FORSCHUNGSSTELLE. A World War II intelligence unit designed
to monitor transatlantic telephone communication, the Forschun-
gsstelle (research post) was established in 1940 and based in the
Netherlands. Within two years, under the direction of Kurt Vetter-
lein, the unit intercepted and unscrambled telephone calls between
the United States and Great Britain. Yet many of the conversations
involved only minor officials, and even those between Franklin D.
Roosevelt and Winston Churchill yielded little substance, as Allied
officials assumed that the communication link was not secure. In
1944, the unit was transferred to Bavaria for the remainder of the
war.
FRANKE, ARTHUR (1909–1992). The third head of East German
military intelligence, Arthur Franke was born in Berlin on 5 August
1909 and trained as a cabinetmaker. He joined the Kommunistische
Partei Deutschlands in 1930. When Adolf Hitler came into power,
Franke took refuge in Czechoslovakia under the pseudonym Pavel
Hanke and then fought in the Ernst-Thälmann Battalion during the
Spanish Civil War. Interned in France, he was returned to Germany
in 1941 and spent the last years of the war in the Sachsenhausen con-
centration camp, where he met Willy Sägebrecht.
Franke was appointed to several party positions during the So-
viet occupation period, and in 1951 he became head of the political
section of East Germany’s new air police, the nucleus of the future
air force. By 1959, he had advanced to second in command of the
Verwaltung für Koordinierung, the unit charged with military intel-
ligence, which was headed by Sägebrecht. Several months later,
Sägebrecht was dismissed and Franke took charge. His tenure saw
not only the construction of a new seven-story headquarters build-
ing in the Oberspreestrasse but also the replacement of many senior
officers with younger, more adept university graduates. All the cad-
res, in fact, underwent a personal review by Franke. More than any
other East German military intelligence chief, he participated in the
meetings with informers and covert operatives (frequently using the
name General Stein). He also fostered strong relations with the GRU
(Soviet military intelligence) within the larger context of the Warsaw
Pact. Following his reluctant retirement in early 1975, Franke headed
the diving division of the Gesellschaft für Sport und Technik (Society
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