Blackmail can also explain how Wolf was able to send and use spies in West Germany: he was shamelessly exploiting the Nazi past of these men and women. When those concerned refused to obey, he threatened to make public their service in the Nazi party or in the army of the Third Reich. It was no wonder therefore that former Nazi soldiers became communist agents. But that was not all. The Eastern intelligence services also made the most of information they had on people who were now settled in West Germany, but had previously worked for them; men from Comintern, for example, or simply former communist militants. In post-war West Germany, it was certainly not recommended to have once flirted with the Communists and was sometimes seen as being worse than having belonged to the Nazi Party. General Gehlen himself had had a very close relationship with the Nazis, but that did not prevent him from becoming the head of West Germany's intelligence service!
In the years after the war, Germany became almost the country of choice for eastern spies and there was always a permanent climate of suspicion. People were quick to suspect a neighbour, work colleague or boss as someone who worked for ‘the other side', as it was called. No one was immune, not even the most important people in the federal government. Willy Brandt himself was even the object of suspicion, with some accusing him of being a member of the CIA, while other believed he was a KGB agent.
To understand this hotbed of suspicions, it is necessary to examine the biography of the Chancellor. For one thing, Brandt was not called Brandt. This pseudonym was actually given to him during the war and like many members of the French Resistance, he kept it after the war when he returned to his own country.
His real name was Hebert Frahm and he was born in Lubeck just before the beginning of the First World War. He came from a very modest background, right on the edge of poverty. His mother was a shop assistant and his grandfather, who was a labourer on one of the Junker's estates,87 had become a socialist after rebelling against the brutal methods that his master used towards his staff. The young Herbert never knew his father, perhaps because his mother was not actually married to him. It is not hard to imagine the life of this young mother in such a corseted society as Germany in the early twentieth century. Many years later, the faults of the mother were still being reflected in the son: when Brandt became a prominent political figure, there were many of his opponents who chose to exhume the subject and bring up his mother's past.
A brilliant student, the young Frahm was awarded a scholarship to study at high school. He passed his exams, but it was politics that already occupied most of his life. His grandfather's influence and his mother's low status in life all led to him quickly acquiring a left-thinking political conscience, joining the Young Socialists at an early age and becoming a member of the SPD (German Socialist Party) at seventeen. He soon came to believe that the party was too complaisant and, above all, too legalistic, so he moved to another socialist party instead. He was also wary of the Communist Party as he considered it to be too subservient to Stalin. The inevitable rise of Hitler soon began, ending with him becoming Chancellor in 1933. All left-leaning thinkers were hunted from the outset and Herbert Frahm went into hiding and adopted the pseudonym Willy Brandt. Shortly after Hitler had seized power, Brandt sailed to Norway where he was charged with setting up a liaison office with the Socialist Party. His life was forever changed and he would not set foot back in his home country until after the end of the Second World War, with the exception of a secret journey he made in 1936 to make contact with the inner resistance.
Brandt resumed his studies in Norway, but spent most of his time advocating and organising resistance to the Nazis among other German immigrants. Stripped of his nationality, he became a Norwegian citizen and wrote for several newspapers. He visited Spain during the Civil War in his role as a reporter, although he was more of a travelling salesman for the anti-Nazi campaign rather than a journalist. He moved around a great deal, making contact with other Germans who were fighting with the International Brigade. He sympathised with the POUM party88 and had his first altercations with the communists, who regarded it as a den of Trotskyites and lefties. Indeed, the Stalinists would physically eliminate many of its members.
Willy Brandt therefore became a target for the communists, with its leaders accusing him of one absurd allegation after another: he was suspected of being a Gestapo agent, then a spy for Franco. It was even insinuated that he was trying to infiltrate POUM on behalf of the French National Police.
In 1940, Brandt was surprised by Hitler's invasion of Norway and he was at great risk if the Germans discovered his true identity. Taken prisoner, he pretended to be a Norwegian officer, with his political opponents later using this information to accuse him of having fought against his own countrymen. Nevertheless, he managed to escape and made it to the Swedish border where he made sure to be particularly cautious. Although a neutral country, Sweden still had many supporters of the Nazi regime and paid close attention to the activities of its German opponents. Some Swedish citizens were even interred in camps. However, as a Norwegian citizen, Brandt was allowed to continue his resistance activities and used his position as a journalist as a cover to get information. Thanks to the resistance network that he had established in Germany, Norway and Denmark, he was able to collect information together and
