Elli Barczatis

Helene "Elli" Barczatis (7 January 1912 – 23 November 1955) was a typist-secretary who worked between April 1950 and January 1953 as the head secretary of the East German prime minister, Otto Grotewohl. Convicted of espionage, she and her lover Karl Laurenz were guillotined on 23 November 1955.

Life

Early years

Elli Barczatis was born in Berlin in 1912, the daughter of a master tailor. She attended school locally between 1918 and 1926 before embarking on a traineeship as a saleswoman with a small publishing company, "Banzhaff-Verlag". She switched in 1928, working as a typist for a book dealership called Karl Block. In 1929 she joined the Gewerkschaftsbund der Angestellten, a trades union for clerical workers, and between 1929 and 1933 attended evening classes in order to gain a higher secretarial qualification. A succession of further secretarial positions followed, always in Berlin where she lived with and looked after her mother.

In the years following the war she worked as a typist and secretary for various forms and organisations. She was hired in January 1946 to work as a secretary for Gustav Sobottka, a politician who at the time was the president of the National Administration for Energy Supplies ("Zentralverwaltung der Brennstoffindustrie"). It was while working here that she got to know Karl Laurenz. In 1951, she attended a course at the regional party academy. In January 1953, she resigned from her secretarial position in order to attend a training course at the "Walter Ulbricht" Management College (Verwaltungsakademie „Walter Ulbricht“). Her course completed, she returned briefly in May 1953 to her secretarial work for Grotewohl.

A few days later Joanna Lexow reported what she had seen at her place of work, and her concerns were passed on to the Ministry for State Security. Stasi files from this point on identify their informant, Johanna Lexow, under the cover name "Grünspan" (literally: "Verdigris").

Karl Laurenz

In fact, since the autumn of 1949 Karl Laurenz and Elli Barczatis had been lovers. At the time when they were spotted behaving suspiciously in a cafe, Laurenz had not been identified as a spy, although he had gained a certain notoriety because of his sometimes inappropriate behaviour with female colleagues: this may be why Johanna Lexow paid particular attention when she spotted him sitting on his own at a small table behind a pillar in the cafe.

During the early 1950s the political division of Berlin was not yet matched by physical divisions, and Laurenz regularly went to the western sector (later West Berlin) to meet Clemens Laby, his contact from the West German intelligence service. According to testimony which they gave in 1955, sometimes Barczatis accompanied him, being introduced to Laby simply as Laurenz's girlfriend: sometimes Laurenz went alone. It seems that for Barczatis, Clemens Laby and Karl Laurenz were simply old friends who liked to meet up occasionally and talk about old times. Later, when he faced trial, it would be repeatedly put to Laurenz that Barczatis must have been aware of the true nature of the relationship between himself and Laby, but Laurenz repeatedly insisted that he made a point of keeping this from her, "for her own protection". Barczatis was nevertheless given a code name by the western intelligence services who identified her as "Gänseblümchen" (literally: "Little daisy flower").

Trial and execution

On 17 June 1955 the investigation was finally completed, with a recommendation to the court that the ensuing trial should be conducted in closed court. The trial itself, thought to have taken place in Berlin, was held on 23 September 1955. It is thought to have lasted approximately 13 hours and was recorded. A version of the recording, reduced to approximately 320 minutes, was found among the Stasi archives following the demise of the East German regime. Neither Barczatis nor Laurenz had any legal representation. Apart from the two of them, the court officers and the prosecutors, only Stasi officers were present in court.

The original recommendation had been for life sentences, but the court condemned both defendants to death for "Boycott Agitation" under article §6 of the constitution.

At around 3 in the morning on 23 November 1955, Karl Laurenz was taken from his cell to the execution room at the National Execution Facility in Dresden and guillotined. Elli Barczatis was guillotined approximately ten minutes later.

Communication

It was only some months later that the public became aware of the trial, the verdict and the execution. During the first part of 1956 the families knew nothing of the whereabouts of Barczatis and Laurenz. However, on 7 March 1956 Elli's younger sister, Herta Barczatis, told a reporter from the New York Times that she had learned that her sister had been condemned to death as a "spy for the United States" and sentenced to death. She thought it probable that Elli had been executed.

Rehabilitation

Elli Barczatis was officially rehabilitated by the Berlin District Court on 28 November 2006.

Further context and evaluation

The East German media were not able to report specifically on the Barczatis case, because the trial was held behind closed doors "in camera". But they did report in more general terms a massive unmasking and the successful arrest of more than 1,000 "Gehlen spies". Most of these were, of course, not spies but political detainees.

Contrasting assessments exist concerning the importance of Elli Barczatis to western intelligence. There are those who identify her as an important agent. Much subsequent comment has concluded that Gehlen, whose intelligence career had been widely discredited by the time he wrote his memoirs thanks, above all, to Heinz Felfe, had reasons of his own to emphasize any available positive aspects of the role played by the West German intelligence service during the 1950s.

Since the records of her trial have become available it has become evident that many of the "facts" which the court concluded Barczatis had passed to Laurenz for onward transmission to his western handler involved agenda items that could be found in the newspapers in both East and West Germany, concerning matters such as the scheduling of formal visits by Prime Minister Grotewohl. Possibly of more interest to western intelligence would have been information on economic and industrial matters, such as supply shortages of certain raw materials,

One of the panel of judges that condemned Barczatis to death in 1955 was still alive in 1995, when Judge Helene Heymann (back in 1955 Judge Helene Kleine) found herself facing the Berlin District Court on charges of manslaughter, false imprisonment and legal violations. The court determined that Kleine and her fellow judges had knowingly imposed disproportionately heavy penalties, and she was herself sentenced to a five-year jail term. The sentence was suspended, however.