Of the 118 individuals tried before closed military tribunals, 45
received death sentences by hanging or the guillotine. Because of
the loss of most of the Gestapo interrogation records and the court
minutes—coupled with the inaccessibility of Soviet archives until the
1990s—the Rote Kapelle has been the object of widely differing in-
terpretations. Whereas the Soviet Union and the German Democratic
Republic paid tribute to its exploits in glowingly heroic terms, sev-
eral Western writers were more skeptical about its importance, not-
ing that the information obtained came from second- and third-hand
sources and not from the top military command. After the war, U.S.
and British intelligence officers, while aware of Gestapo mistreat-
ment of Rote Kapelle members, showed no interest in prosecution
but were anxious to expand their knowledge of Soviet tradecraft. See
also FUNKABWEHR; PANZINGER, FRIEDRICH; STRÜBING,
JOHANN; WENZEL, JOHANN.ROTSCH, MANFRED (1924– ). One of the most productive Soviet
spies operating in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), Manfred
Rotsch was an engineer trained in Dresden between 1948 and 1952.
In April 1954, shortly before resettling in the FRG, he agreed to
work undercover for the KGB (code name Emil). Rotsch’s subse-
quent position as head of the planning department of Messerschmitt-
Bölkow-Blohm, the country’s largest arms manufacturer, proved a
lucrative source of technological information, especially regarding
the Tornado, the new fighter bomber designed for the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization, and the Milan antitank missile. Rotsch, who
projected a conventional bourgeois image, also stood as a candidate
of the conservative Christlich-Soziale Union in local Bavarian elec-
tions. Betrayed by a French agent of the KGB, he was arrested on
24 September 1984. Convicted of treason in 1986, he was sentenced
to eight and a half years in prison but was released as part of a spy
exchange in August 1987. Later the same year, Rotsch and his wife
left the German Democratic Republic and returned to their home near
Munich.
RUH, ANTON (1912–1964). A U.S. Office of Strategic Services
(OSS) agent with secret ties to Soviet military intelligence, Anton
Ruh was born in Berlin on 20 February 1912 and trained as a printer
380 • ROTSCH, MANFRED