Erwin Tiebel

Erwin Tiebel (10 November 1903 - 17 August 1981) was a German lawyer. After the Nazis took power he joined the Leipzig chapter of the party in April 1933. During the late 1930s he began working for the security services. His involvement became progressively more time consuming and after 1943 he restricted his law work to existing cases. That year he was recruited into "Amt VI" (literally "Office 6"), the department in Berlin that dealt with political foreign intelligence. He worked on "commercial matters", especially with regard to "currency transactions in foreign countries". Switzerland was a particular focus, though plans that he should himself be posted to Switzerland came to nothing.

After 1945, with housing in desperately short supply, he eventually found lodgings with a young couple called Pohl at Lendringsen in the Sauerland region, east of Dortmund. Pohl was a construction contractor. The Pohls had recently inherited a building business which they were expanding in order to participate in the necessary construction boom that followed the destruction of war. Tiebel worked for a couple of years on the construction sites and thereafter remained with Pohl as a senior member of the growing business, working in a commercial and management capacity. Felfe and Clemens were sentenced respectively to fourteen and eleven years, though none of the three men would serve out their full jail terms.

Life Provenance and early years Erwin Tiebel was born in Dresden. It is known that he had an elder brother, Martin, born in 1901, and a younger brother, Siegfried, born in 1917. The boys' father, Paul Tiebel, who died in 1948, is described as a "master mechanic". Erwin Tiebel attended school in Radeberg (Dresden) from 1910, passing his Abitur (school leaving exams) in 1923. He studied Law at Leipzig and Berlin between 1923 and 1928, passing his first level law exams in 1927 and the second level exams in 1934. Between 1928 and 1934 study was combined with work in the courts at Dresden, Bautzen and Leipzig. In 1934 he joined an existing law practice as a qualified lawyer in Saxony, but almost immediately changed tactics, setting up in private practice as a self-employed lawyer in Radeberg. and it is likely that the Dresden office was also involved in subsequently involving Tiebel. Later CIA reports noted that during the years directly following the war the Soviets had systematically targeted former agents of the Nazi Intelligence services, and that they had particular success in recruiting people from Dresden because of bitterness against the British and Americans resulting from the very high level of civilian deaths and suffering caused by the destructive fire bombing of that city in February 1945. The intense bombing of Dresden had been controversial even in London and Washington. Nevertheless, at his interrogations in 1961 Tiebel insisted that when, after due reflection, he "finally" indicated his willingness to help his friend as requested, he did what he did "out of comradeship". At that stage there was little further discussion of the matter. "Detailed briefing" followed a few months later in connection with what Tiebel described as his "first courier trip". Tiebel's contribution, as far as the court concluded, was restricted to his courier work. It became very clear that Felfe was intellectually dominant and took the leading role, although he was fifteen years younger than Clemens and Tiebel. Nevertheless as Tiebel at one stage made a point of telling the court, when they had first got to know each other back in Dresden it was Tiebel, the older man, who had suggested that they should address one another using the familiar "du" appellation rather than the more formal "Sie". It was further determined that Felfe had been mandated by his Soviet handlers to recruit former comrades from his time with the Nazi security services, though the West German Intelligence Services vehemently denied the suggestion that they employed significant numbers of former Nazi intelligence agents. Commentators were not convinced.

Personal Erwin Tiebel married his wife Isolde Hordler in October 1941. Isolde was also from a Dresden family, and until Erwin Tiebels's transfer in Berlin in 1943 they lived together in Radeberg near Dresden. The marriage produced two children, Wolfgang and Heidemarie, who were aged 19 and 17 at the end of 1961, so were presumably both born between 1942 and 1945. After 1945 the couple were separated. Erwin Tiebel could not return to the part of Germany that was now administered as the Soviet occupation zone for "political reasons", presumably based on his membership of the security establishment during the Nazi years: Isolde Tiebel, whose mother had recently died, could not leave her father alone in Dresden after he returned from his time as a prisoner of war.

Living in the west after 1945, Tiebel received reports from his mother, who remained in the Dresden area till 1958, that his wife and her father were having trouble coping, and that they had "taken to drink". He later reported, under questioning, that Isolde unsuccessfully tried to persuade him to "take her to the west", while she made no response to his suggestion that they might consider a divorce. Late in 1951 he proposed a family meeting, subsequently travelling to West Berlin (as the non-Soviet sectors of the city were now collectively known) where he met up with his wife, her father and their children, as well as his own (widowed since 1948) mother. The family meeting in 1951/52 lasted two days, and was the last time Tiebel met his wife for at least ten years (and probably for ever). At the end of the meeting Erwin Tiebel took his son Wolfgang back with him to West Germany while his wife, his daughter Heidemarie, his father-in-law Waldemar Hordler and (at this stage) his mother all made their way back home to Radeberg near Dresden.