BND officer should never write memoirs, Gehlen’s Der Dienst (The
Service) appeared in 1971, provoking controversy on both sides of
the Atlantic. Gehlen died on 8 June 1979 in Berg at Lake Starnberg
(Bavaria). See also GENERALVERTRETUNG.GENERALVERTRETUNG (GV). The primary subdivision of the
Organisation Gehlen, a Generalvertretung (General Agency) was
largely autonomous and headed by persons with considerable prior
experience, such as Hermann Giskes and Joachim Rohleder.
While the GV in Karlsruhe concentrated on Eastern bloc counter-
espionage, others had a geographic focus: Munich for Austria and
Czechoslovakia; Darmstadt for Poland and the Soviet Union; Bre-
men for the German Democratic Republic. It was the task of each GV
to discover new sources of information, supervise its own branches,
and forward collated material to the appropriate sections at the Pul-
lach headquarters.
GERECKE, GÜNTHER (1893–1970). An early agent of the Mi-
nisterium für Staatssicherheit (MfS) in the Federal Republic of
Germany, Günther Gerecke had volunteered for service during
World War I. Imprisoned several times during the Third Reich for
his opposition to Adolf Hitler, he found his landed estate expropri-
ated by officials of the Soviet occupation zone at the end of World
War II. Gerecke resettled in the Western zone and became one of the
founders of the Christlich-Demokratische Union (CDU) as well as
an important official in the government of Lower Saxony. In June
1950, to underscore his dissatisfaction over Konrad Adenauer’s
German unification policy, a personal meeting was arranged in East
Berlin with the leader of the German Democratic Republic (GDR),
Walter Ulbricht. The result was the loss of Gerecke’s political office.
Leaving the CDU, he founded the splinter party Deutsche Soziale
Partei and became an MfS agent. Because of the imminent risk of
exposure, he was exfiltrated to East Berlin and then presented at a
press conference on 26 July 1952 as a patriotic critic of the Adenauer
government. Gerecke died in the GDR on 1 May 1970.
GERLACH, MANFRED. A leading East German aeronautical en-
gineer recruited by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) in 1956,
132 • GENERALVERTRETUNG