avoid unexpected revelations within East Germany about suspected
Nazis—and to aid the disinformation campaigns directed at the
Federal Republic of Germany—Mielke ordered an end to the previ-
ous case-by-case procedure and instituted greater centralization and
systematization. The MfS also increased its efforts to obtain copies
of all Nazi documents from foreign archives, especially those in
Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union. Placed in the MfS’s
own archive, these records remained restricted from other state insti-
tutions as well as individual citizens. This operation can be viewed
as a tacit admission that the German Democratic Republic faced a
serious problem concerning the number of suspected Nazis in its own
population.
KOPATZKY, ALEKSANDR GRIGORYEVICH (1923–1982). A
prized Soviet double agent active in numerous intelligence organiza-
tions in Germany, Aleksandr Grigoryevich Kopatzky was born in
Siurozh (Bryansk Oblast) and attended a military espionage school in
Novosibirsk following the German invasion in 1941. After parachut-
ing behind enemy lines in October 1943, he was captured by German
forces and agreed to work as an undercover agent against the Red
Army. During the final months of the war, he was an intelligence of-
ficer with the anti-Soviet Russian Army of Liberation under General
Andrei Vlasov. Imprisoned briefly by the Americans in May 1945,
Kopatzky attracted the attention of the Organisation Gehlen (OG)
because of his anti-Soviet credentials. Also, he married the daughter
of a former SS general in 1948. His spurious reports, however, led to
his later dismissal by the OG.
In 1949—under mysterious circumstances—Kopatzky volun-
teered to work once again for Soviet intelligence (under the succes-
sive code names erwin, herbert, and richard) and managed to
infiltrate an anticommunist émigré organization based in Munich.
In 1951, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) station in West
Berlin recruited him (under the pseudonym Franz Koischwitz). This
mistake resulted in extensive damage, including the kidnapping of
Vladimir Kivi, a fellow CIA agent of Estonian background, to East
Berlin, as well as the unmasking of more than 100 American intel-
ligence officers and agents in the German Democratic Republic. But
Kopatzky’s duplicity was not immediately discovered by authorities.
KOPATZKY, ALEKSANDR GRIGORYEVICH • 241
