in 1975—appointed a senior officer for special tasks—and retired
from the HVA in 1980. He died on 30 May 1984.WEIRAUCH, LOTHAR (1908–1983). A leading member of the
Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP) and agent of the Ministerium für
Staatssicherheit (MfS), Lothar Weirauch was born in Laurahütte
(now Siemianowice, Poland). A member of several nationalist youth
groups, he joined the Sturmabteilung in 1930 and the Nazi Party four
years later. In 1937, Weirauch completed his law degree and became
active in legal circles in Breslau (today Wroclaw, Poland) and vari-
ous projects of the local Nazi Party. Greater responsibilities fell to
him during World War II as head of the racial resettlement division
in Cracow, which included supervision of mass deportations of Jews
to the death camps.
In 1948, Weirauch, for reasons still unclear, made contact with the
leadership of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands and was later
transferred to the MfS (code names x and kx). His rise to prominence
in the FDP began in North Rhine-Westphalia and concluded with a
key appointment to the Ministry of All-German Affairs in 1963, thus
allowing him to convey important information to his East Berlin
handler. Although Weirauch and several others had been charged as
accessories to wartime murder by prosecutors in Dortmund, the case
was dropped in September 1964 for lack of conclusive proof. Yet
later faced with incriminating documentation gathered by a Polish
war crimes commission, the MfS leadership permanently broke with
Weirauch in 1967. It was not until the unmasking of Kurt Gröndahl
in 1993—a decade after Weirauch’s death—that his MfS complicity
came to light.
WENDLAND, HORST. See WESSEL, GERHARD.
WENZEL, JOHANN (1902–1969). A Soviet agent active in the Rote
Kapelle, Johann Wenzel was an East Prussian by birth and joined the
Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands in 1923. After working in its
intelligence apparatus, he fled to Moscow in 1933 and was recruited
by the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) the following year. His
training in radio communications at a Red Army school enabled him
to establish a small spy ring in Brussels in 1936 (his code names
WENZEL, JOHANN • 487