Former SS Obersturmführer in the service of the KGB

Few people know that the historical consultant on the set of the Russian cult film “17 Moments of Spring” was the real SS Obersturmführer (i.e. Senior Lieutenant) Heinz Felfe, who personally knew Müller and Schellenberg and helped to supplement their images with historical accuracy. Unfortunately, the consultant’s name was not indicated in the credits.

But this man, Heinz Felfe, managed to work in four intelligence services during his life: the Third Reich, the British MI-6, the West German BND and the Soviet KGB. At the same time, what is interesting is that he was in good standing everywhere.

But the most surprising thing is that Felfe, who did not arouse any suspicion, worked in the German intelligence service in the counter-espionage department against the USSR and at the same time “leaked” all the secrets to Moscow!

This was preceded by a solid career in the Reich.

Heinz Paul Johann Felfe was born in 1918 in Dresden.

His father came from the West Slavic ethnic group, which lives mainly in the east of Germany. In Dresden, he served as the head of the department for the observation of morals of the criminal police commissioner. The son received a fairly decent education. For some time, Heinz worked as an instrument adjuster; in 1931, he joined the Hitler Youth, and five years later he became a member of the NSDAP and SS.

The pneumonia closed his path to the military in 1939. But he began working in the Reich Main Security Office in the personal protection of prominent members of the Nazi Party, where he also received training as a criminal police officer.

In 1943, Heinz Felfe joined the SD (the NSDAP intelligence service) and was appointed head of the Swiss department. Here, the exemplary Nazi was responsible for exchanging counterfeit banknotes, in particular, the pound.

In 1944, he was promoted to the rank of SS-Obersturmführer and was assigned to the Netherlands, where he trained saboteurs on behalf of the Reich to be sent behind Anglo-American lines.

The Netherlands were liberated by Allied troops in early May 1945. Until 1946, Heinz Felfe remained a British prisoner of war.

Then his service record in the SS and SD attracted the attention of the British foreign intelligence service MI6.

On October 31, 1946, he received a certificate stating that he was not a war criminal and was not accused of violating human rights. And this despite almost ten years of service in the SS.

He was tasked with analyzing and reporting primarily on the activities of communist activists at the University of Bonn. Heinz Felfe diligently carried out this task from 1947 to 1950, under the code names Paul and Friesen.

MI6 employees suspected Heinz Felfe of being a double agent and refused his services. According to another version, he stopped giving them important information and simply became unnecessary.

After leaving MI6, he was recruited by the German secret services, and began working in the Federal Ministry for All-German Affairs. Well acquainted with the structures of the Nazi police and Nazi intelligence, he helped in interrogating former police officers and Nazi secret service employees to determine the possibility of their use in the structures of the FRG.

Like many secret service employees, he worked as a radio journalist – a common cover profession, and traveled all over Germany. Not only West, but also East. The sight of his native Dresden made an indelible impression on him.

The streets where Heinz spent his childhood and youth were literally blown to smithereens by Allied bombing. At the same time, there were no large military industrial enterprises in the city, and there were no military units stationed there.
The cruelty of the British and Americans in Germany against the backdrop of the humane treatment of the USSR formed Felfe’s convictions.

The second thing that inspired him with disgust for the new leadership was the cynicism with which the British and Americans robbed the Germans.

Wealthy people were indiscriminately accused of having ties to the Nazi regime and kept in prison simply to fleece them dry, shaking their money and valuables out of them.

“This tyranny of the American administration was not only not suppressed, but was actively encouraged by the Allied military command,” Heinz Felfe would later write in his memoirs.

He was also offended by the arrogant attitude of the Anglo-Americans towards the Germans. The victors behaved like masters in Germany, and openly pushed the Germans around like their servants.

The situation was completely different in the GDR, where the representatives of the Soviet administration treated the defeated with the utmost magnanimity.

When his fellow countryman, former SD colleague and Moscow agent Hans Clemens approached him in 1951, Heinz was already ideologically ready to work for the Soviet Union.

In addition, Soviet intelligence paid well – much more than the British, and then his salary in the BND. Heinz Felfe did not hide the fact that he wanted and loved to live a dignified life: he always had the newest and most prestigious cars, a beautiful apartment and a large country house.

He was very lucky with his infiltration.

After Felfe published a work on the work of the people’s militia in the Soviet occupation zone, Reinhard Gehlen (he was a lieutenant general in the Wehrmacht during the war), who was assembling the intelligence service in the post-war country, took notice of Heinz Felfe and invited him to work in his organization. This was in 1951. In 1956, Gehlen’s organization would become the Federal Intelligence Service of West Germany (BND). There he was engaged in the Soviet direction.

As soon as military secrets passed through the BND structures, the Kremlin already knew about them.

The CIA noted that during Felfe’s 10 years of work for the Soviet Union, he transferred 15 thousand pages of secret documents to Moscow. Curiously, he photographed them right in his office.

Also, thanks to his merits, for several years not a single Soviet agent in West Germany was arrested.

Felfe supervised such important operational activities as the installation of listening devices in the Soviet embassy in Bonn and the trade mission in Cologne. Information about the “bugs” was immediately passed on to the KGB.

