Walter Gramsch (born 15 January 1897, date of death unknown) worked in a high position for the State Railways in Nazi Germany, and was involved in the

20 July plot On 20 July 1944, Claus von Stauffenberg and other conspirators attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Führer of Nazi Germany, inside his Wolf's Lair field headquarters near Rastenburg, East Prussia, now Kętrzyn, in present-day Poland. The ...

against Hitler. Gramsch later became a high ranking transportation official in the Communist East German government (The

GDR East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic (GDR; german: Deutsche Demokratische Republik, , DDR, ), was a country that existed from its creation on 7 October 1949 until its dissolution on 3 October 1990. In these years the state ...

). However he was unhappy with the GDR and thus became a spy against it. He used his position to feed information to the West German Gehlen Organization.Höhne & Zolling, p 103-107 In particular, he spied on

Ernst Wollweber Ernst Friedrich Wollweber (29 October 1898 – 3 May 1967) was a German politician who was State Secretary of State Security from 1953 to 1955 and Minister of State Security of East Germany from 1955 to 1957. Biography Born in Hann. Mün ...

, a Soviet sabotage expert. After the war Wollweber became a high official in the East Germany Directorate-General of Shipping, the same area as Gramsch. Gramsch was thus in a good position to report on his activities. This resulted in, among other things, the upset of several of Wollweber's attempts to smuggle products past the Western embargo into East Germany. In the mid-1950s Gramsch was 'recalled' to West Germany. This was to protect him from the East German

SSD A solid-state drive (SSD) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies to store data persistently, typically using flash memory, and functioning as secondary storage in the hierarchy of computer storage. It is ...

(coincidentally, then run by the same Wollweber he had formerly spied on) which had become recently successful in discovering and executing large numbers of spies.Höhne & Zolling, p 208

References

Sources

* (Published in Germany as ''Pullach Intern'', 1971, Hoffman and Campe Verlag, Hamburg) 1897 births Year of death missing Interwar-period spies {{Germany-bio-stub