Markus Wolf. "Man Without A Face". Part I

2024 Author: Adrian Jeff | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:06

Today it is 10 years since Marcus Wolf, the permanent head of the GDR's foreign intelligence, has passed away.

His father, Friedrich Wolff, is known as a writer and playwright, whose plays were staged throughout Germany and beyond. F. Wolf, an anti-fascist and enemy of the Hitler regime, left the country and in 1934, after long wanderings in Europe, went with his family to the USSR.

Without the most complete knowledge, you will not be able to

successfully deploy a spy.

Without humanity and justice, you will not be able to

Send scouts ahead.

Without a correct instinct and an inquiring mind, you will not be able to correctly evaluate the information you received.

Sensitivity! Sensitivity!

Sun Tzu Chinese general, 4th century BC e. "Art of War"

The intelligence service of the GDR Stasi was considered one of the best in the world. She owes her effective work and achievements to the permanent head of foreign intelligence - Markus Wolf. He was sometimes called a genius of espionage, then a super agent, then a "man without a face." Intense travels around the world, personal meetings with agents, contacts with many politicians in the composition of delegations and a spectacular appearance did not prevent Markus Wolf from remaining the most mysterious figure among the leaders of the GDR.

For opponents, his appearance was "a secret behind seven seals." While the sensational press was hunting for him, and the best intelligence in the world for twenty years trying to get at least a photo of him, Marcus's people penetrated everywhere.

They easily recruited Western scientists and prominent journalists, got in touch with ministers and presidents, seeking their full confidence, for many decades became the "right hand" of the most famous politicians, managing hundreds of secret operations before the incident that exposed them intervened.

From the dossier

Markus Wolf (1923–2006) was born in Germany. His father, Friedrich Wolff, was a doctor, homeopath, propagandist of vegetarianism and even wrote a book on this topic, which became popular in Nazi Germany.

With the coming to power of Hitler the vegetarian, the Germans, along with the Aryan ideas about the purity of the race, arose a cult of health. Passion for vegetarianism speaks of serious problems of the visual vector, of fears that are trying to justify the philosophy of life of rejection of animal products.

In addition to his medical practice, the anal-sound-visual Friedrich Wolf is known as a writer and playwright, whose plays were staged throughout Germany and beyond. F. Wolf, an anti-fascist and enemy of the Hitler regime, left the country and in 1934, after long wanderings in Europe, went with his family to the USSR.

The persecution of the Jews in the Third Reich began long before Kristallnacht, as a series of coordinated Jewish pogroms was called throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on November 9-10, 1938.

For the play Professor Mamlok, which became the first literary evidence of the persecution of Jews in Germany, the name of Friedrich Wolff was on the list of "harmful and unwanted writers" whose books were to be burned.

The whole family, including the sons of Markus and Konrad (Koni), was stripped of German citizenship and put on the wanted list. The Wolves leave Germany and flee to France, but there they are denied political asylum. Then they go to the Soviet Union.

German, pepper, sausage, sauerkraut

Thanks to the efforts of the Soviet writer Vsevolod Vishnevsky, who had been friends with Friedrich since 1931, the Wolves ended up in Moscow and received a two-room apartment on the street next to Arbat.

Markus was 11 years old, Konrad - 9. Dressed in everything foreign, and most importantly in short pants unusual for little Muscovites, for the first time leaving their entrance in a noisy Moscow courtyard, the German boys immediately attracted the attention of the courtyard punks.

"German, pepper, sausage, sauerkraut!" - teased these neat in the yard. Markus, endowed with an olfactory vector, intuitively felt that in order to survive and "preserve himself" in the Arbat-Presnensk boys' flock, it was necessary to accept "the conditions of playing on a foreign field."

Instead of resentment and tears, the brothers quickly figured out in a skin: to pass for their own, you need to change names and acquire the correct local "camouflage". Such a castling was a natural behavior for Marcus with his unique set of vectors, whose properties were aimed at adapting and adapting to the new landscape, and little Koni could only follow his older brother.

“Once in another country, foreign children adopt the mentality of the people among whom they grow up and are brought up,” says Yuri Burlan at his lectures on Systemic Vector Psychology.

The Wolf children went to the German school named after Karl Liebknecht in uniform, and in the yard they did not stand out among their peers. They wore the same satin trousers as most of the boys in Moscow, and together with the neighbors' boys they explored all the attics and examined all the basements. Russian names "stuck" to the Germans by themselves.

“Since that time we have got the nicknames Kolya and Misha. We not only became Soviet citizens on paper, but also imperceptibly absorbed the national traits of the Russian character, turning into real “children of the Arbat””(M. Wolf“Playing in a foreign field. 30 years at the head of intelligence”).

