from PART I - HIGH-TECH
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2009
At 5:10 a.m. on 5 December 1989, Artur Wenzel was found dead in his jail cell at the central East Berlin police station. He had hung himself on the cell window with his leather belt. He was a tidy man who attended to appearances, and his shoes were placed neatly in a corner. He usually wore a businessman's suit and tie and had dyed jet-black, slicked-back hair, which did not match his fair complexion and blue eyes. When police detained the well-dressed, corpulent fifty-five-year-old “businessman” outside of his Alexanderplatz “House of Electronics” office in the heart of the city the day before, they seized two suitcases containing more than half a million West German marks and 100,000 East German marks – more than a quarter of a million dollars.
Was Wenzel planning to flee the country and go underground with this large amount of money or was he merely carrying out a business transaction as he told investigators the next day? No ordinary citizen, and not even a real businessman, Colonel Wenzel had faithfully served the Ministry for State Security for thirty-five years and had been head of internal security's microelectronics unit, where he had worked on countering economic espionage since 1981. It is not surprising that Wenzel had access to large amounts of money, given his position. The Stasi had established good relations with Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski, Secretary of State for Foreign Trade, who provided East Germany with the hard currency it needed for expensive technology.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.