Walter Gramsch (born 15 January 1897, date of death unknown) worked in a high position for the State Railways in Nazi Germany, and was involved in the
20 July plot
The 20 July plot, sometimes referred to as Operation Valkyrie, was a failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler, the chancellor and leader of Nazi Germany, and overthrow the Nazi regime on 20 July 1944. The plotters were part of the German r ...
against Hitler. Gramsch later became a high ranking transportation official in the Communist East German government (The
GDR
East Germany, officially known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR), was a country in Central Europe from its formation on 7 October 1949 until its reunification with West Germany (FRG) on 3 October 1990. Until 1989, it was generally vie ...
). However he was unhappy with the GDR and thus became a spy against it. He used his position to feed information to the West German
Gehlen Organization
The Gehlen Organization or Gehlen Org (often referred to as The Org) was an intelligence agency established in June 1946 by U.S. occupation authorities in the United States zone of post-war occupied Germany, and consisted of former members of the ...
.
[Höhne & Zolling, p 103-107]
In particular, he spied on
Ernst Wollweber
Ernst Friedrich Wollweber (29 October 1898 – 3 May 1967) was a German politician who was State Secretary of State Security from 1953 to 1955 and Minister of State Security of East Germany from 1955 to 1957.
Biography
Born in Hannovers ...
, a Communist sabotage expert. After the war Wollweber had become a high official in the East Germany Directorate-General of Shipping, the same area as Gramsch. Gramsch was thus in a good position to report on his activities. This resulted in, among other things, the upset of several of Wollweber's attempts to smuggle products past the Western embargo into East Germany.
In the mid-1950s Gramsch was 'recalled' to West Germany. This was to protect him from the East German
SSD
A solid-state drive (SSD) is a type of solid-state storage device that uses Integrated circuit, integrated circuits to store data persistence (computer science), persistently. It is sometimes called semiconductor storage device, solid-stat ...
(coincidentally, then run by the same Wollweber he had formerly spied on) which had become recently successful in discovering and executing large numbers of spies.
[Höhne & Zolling, p 208]
References
Sources
* (Published in Germany as ''Pullach Intern'', 1971, Hoffman and Campe Verlag, Hamburg)
1897 births
Year of death missing
Interwar-period spies
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