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Concept
Markus Wolf
Summary
Markus Johannes Wolf (19 January 1923 – 9 November 2006), also known as Mischa, was head of the Main Directorate for Reconnaissance (Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung), the foreign intelligence division of East Germany's Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, abbreviated MfS, commonly known as the Stasi). He was the Stasi's number two for 34 years, which spanned most of the Cold War. He is often regarded as one of the best-known spymasters during the Cold War. In the West he was known as "the man without a face" due to his elusiveness.
Wolf was born 19 January 1923, in Hechingen, Province of Hohenzollern (now Baden-Württemberg), to a German-Jewish father and a non-Jewish German mother. His father was the writer, communist activist and physician Friedrich Wolf (1888–1953) and his mother was the nursery teacher Else Wolf ( Dreibholz; 1898–1973). He had one brother, the film director Konrad Wolf (1925–1982). His father was a member of the Communist Party of Germany, and after the anti-socialist and anti-Semitic Nazi Party gained power in 1933, Wolf emigrated to Moscow with his father, via Switzerland and France, because of their communist convictions and because Wolf's father was Jewish.
During his exile, Wolf first attended the German Karl Liebknecht School and later a Russian school. In 1936, at the age of 13, he obtained Soviet identity documents.
After finishing school, Wolf entered the Moscow Institute of Airplane Engineering (now Moscow Aviation Institute) in 1940, which was evacuated to Alma Ata after Nazi Germany's attack on the Soviet Union. There he was told to join the Comintern in 1942, where he among others was prepared for undercover work behind enemy lines. He also worked as a newsreader for German People's Radio after the dissolution of the Comintern, from 1943 until 1945.
After the war he was sent to Berlin with the Ulbricht Group, led by Walter Ulbricht, to work as a journalist for a radio station in the Soviet Zone of occupation.
Official source
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