October 1929. A baker by training and a member of the Sozialist-
ische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, he entered the East German police
force in 1952 and, following additional instruction, was transferred
to military intelligence operations four years later. By 1964, he held
the rank of major.
Two of his agents—José Kautz-Coronel and Julio Torrentes-Avel-
lan (code-named primel and vergissmeinnicht)—were Nicaraguan
students at the Technical College in Munich. Recruited in 1957
through classified advertisements, they had the task of obtaining
information about the U.S. armed forces stationed in the Federal
Republic of Germany. Scheithauer also used them in a mission to
Spain in 1959 regarding military operations of the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization and then later in West Berlin. After contact with
them abruptly ended in fall 1961, two bodies were discovered—one
shortly thereafter in the forest near Gross Marzehns (Brandenburg),
the other a year later less than two miles from that spot. Both wore
Western clothes and had died from a gunshot wound in the back of
the head.
It took the Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit (MfS) nearly four
years to confirm the identity of the corpses. According to the results
of the inquiry, Scheithauer, who had been regularly pocketing part
of their compensation, murdered the two students with his service
revolver out of fear that his misdeeds would become known (the
students had complained of being underpaid and begun to balk at
their next assignment). During interrogation by the MfS, he admitted
to having embezzled other funds as well. Scheithauer was executed
in 1968, although none of his VA colleagues learned of the circum-
stances that led to his death.SCHELIHA, RUDOLF VON (1897–1942). A career diplomat and
Soviet agent, Rudolf von Scheliha was born in Zessel (now Cieśle,
Poland) on 31 May 1897, the son of a landed aristocrat. A decorated
volunteer in World War I, he completed his legal studies at Breslau
(now Wroclaw, Poland) and joined the Foreign Office in 1922.
Scheliha was recruited as a GRU (Soviet military intelligence) agent
by Ilse Stöbe and Rudolf Herrnstadt in 1937 while a legation sec-
retary in Warsaw. Under the code name arier, he proved to be an
exceptionally productive and well-paid source whose work continued
392 • SCHELIHA, RUDOLF VON