M-Apparatus of the KPD and the courier section of the Comintern.
After duty in the Spanish Civil War, Fomferra returned to Moscow
and was sent on various secret missions to Germany, Hungary, and
Slovakia, where he was arrested in 1942 and given a 12-year prison
sentence. With his liberation by Slovakian partisans two years later
came a short interlude in the country’s provisional interior ministry.
While associated with the K-5 in the Soviet occupation zone of
Germany, Fomferra sharply criticized the number of former Nazis
and Wehrmacht members selected for administrative positions and
the seeming indifference of the party leadership under Walter Ul-
bricht to revolutionary politics. His own appointment to the newly
established MfS in 1950 proved to be short-lived, as he was dis-
missed along with Wilhelm Zaisser in the aftermath of the Uprising
of 17 June 1953 and assigned to the Border Police. Significantly,
however, he was summoned in 1957 to help design a sabotage unit
alongside Gustav Röbelen that targeted the Federal Republic of Ger-
many. Fomferra published two autobiographical sketches following
his retirement in 1959. He died on 31 May 1979.FONTANE, THEODOR (1819–1898). A celebrated German writer of
Huguenot ancestry who was once falsely arrested as a spy, Theodor
Fontane worked as a journalist during the Franco-Prussian War.
During a tour of the front lines in fall 1870, he ventured from the
Prussian war zone into enemy territory to visit the birthplace of Joan
of Arc. On 5 October, while inspecting a bronze statue of her next to
the chapel in Domrey, Fontane was arrested as a spy by a group of
French irregulars. Not only were a revolver and dagger found in his
possession but, lacking any medical credentials, he was improperly
wearing a Red Cross badge. Fontane was imprisoned first in Neuf-
château, then in Langres, and finally in Besançon.
After Fontane’s transfer on 29 October to the island of Oleron off
the Atlantic coast, his plight belately became known to the Berlin
public. His release in December occurred primarily as a result of
the pressure exerted by the soon-to-be German chancellor, Otto von
Bismarck, who described him as “a harmless scholar” on “a scientific
trip.” Should he not be released, Bismarck threatened to retaliate
by handling any French citizens caught in similar circumstances no
differently. Fontane’s own account, Kriegsgefangen: Erlebtes 1870
FONTANE, THEODOR • 111