Exile and war
He was born on 19 January 1923 in Hechingen. In 1933 he left with his family for Switzerland, then France, and in April 1934 for Moscow.1
In 1942–1943 he attended the Comintern school in Kushnarenkovo, and from 1943 to 1945 he was an editor, announcer and commentator for the Deutscher Volkssender radio station in Moscow.1
After the war
From May 1945 he worked for the Berliner Rundfunk, and in 1945–1946 he reported on the trial of the major war criminals at Nuremberg. From October 1949 to August 1951 he was First Counsellor at the GDR mission in Moscow.1
Head of East German intelligence
In September 1951 he became deputy head of the analysis department of an intelligence service operating under the name of the Institute for Economic Research (IWF). According to the Federal Archives, this service, sometimes also called the APN, became Main Department XV in 1953 and from 1956 was known as Main Directorate A (HV A).1,2
He led it until February 1986, first as deputy state secretary in the Ministry of the Interior and then as deputy minister for state security. After stepping down he remained on the staff of the HV A, working on its history and writing books.1,2
The HV A started with twelve staff and by 1989 numbered 4,778 people, including officers on special assignment and full-time unofficial collaborators. At that time it ran about 1,550 unofficial collaborators in West Germany; by one estimate, some 6,000 West German citizens and West Berliners in all served as such over 40 years. The name HV A remained in use until the MfS was dissolved in June 1990.2
Trials
In 1993 he was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for treason and bribery; in 1995 the verdict was quashed. At a new trial in 1997 he was convicted of deprivation of liberty, coercion and bodily harm and given a two-year suspended sentence and a fine of 50,000 marks.1
On 15 May 1995 the Federal Constitutional Court ruled, in cases involving East German intelligence officers, that international law did not rule out prosecuting espionage conducted from the territory of a state that later acceded to the Federal Republic, but that some convictions violated the principle of proportionality; it set those judgments aside.3
He died on 9 November 2006.1
Sources
- Bundesarchiv, Stasi-Unterlagen-Archiv, MfS-Lexikon: Wolf, Markus
- Bundesarchiv, Stasi-Unterlagen-Archiv, MfS-Lexikon: Hauptverwaltung A (HV A)
- Federal Constitutional Court of Germany (text: Deutschsprachiges Fallrecht, University of Bern), BVerfGE 92, 277 – order of 15 May 1995, 2 BvL 19/91, 2 BvR 1206/91, 1584/91, 2601/93
Checked: 7 November 2026