Christel Boom

Christel Ingeborg Margarete Meerrettig was born on 6 October 1927 in Allenstein, East Prussia, Germany (modern Olsztyn, Poland).

Her mother married a successful Dutchman, Tobias Boom, the technical director of a tobacco factory in East Prussia, in the early 1930s.

The family moved to Leisnig, but was broken up during the Second World War when Christel's adoptive father was arrested and held in Nuremberg for being a hostile foreigner after the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940.

Finding job prospects limited in Leisnig, she moved to East Berlin and found work as a secretary at the headquarters of the Committee of the Fighters for Peace,[1] a communist front organisation.

[9] Christel initially carried out administrative work in support of Günter, who acted as a handler for two contacts within the SPD; she would decode and encrypt the messages relayed between them and Stasi headquarters.

When Birkelbach rose to be part of the party leadership, and a secretary of state, Christel gained access to NATO documents as well as SPD ones.

[13] After Christel's initial successes, it was Günter who later made more significant inroads; after being elected to the Frankfurt city council in 1968, he was campaign manager for Georg Leber who became West Germany defence minister.

[8] There had always been rumours about the Guillaumes' past, and as early as 1955 Günter had been suspected of working as an East German agent, but the initial report had been overlooked and dismissed.

Among the most compelling pieces of evidence were radio intercepts dating back to the 1950s that coincided with significant events for the Guillaumes; the birth of Pierre, birthdays and other family occasions.

The HVA had sent messages like these to improve the morale of their foreign operatives, but for the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) this provided motivation for further investigation.

Under normal circumstances at the time, the pair would have expected to be sent back to East Germany sooner rather than later as part of a prisoner exchange, but given the high profile and embarrassing nature of the infiltration, the West German government was not interested in such a swap.

[3] Soon after their return, she divorced Guillaume, who she felt had betrayed her by confessing to their spying,[16] and for revelations made during the trial that he had been a member of the Nazi Party, against whom she held a grudge for their treatment of her father.