In 1956, Felfe received the positions of government adviser and head of the report “Counter-espionage against the USSR and Soviet missions in the FRG”, as well as direct access to the leadership of West Germany.

Such successful underground work was due to special conditions.

Here is what his personal curator from the KGB, Vitaly Korotkov, says in his memoirs:

“A significant problem was the implementation of information received from Felfe, especially operational ones. One of the conditions that Felfe set, already working in Gehlen’s intelligence, was the following: not a single agent, not a single target of development, which would become known from him, should be arrested. This condition was strictly observed during ten years of cooperation. In addition to the usual depersonalization of copies of secret documents, a legend of the source of their receipt was developed each time; the nature of the document and its design were changed during translation.”

Heinz was a born actor and conspirator. He was so quick to change his facial expression, manner of behavior and conversation, methods of collecting information and methods of transmitting it that for a long time no one could suspect him of anything. At the same time, the head of the organization, Reinhard Gehlen, himself an experienced intelligence officer, personally sympathized with him and trusted him unconditionally. It was not for nothing that Felfe was awarded the honorary medal of St. George for 10 years of “impeccable service.”

In order to exchange experience with the US intelligence services, the “Gehlen Organization” (OG) organized a trip for eight of its employees to the USA.

Heinz Felfe took all possible measures to participate in such a trip.

German historian Bodo von Hechelhammer in his book “Doppelagent Heinz Felfe entdeckt Amerika” (“Double Agent Heinz Felfe Discovers America”) provides facts proving how important the KGB considered this trip: a year before, when the trip was only being planned, all contacts and meetings with Heinz Felfe were terminated.

To impress their German guests, the hosts of the CIA and FBI decided to demonstrate the work of a lie detector. And the choice, perhaps deliberately, fell on Heinz Felfe.

With great difficulty, he managed to get away with the excuse that he was not feeling well. And in fact, by evening his face was swollen from nervous tension, his lips were swollen, his skin was covered in red blisters. Felfe attributed the attack of hives to an allergy and the terrible heat that was really happening in America at the time.

Of course, as the author of the book emphasizes, the reason for this state was the fear of failure, which he experienced for the first time.

Even earlier, Vitaly Korotkov warned about the possibility of the effects of drugs that would lead to a loss of vigilance. Therefore, Felfe refused any drugs.

Heinz waited two months after returning from the United States, and then secretly went to East Berlin. There he reported on the structures and methods of work of American intelligence and counterintelligence, their technical capabilities, gave characteristics to the employees of the CIA and FBI. And most importantly, he gave the names and surnames of CIA agents working in the USSR. In total, he gave away about a hundred CIA employees and agents.

As it turned out later, back in 1953, Heinz Felfe was listed as a possible traitor, compiled by American military intelligence.

After returning from the United States, one of the Polish agents told Gehlen that the delegation included at least two “moles” working for the USSR.

Suspicion fell on Heinz Felfe, but Gehlen did not believe this information. Similar information, but also without mentioning a specific name, was received in October 1961 from KGB Major Anatoly Golitsyn, who had defected to the Americans.

A special group created in the BND to search for the Soviet “mole” was already getting closer to Felfe, and Golitsyn’s information allowed him to complete the unclear picture.

Felfe’s phone was monitored. The agent made a mistake when they discovered an “encrypted message from Fritz” sent to him by Hans Clemens (the code name “Fritz” was his Soviet handler).

On November 6, 1961, three policemen suddenly burst into Heinz Felfe’s apartment in Munich. He tried to swallow the microfilm, which contained secret information for Moscow, but he failed.

On the same day, BND officers Hans Clemens and Erwin Tiebel, suspected of espionage, were arrested.

On July 22 1963, the Federal Court sentenced Heinz Felfe to 14 years in prison, Clemens to 10 years, and Tiebel to three years. As noted in the trial documents, the court took into account Felfe’s “extremely high degree of long-standing treachery” and the “high importance of the material he supplied in enormous quantities.” In addition, Felfe’s “personal danger” was great, mainly due to his important official position, high intelligence, and dishonesty.

Felfe served his sentence in the Bavarian prison of Straubing.

On the night of February 14, 1969, a unique event occurred at the Herleshausen checkpoint (the state border of the GDR and the FRG): the KGB exchanged Felfe for 21 of the German and American spies arrested in the GDR and the Soviet Union.

In the USSR, the former SS Obersturmführer became a respected man. Felfe received the Order of the Red Star and the Red Banner, as well as the highest departmental award of state security.

Heinz Felfe lived in Moscow for some time, working for the KGB, then moved to East Berlin. At Humboldt University, he defended his dissertation and became a professor of criminology.

Felfe enjoyed a privileged life in the GDR. The Stasi gave him a house and a car.

In 1986, Felfe published memoirs in the FRG under the title “Im Dienst des Gegners” (“In the Service of the Enemy”). In them, the great spy called the years of work for the USSR the happiest in his life. Only two years later, politically “combed”, they also appeared in the GDR. According to his biographer Bodo von Hechelhammer, Heinz Felfe knew how to “adapt to the times like a chameleon.” He died on May 8, 2008, at the age of 90, and is buried in Berlin at the Weissensee cemetery.