“I am completely at peace with myself” – so announced Werner Grossmann, who served as the last head of East Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the HVA, for four years from 1986. When challenged after German reunification in 1990, Grossmann, who has died aged 92, claimed his life had been dedicated to helping prevent the outbreak of another world war.
To achieve this, his agents had to know what Nato was planning, and over the years the HVA had certainly been able to penetrate many top-secret offices in West Germany. Rainer Rupp was one powerful spy who worked at Nato headquarters in Brussels. From there he sent hundreds of secret documents to the east.
Another famous recruit was Gabriele Gast, who committed herself in 1968, when a student, to work for the HVA and managed to rise to a high rank in the West German foreign intelligence service, directed by Grossmann’s predecessor as head of the HVA, Markus Wolf, under whom Grossmann served for many years, from 1983 as Wolf’s deputy.
Perhaps the HVA’s biggest successes were Günter Guillaume, and his wife, Christel, who gathered intelligence in West Germany. Guillaume became the West German chancellor Willy Brandt’s close assistant, and the discovery that he was a spy in 1973 led to Brandt’s downfall.
Another notable HVA agent was Klaus Kuron, an official of the West German internal security organ, BfV, who offered his services because he could not get promotion due lack of a university degree and needed a higher income to fund his children’s university education. He worked for the East Germans from 1982 to the fall of the regime in 1989. His arrest came only after he panicked, and he was sentenced to 12 years in prison in 1992.
Kuron’s boss, Hansjoachim Tiedge, defected to East Germany in 1985, causing panic and dismay in West Germany and Nato. The head of West Germany’s counterintelligence department was soon divulging all to his new hosts.
Much of the HVA’s success was achieved under the leadership of the charming, erudite Wolf. He told his agents they were “scouts for peace” (“Kundschafter des Friedens”). It has been estimated that there were 1,500 HVA spies in West Germany. He and his loyal deputy, Grossmann, emphasised that the HVA was an ersatz family.
Grossmann’s background was very different from that of Wolf. The son of Martha, a kitchen worker, and Erno, a carpenter, he was born and grew up in Oberebenheit, a village in Saxony that had neither electric lights nor radio. His home had no running water. He owed the fact that he went to the grammar school in nearby Pirna, in 1940, to his athletic and intellectual abilities, but even more to the teacher’s assurance that his parents would not have to pay school fees.
As the second world war drew to a close, the 16-year-old Grossman, with others of his age, as well as elderly men, were called up by the Nazis for the Volkssturm, a kind of home guard, to defend the rapidly disintegrating German front. “When the Red Army came, I took my bike and rode home.”
His father returned from captivity in 1946. Father and son joined the KPD, the re-established Communist party, on 1 March 1946. Grossman Jr established the FDJ, the communist-led youth movement, in his village. He became a bricklayer, a trade desperately needed in the battered area near Dresden. He was persuaded to attend the workers’ and peasants’ educational faculty, and then studied at the pedagogical faculty of the Technical University in Dresden. Finally, he became a full-time employee with the FDJ.
In 1952 he was invited to join the new intelligence service, and in 1953 started as a first lieutenant in the State Secretariat for State Security, or Stasi. The strikes and demonstrations of that year’s East German uprising of came as a shock to Grossmann, as did the denunciation of Stalin in 1956, and he claimed that the GDR’s intelligence service was just as surprised as the rest of the world by the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961: “We were kept completely out of it.” He admitted that the extent of the crisis that led to the Wall being opened was also underestimated. His big claim was that peace was preserved, at least in Europe, despite the cold war, largely due to the HVA.
In 1990 he was held under arrest for one day, but because he had never taken any oath of allegiance to West Germany did not face any prosecution for his activities. One of his opponents judged in 2001 that “Grossmann is honest. Self-pity and sentimentality seem foreign to him.”
Although his public appearances usually met with protests, he remained proud of the HVA. He was angry about his pension, though. As an HVA general, he was awarded a sum equal to that of a West German NCO.
He and his wife, Brigitte, had three daughters.
• Werner Grossmann, intelligence chief, born 9 March 1929; died 28 January 2022
