illusory, causing him to offer his services instead to the Darzhavna
Sigurnost while in Sofia. When the information he provided was
checked with the MfS and found to be mostly invented, Ohnesorge
was tried before a Bulgarian military tribunal and given a 15-year
sentence in April 1985. His self-immolation occurred in a penal fa-
cility at Stara Zagora on 15 December 1987, and a Bulgarian aircraft
transported his remains back to Hamburg. An inquiry by the German
Foreign Office in 1997 elicited no clarifying documentation from
authorities in Sofia.OLBRICH, JOHANNA (1926–2004). One of the best-placed agents
of the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA) in the Federal Repub-
lic of Germany (FRG), Johanna Olbrich was born on 26 October
- Initially a schoolteacher in the German Democratic Republic
(GDR), she became the chief consultant in the Ministry for People’s
Education in 1960. She was recruited by the HVA in 1964 while at-
tending a party seminar in East Berlin and underwent training for re-
settlement in West Germany. Given the alias Sonja Lüneburg and the
cover career of a hairdresser, she was taken to the FRG via Colmar,
France, in 1967. After first finding employment with an insurance
firm in Hamburg, she moved in 1969 to Bonn, where William Borm,
a leading member of the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP) and an
important asset of the HVA, engaged her as a secretary. Borm in turn
recommended her to two other colleagues in 1973.
Employed for one year with Karl-Hermann Flach, the general sec-
retary of the FDP, Olbrich began working for a rising figure in the
party, Martin Bangemann, who subsequently became the party whip
in the European Parliament in Strasbourg and the economics minister
in the government of Helmut Kohl. When Olbrich lost a false pass-
port with her photograph in Rome, she was exfiltrated to the GDR via
Lübeck. She was arrested outside Berlin shortly after reunification on
11 June 1991. Sentenced to prison, she was later released with proba-
tion. She died in Bernau near Berlin on 18 February 2004. A short
autobiographical sketch, Ich wurde Sonja Lüneburg (I Became Sonja
Lüneburg), appeared in 2003.
OPERATIONSGEBIET (OG). A term employed by the Ministerium
für Staatssicherheit, Operationsgebiet (area of operations) derived
330 • OLBRICH, JOHANNA