Alfred Frenzel

Who was Alfred Frenzel?

Alfred Frenzel was a West German member of parliament, who was secretly conducting espionage for Czechoslovakia while serving on the Bundestag's Defense Committee. Given the code name Anna by the StB, he passed along classified information to the Communist government in Prague for five years, until his arrest in Bonn on October 31, 1960. He was the most important StB spy during the entire Cold War.

During World War II, after the invasion of his homeland by Nazi Germany, Frenzel worked as an agent for the government in exile in the United Kingdom. After the end of the war, Czechoslovakia became a communist state, and Frenzel emigrated to West Germany.

The new state intelligence service in Czechoslovakia, the StB, examined the files of pre-war intelligence officers, and found information on Frenzel's pre-war activities. When they discovered that Frenzel had been appointed to the parliamentary defence committee responsible for remilitarising West Germany and establishing her place in NATO, the StB leapt on this opportunity to recruit such a highly placed spy.