Soviet internationalism

The main features of the Russian urethral character, manifested in collectivism, mercy and responsibility for the flock, the German Markus Wolf will more than once demonstrate both in his work and in the struggle to drop charges against fellow intelligence officers of the GDR intelligence services, demanding amnesty for them from the West German justice. The majority of foreign children who grew up in the pre-war USSR have by themselves formed a urethral superstructure of the Russian mentality, uniting them with the entire Soviet people.

In 1936, with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Friedrich Wolff applied for an exit permit to serve as a doctor in the International Brigades. They had to wait a long time, and when the departure was authorized, Wolf never made it to Spain. World War II broke out in Europe, and the father of Marcus and Koni, along with other internationalists, was interned in a camp in southern France.

With a German passport, Friedrich was threatened with extradition to the Nazis. The whole family was worried about his father. They met in March 1941, three months before Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union.

Evacuation to Kazakhstan

Konrad was still in school, and Markus was already completing his first year at the MAI - Moscow Aviation Institute. The brothers spoke Russian all day, and only at home they spoke German. On June 22, 1941, when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, the life of the Wolf family, like that of millions of Soviet citizens, changed dramatically.

The Moscow Aviation Institute was transferred to Kazakhstan. The Writers' Union was also evacuated there. The Wolf family traveled for three long weeks to Alma-Ata by train, which allowed the echelons going west to the front.

Sick and exhausted Anna Akhmatova was on the same train to evacuate. Marcus brought her bread, which his father Friedrich Wolf carefully shared with the disgraced poet.

In Alma-Ata, where many of the capital's theaters and film studios were evacuated, life went on as usual. Film director Sergei Eisenstein was preparing to shoot the film "Ivan the Terrible". Markus studied at the institute, moonlighted on the set as an extra. Many of his fellow students went to the front.

Red Star Cavalier

If Friedrich Wolff did not manage to fight the Nazis, then his younger son Konrad did it instead. Although the Germans were not called up for military service in the ranks of the Red Army, Koni, leaving school, volunteered and marched with the 47th Army from the North Caucasus to Berlin. The German youth, who had absorbed the spirit of the urethral-muscular Russian mentality, was not even faced with the question of what to do when the Fatherland was in danger. The Wolf brothers considered the USSR their second homeland and were ready to share common misfortune, anxiety and grief with its people.

Fascist Germany capitulated, and nineteen-year-old Konrad was appointed military commandant of the German city of Bernau in Brandenburg. Wolff Jr. ended the war as a senior lieutenant and Knight of the Red Star, and he was also awarded several medals.

In 1949, the anal-sound-visual Konrad Wolf entered the directing department of VGIK, where he studied with the best masters of Soviet cinema S. Gerasimov, M. Romm, G. Aleksandrov. After graduating from the Institute of Cinematography, he lived and worked in the GDR.

In the 70s, he will become known to the Soviet audience in the movie "Goya, or the Hard Path of Knowledge", which he shot based on the novel of the same name by Leon Feuchtwanger with Donatas Banionis in the title role. In October 2015, World War II veteran and film director Konrad Wolf could have turned 90 years old.

Ufa. School of the Comintern

In the summer of 1942, Markus was recalled from Kazakhstan to the capital of Bashkiria, Ufa, where members of the Comintern were evacuated from Moscow and the overseas leadership of the Communist Party of Germany was transported. From Ufa, Markus went by steamer to the village of Kushnarenkovo. What he would do there, the MAI student found out only on the spot.

In the village of Kushnarenkovo there was a secret school of the Comintern, in which the children of German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Romanian anti-fascists and communists of various European and Asian nationalities studied.

The groups were divided according to nationality and language. German and Austrian cadets were trained to be thrown into enemy territory and for illegal work in the German rear, trained in parachute landing, taught the intricacies of intelligence, conspiracy, secret communication methods, sabotage and subversive activities in the occupied regions, and information warfare.

“The teaching was taken very seriously, but we were forbidden to make any notes. We had to keep everything in mind”(V. Leonhard“The revolution rejects its children”).

Amaya Ibarruri, the daughter of the famous Passionary Dolores Ibarruri, Zharko, the eldest son of Josip Broz Tito, and many others, who later held leading positions in the governments of the countries of the socialist camp, included in the Eastern Bloc, as well as in China, Korea, Vietnam, etc., studied at the Comintern school..d.

“Despite strict discipline, we cadets became friends in our few free hours. I not only met the lovely Amaya, the daughter of the legendary Dolores Ibarruri, and the sons of Tito and Togliatti … The internationalism in the atmosphere in which we lived at school largely determined my way of thinking. Therefore, later I could never understand the nationalist manifestations in the socialist countries - after all, they sharply contradicted everything that we were taught at the school of the Comintern "(M. Wolf" Playing in a foreign field. 30 years at the head of intelligence ").

On May 16, 1943, the Comintern school was disbanded. Markus and some of his fellow students were summoned to Moscow.