Uta Felgner

Uta Felgner (born 14 August 1951) is a German businesswoman. By the end of 2006, she was becoming known as the most high-profile hotel manager in the country. She was the manager of Berlin's luxurious Castle Hotel ("Schlosshotel") in Grunewald during June/July 2006 when all the hotel's 42 rooms and 12 suites were taken over to accommodate the Germany national team while it participated in the 2006 FIFA World Cup. Other well known guests of the hotel while she was its manager had by that time already included Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, Henry Kissinger Vitali Klitschko, Uwe Seeler, the King of Spain and the Sultan of Brunei.

She hit the headlines three years later in November 2009 after journalists working for the Berliner Morgenpost (newspaper) revealed that during the 1980s she had operated as an unusually active Informal collaborator in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), working for the country's Ministry for State Security (Stasi / intelligence services). The starting point for the journalists' researches had been an originally secret file on Felgner held in preserved Stasi records, comprising approximately 3,000 pages. In 2009 journalists attempting to corroborate Felgner's life story asked the Free University of Berlin for information on Felgner's university degree. However, the university found no reference to Felgner's degree in the archives.

Günther Asbeck In 1973, after qualifying and working as a nurse, and having had a daughter, A co-worker from those times later recalled: "In the international hotels like the "Metropol" and the "Palace" in Berlin, or during the Leipzig Trade Fair, we picked out men from the west and went to bed with them. And it sometimes got pretty wild at Uta's house in Berlin-Kaulsdorf. That way we got to lead interesting lives and were able to escape the every day". difficult and dangerous. Nevertheless, Felgner planned to escape. The plan unravelled when Hans Schulze, the West German businessman who was, at this time, her lover, had his car searched by frontier officers when he was on his way home from the Leipzig Trade Fair. Speculation focused on the senior judge Hilde Benjamin, controversial because of the number of people she had sent to the guillotine at a series of show trials in the early 1950s. There are suggestions that Felgner, by using her "specifically womanly methods" of obtaining information from men, had acquired information on Hilde Benjamin's personal life of a potentially explosive nature. It should not be expected that the nature of Felgner's "explosive information" would be spelled out in Stasi records. It is nevertheless interesting that shortly before her release Felgner signed a written undertaking that following her release from prison she would "maintain the strictest silence [about] her collaboration with the Ministry for State Security". Also unexpected for someone who had been convicted and imprisoned for trying to flee the country, is a card index entry in the Stasi records indicating that with effect from May 1988 Uta Felgner's status as an active Stasi collaborator had been reinstated. This would give her the opportunity to apply her talents and charms not merely to the hotel guests, but also to journalists.

In 2007, Felgner moved on, appointed by the entrepreneur Eugen Block to manage the five star 511 room "Grand Elysée Hotel" in Hamburg-Rotherbaum. She was subsequently reported to be living in Switzerland with an entrepreneur.