the summer of 1945, Wolf was seconded to work in Berlin, where he was most needed. He said goodbye to his family, to the Soviet Union, to his childhood and youth.
“Soviet everyday life and the Russian mentality influenced me in childhood and adolescence … For many more years I felt at home in Moscow, and Muscovites were closer to me than Berliners,” he writes in his book “Playing on a foreign field. 30 years at the head of intelligence."
Markus lived in the USSR for 11 years. His life was not much different from the life of an ordinary Moscow teenager, brought up on urethral values, including a sense of internationalism and justice. The contrast became all the stronger for him when he found himself in Berlin and plunged into his everyday reality. Ahead of him was a new chapter in life.
Markus Wolf arrived in Germany at the end of August 1945, and in September he was sent to Nuremberg as an interpreter and correspondent for Berlin Radio. There began a trial over the Nazis, who until recently were at the zenith of their power and in the same Nuremberg adopted racial and inhuman laws.
New Germany
In the book “Playing on a foreign field. 30 years at the head of intelligence "Wolf writes that the people of Germany" considered themselves victims and regretted that they had lost the war and lived in bombed cities, spending all their energy on bagging. They had neither interest nor sympathy for those who survived the concentration camps."
The consumer society, as a bearer of the skin mentality, which prioritized material values, got used to a stable property existence during the Hitler dictatorship. After the surrender of Germany and the destruction of the usual burgher lifestyle, the population fell into severe psychological stress.
As always, in any society in times of political and economic collapse, all archetypal skin foam comes to the surface - from petty crooks and thieves to large swindlers and speculators, whose goal is to get profits by any means for their own "good-benefit".
And parents, and their entourage, and the Soviet school from childhood raised a patriot and an anti-fascist in Marcus. Going to Berlin, he was sure that the people of Germany could not wait for the Soviet Liberation Army, which had come to the West to rid Europe of Nazism.
Most of the civil Germans, for whom the whole of Europe worked, lived for their own pleasure, did not experience any threat from other states. The war going on in the East was of little interest to them. Here Goebbels propaganda tried. Many did not know about the crimes of the Nazis and few heard about the besieged Leningrad, Kursk Bulge, Stalingrad, the death camps of Dachau, Treblinka, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Babi Yar and Khatyn.
Having lost psychological support in the form of daily Goebbels induction of racial superiority by anal-sound ideology, having lost the property component in the form of "skin reserves", the people have lost the feeling of security and safety, which was recently guaranteed by a bunch of ambitious anal-skin-visual sound specialists of the Third Reich.
And although the time of oral-enthusiastic chants and victorious enthusiasm has passed, one could not count on the adoption of the urethral-communist views, against which Germany had recently fought. The brown sound doctrine was installed too deeply in the minds of the Germans.
The bitterness of defeat, devastation, hunger, confusion from the current trials of recent Nazi idols, who were idolized by the people, and who promised all obedient immunity and preservation of the purity of the Aryan race, created chaos in the heads of the Germans. West Germany, which had suffered less bombing than East Germany, recovered quickly with the help of allied humanitarian rations and some financial injections.
No Westphalian or Bavarian who received a free bowl of American canned stew and a glass of granulated coffee slurry in food centers for homeless refugees and a glass of granulated coffee slurry to satisfy their natural needs - to eat, drink, breathe, sleep - had no idea what Germany was paying for these humanitarian concentrates. …
In a very short time, America, which did not have its own genius physicists before, but which before the arrival of the Soviet Army had time to take out more than 1,500 German sound scientists together with their laboratories, ready-made and started projects somewhere in the direction of Texas or New Mexico, will begin to dictate their terms to the whole world, demonstrating a nuclear superiority in military power.
Stasi
The joy of the urethral Victory over fascism did not overshadow the political premonition of the olfactory Stalin. The West, of course, would not dare to openly oppose the USSR again, but this did not relieve the tension from the expectation of any provocations on its part.
The Soviet leadership understood that "breaking the back of the fascist hydra" and accepting the capitulation of Germany, the confrontation of the two worlds - the socialist east and the imperialist west - would not end. The contradictions between the USSR and its allies caused the split in Germany.
In July 1945, at the Potsdam Conference, an agreement was reached on the procedure for exercising control over Germany. The entire territory of the German state and Berlin were divided into four sectors: Soviet, American, British and French.
