Ursula Richter

Ursula Richter was the name used by the spy Erika Reißmann (18 April 1933 - 2002) after she was infiltrated from East Germany into West Germany at the end of 1964. Between 1966 and 1985 she was employed in a series of jobs with businesses and agencies in the Bonn area which gave her access to information that was of interest to her handlers. Fearing imminent arrest in the west, she resurfaced in East Germany in August 1985. Her real employer during her two decades in West Germany was the Foreign Intelligence Service (" Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung" / HVA) branch of the East German Ministry for State Security ("Ministerium für Staatssicherheit"" / MfS / Stasi).

Biography The real Ursula Richter She was born on 18 April 1933 in Wittenberg and worked as a domestic servant. Her parents had divorced soon after her birth and then both died in 1955. Neither had ever had the chance to get to know their daughter who had grown up, between 1934 and 1949, in a succession of care homes and orphanages. She then attended a "Housekeeping academy" and her work between 1950 and 1966 included several periods as a domestic servant in various private homes. The passport number was correct, but everything else about the document, which was a Stasi production, was false. The passport number related to a genuine passport issued to a German housewife by the Toronto consulate back 1963. Olga Jatz (born Olga Witt) had been born back in 1906. By the time the West German consulate in Toronto had issued her with a replacement in 1963, Mrs Jatz had already lived in Canada for more than ten years, so there would have been nothing remarkable about her having acquired the passport from a consulate overseas. With the support of the usual panoply of (forged) tax and insurance documents Ursula Richter's residency back in West Germany was completed and the first step in her infiltration had been successfully concluded. Her mandate now involved a two-year "legitimisation phase" during which she had very little contact with her HVA handlers. There were by now several million people living in West Germany who had previously lived in the Soviet occupation zone and then the so-called German Democratic Republic (East Germany) after its launch in October 1949. Ursula Richter was one of them. ) In 1972 it seems that the Stasi had lost any interest they might once have had in the Catholic News Agency and Ursula Richter was prompted to find a new employer. In October 1972 she started a new job with the Bonn office of the "Association of the expelled" "Bund der Vertriebenen" (BdV). Frontier changes agreed in 1945 between the Soviets, the Americans and the British, and implemented during 1944/45, had left approximately the eastern third of what had been Germany shared out between Poland and the Soviet Union. It was far from the first time that Germany's eastern frontier had moved. What was unprecedented was the thoroughness of the ethnic cleansing which forced more than ten million Germans to move to the west of the "Oder–Neisse line". Many of these were still living in West Germany in 1972 and the BdV was a political lobbying organisation established in 1957 to promote their interests. Significantly, it was particularly "close to the Christian Democratic Party", which had led the West German government till 1969 and would do so again after 1982. The previous day she and her partner, Lorenz Betzing, crossed back to East Berlin. According to a newspaper report published at the time, she had been under surveillance from the western intelligence services since the start of the year, as they sought to identify her contacts and the extent of any spy network with which she was involved.

On 24 October 1986 an investigating judge from the Federal Court in Karlsruhe issued a warrant for the arrest of Ursula Richter: "She is strongly suspected of having undertaken secret service actions in Bonn against the Federal Republic of Germany on behalf of the intelligence services of a foreign power between December 1964 and 17 October 1985." The Public Prosecutor launched an investigation. Across the internal border Ursula Richter had reverted to her former name and was living as Erika Reißmann in the Köpenick quarter of East Berlin. Supported by a monthly disability pension of 2718 Marks, she had not returned to work. As late as October 1989, while the infrastructure of the East German surveillance state crumbled, her pension application was supported by a statement from the deputy Minister for State Security: "Comrade Erika Reißmann was sent across to the Federal Republic in 1964 as a scout (Kundschaferin). In various jobs in Bonn she worked on a huge amount of information and a very large number of documents, giving our party and government leadership a[n otherwise] virtually closed overview of revanchist organisations in West Germany and of their planned operations against East Germany".

Reunification The reunification process came into effect, formally for most purposes, in October 1990. The Federal Court resumed its investigations. Reißmann was willing to testify about her activities as an intelligence agent, disclosing most of what she knew, and on 12 November 1990 the prosecuting authorities withdrew the arrest warrant against her. After two and a half years of further investigation and testimonies from those involved, the case against her was dropped on 12 March 1993. The public Public Prosecutor issued a statement to the effect that pursuing the matter further would not be in the public interest. Reißmann had indeed passed a large amount of material to the East German Ministry for State Security during the years up to 1980. However, after she underwent a leg amputation in that year her espionage activity had been greatly diminished and it seemed that the East Germans had treated her as a "social case". As an unconvicted suspect she had been living, since 1989, on a monthly income of just 990 Marks. At the time of her disappearance in 1985 she had built up a balance of 72,000 Marks in her account with the Bonn "Sparkasse" (literally: "savings bank"), which was presumed to represent payment for her espionage activity. This had been forfeited to the West German government. The defendant was required to contribute 67,138 Marks to the accumulated costs of her own trial, which the court agreed could be paid back in monthly installments of Marks. After 1999 the outstanding balance was written off.

Erika Reißmann died at Köpenick in 2002. Some of the details of her life have emerged only after her death, as a result of continuing research in the Stasi archives.