Ter Braak was born Engelbertus Fukken in the Netherlands. Para-
dropped on 2 November 1940 near Haversham in Buckinghamshire,
he proceeded to Cambridge and pretended to be working for the
Free Dutch Forces based in London. His growing concern of being
detected caused him to commit suicide at a Cambridge air raid shelter
on 29 March 1941. Although Ter Braak was the only infiltrated Ger-
man spy to have eluded capture during the war, the state of his radio
equipment indicated to British authorities that he had failed to make
contact with his Abwehr handler.TESKE, WERNER (1942–1981). An officer of the Hauptverwaltung
Aufklärung (HVA) executed as a would-be defector, Werner Teske
was born on 24 April 1942. In 1969, while pursuing a doctorate in
economics at Humboldt University in East Berlin, he agreed to work
full-time for the HVA, having already served as an Instrukteur for
two years. His career in the Sektor Wissenschaft and Technik
(SWT) appeared to prosper, as he was the recipient of numerous
awards and bonuses for his agent recruitment. Yet his performance
started to falter and led to disciplinary action in 1978. Chafing at the
regimented atmosphere of the HVA and anxious to return to aca-
demic life, Teske had already begun to collect material and plot his
escape to the West.
More serious infractions surfaced, including evidence of embez-
zlement, following his dismissal in August 1980. After a search of his
apartment and the discovery of a large cache of secret departmental
documents, Teske was arrested on 11 September and interrogated for
more than six months. Looming in the background was the highly
damaging defection of his SWT colleague Werner Stiller the previ-
ous year. In the end, even though no Western organization had been
contacted and Teske had delayed his planned escape in order not to
leave his family abandoned, a secret military tribunal issued a death
sentence, which was carried out in Leipzig on 26 June 1981. He thus
became the last person to be executed in the GDR prior to the aboli-
tion of capital punishment in 1987. Informed merely that he had died
in an accident, Teske’s wife and daughter had to relocate and assume
new identities. Stiller, in a 1992 interview, ruefully conceded that
Teske would have received a life sentence in all likelihood had his
own defection not occurred.
TESKE, WERNER • 459