The USA and Great Britain ignored any proposals of Stalin to preserve the integrity of Germany, by all means they fueled nationalist sentiments and discontent in the Soviet occupation zone.
Imperceptibly humanity was drawn into a new, unknown and therefore no less dangerous phase of confrontation. Naively believing that Stalin underestimated the West's growing hostile policy towards the former ally, Churchill took it upon himself to explain it to the world.
They say that until 1946 the American town of Fulton was known for the largest lunatic asylum in Missouri. In 1946, he became famous for Churchill's historic Fulton speech, from which it is customary to count the beginning of the Cold War. The divided Germany and Berlin were the scene of the most important battles in this invisible war.
On the territory of the three occupation zones of the FRG - American, French and British - the composition of a single contingent of elite NATO units consisted of 600 thousand American, French, British, Belgian and Canadian soldiers. For comparison: the Soviet group of forces consisted of 380 thousand servicemen.
Then, after the end of the war, olfactory politicians on both sides assessed the FRG as a possible springboard for military conflicts between east and west, which were not excluded. However, going ahead is not included in the tactics of olfactory actions. There is a need for accurate and timely information about the enemy, which only reconnaissance can obtain.
The Americans are actively recruiting specialists from the former Abwehr to work against the USSR. With the support of the United States, the Federal Republic of Germany created the "Office for the Protection of the Constitution" as the main body of counterintelligence and political investigation. The special task of this service was intelligence outside the FRG. The new department of West Germans was looked after by colleagues from the American CIA and the British foreign intelligence MI6.
Back in the spring of 1945, together with Soviet troops, the most experienced illegal intelligence officer Alexander Korobkov arrived in Berlin. He led the work on the creation of an intelligence network, which later became the basis of the GDR intelligence services.
The state security organs of the GDR were built according to the Soviet scheme. They were headed by Wilhelm Zeisser, who had extensive experience working with Soviet intelligence. In the future, this organization will grow into the Ministry of State Security. And the young Markus Wolf will be appointed head of the STASI foreign intelligence department.
Stasi - [German. Stasi, abbr. from Staatssicherheit. Staat state + Sicherheit security], was under the auspices of the USSR Ministry of State Security, and then the KGB.
The Germans, who worked in the State Security of the GDR, were fully aware that they were the outpost of the entire Eastern Bloc. The existence of the GDR, the unprecedented work of its intelligence and of Markus Wolf himself removed the threat to the security of the USSR. Through the agents of East German intelligence working on the territory of the FRG, information was sent to the Soviet Union, which at times turned out to be decisive for the fate of the world.
The West to this day reproaches the Soviet Union for the postwar strengthening of its influence in Eastern Europe. The USSR brought to power the communist and workers' parties in the countries of the so-called people's democracies, supporting them politically, financially and economically, appointing the heads of state of those who correctly understood the tasks set.
Olfactory Stalin knew: the further from the Soviet borders NATO bases were located, the more guarantees for the preservation of the state. This required the very buffer zone - the countries of the Socialist camp. On the front line was the unrecognized German Democratic Republic by any of the capitalist countries. Accordingly, the intelligence operations carried out by the Stasi were of the utmost importance for Moscow.
“We considered it our duty to help the USSR, because it was the main power of our system. He bore the brunt of the military balance of power in the world. And we felt that we should contribute by intelligence to NATO and in West Germany, helping our main ally”(from a TV interview with Markus Wolf).
Markus Wolf led the people, the flow of information, took responsibility for everything that happened. The information received from our German comrades is always a guarantee of reliability.
The foreign agent network of General Directorate “A” in the Stasi, created by Wolf and his employees, numbered more than 38,000 agents scattered around the world.
Nazism, which existed in Germany from 1933 to 1945, caused the flight of Germans who disagreed with Hitler's dictatorship. In various countries of the world, these refugees created large German colonies. For ideological reasons, most of the colonists were ready to cooperate with the new German intelligence.
German comrades were the best scouts for work in West Germany. They had a European upbringing, knew the skinny Western mentality, spoke the same language. They rarely failed, and their implementation in the West was quicker and easier, especially when it came to Operation Assault on Secretaries.
- Part I. Markus Wolf. "Man Without a Face"
- Part 3. Markus Wolf. "Honey trap" for lonely frau
- Part 4. Markus Wolf. "Man of Moscow"
