18 January 1979 – 19 January 1979 · False papers and disguises · Friedrichstraße station
Stasi officer Werner Stiller walks out through the Friedrichstraße agents' gate
After breaking open safes at Stasi headquarters, First Lieutenant Werner Stiller of the foreign intelligence service used his service pass to get through the Stasi's own border gate at Friedrichstraße station and rode the U-Bahn into West Berlin.
Werner Stiller, a physicist, had been recruited by the Stasi as an informer in 1970 and later moved into its foreign intelligence arm, the HV A, where he worked in Department XIII (science and technology). Frustrated with his work and with life in the GDR, he contacted the West German BND. From 1978 he and Helga Michnowski, a waitress in Oberhof, passed information to the BND, while Stasi counter-intelligence searched for an unknown agent it called 'Schakal'.
The BND sent him forged identity papers, but by his own account they would have been spotted at the border, so he decided to flee on his own. After work on 18 January 1979 he went to his office in 'Haus 15' of the Stasi headquarters in Berlin-Lichtenberg, broke open steel cabinets and took secret files.
After a detour to his conspiratorial flat in Prenzlauer Berg, he drove to the Friedrichstraße border station. Using his service pass, he got into a border sluice operated by the Stasi and reached the platform of the U6, the West Berlin underground line. After a few stops he got out and took a taxi to Tegel Airport; the next day a US Army plane flew him from Tempelhof to Munich. Michnowski and her son left via Poland the same day he fled and, after some mishaps, were brought out with the help of the West German embassy in Warsaw.
The Stasi only discovered the break-in at 7.50 a.m. on 19 January, when an officer found his steel cabinet moved and damaged; a report written that day already spoke of the 'well-founded suspicion of desertion using stolen border documents'. Stiller's defection shook the ministry, and the GDR had him convicted of high treason in his absence.
Sources
- Sachstandsbericht über die Ereignisse nach der Flucht Werner Stillers (BArch, MfS, HA II, Nr. 36560, Bl. 292-298)Stasi-Unterlagen-Archiv (Stasi-Mediathek)
- Werner Stiller: Überläufer der Stasi in den WestenDeutsches Spionagemuseum
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