[1][2] After 1945, with housing in desperately short supply, he eventually found lodgings with a young couple called Pohl at Lendringsen in the Sauerland region, east of Dortmund.
The Pohls had recently inherited a building business which they were expanding in order to participate in the necessary construction boom that followed the destruction of war.
[3][4] Felfe and Clemens were sentenced respectively to fourteen and eleven years, though none of the three men would serve out their full jail terms.
The bank manager had recruited Tiebel the previous year as an informant for the local branch of the security services, required to report on matters such as the state of mind of the people and their attitude towards the government authorities.
Activities carried out on behalf of the security services at this stage were not so onerous, however, as to impede Tiebel's regular work in his law office.
By the time war ended Tiebel had made his way to Garmisch-Partenkirchen where he remained till August 1945, when the postwar division of Germany into previously agreed occupation zones was becoming established on the ground.
In Rome, it was reported he had witnessed the trial of 335 Italian hostages under the direction of the German police chief Herbert Kappler, and later participated in the ensuing "execution".
[2] Released in 1947 or 1949 (sources differ), he made his way back to Germany, ending up in Lendringsen where Tiebel was still renting a room with the Pohls.
The encounter was somewhat frosty since, in the euphemistic terms employed by one embarrassed commentator, Gerda Clemens' "futile attempts to keep herself away from the charms of the Russian officers had not remained undisclosed to her husband".
[4] Tiebel also saw a good deal of Gerda Glemens during her visit and formed the impression that she might have been sent in order to persuade her husband, who already had a background in German intelligence, to "work for the Russians and come to Dresden".
Tiebel later explained that he had inferred that his friend "intended to set up a double play against the Russian[s] on behalf of the Gehlen office".
Later CIA reports noted that during the years directly following the war the Soviets had systematically targeted former agents of the Nazi Intelligence services, and that they had particular success in recruiting people from Dresden because of bitterness against the British and Americans resulting from the very high level of civilian deaths and suffering caused by the destructive fire bombing of that city in February 1945.
The trip involved a small suitcase with a false bottom which was given to him by Clemens, and crossing into East Berlin using the underground railway (in ways that later became impossible).
After passing through a barrier guarded by a soldier wearing a Russian uniform he was taken to a small villa apparently in a restricted "Soviet zone" inside East Berlin.
While he was entertained to a light meal and superficial slightly stilted discussion of the political situation in "the west", the suitcase was returned to him for transmission onward to Clemens, who popped round a couple of days after he got home in order to collect it.
The people he was meeting also arrived, usually, in a Volkswagen, and drove behind him at a distance after he had completed the lengthy frontier formalities and crossed through into East Germany at Helmstedt.
Conversation sometimes turned to Hans Clemens whom his interlocutors tended to identify not by a designated code name but simply as "the fat man".
Tiebel would spend the evening and night in West Berlin and drive home the next day, stopping as before at the parking area next to the 107 kilometer marker post in order to pick up the little suitcase.
Provided there was no one around to observe them (in which case the men would busy themselves apparently making repairs to the engine of their car) the exchange took about as long as it took to smoke a cigarette.
[4] Two years later their trial took place at the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe from 8–19 July 1963, before a panel of five judges chaired by Kurt Weber.
It was determined that the trio had transferred 300 rolls of micro-film containing pictures of 15,000 secret documents created by Felfe and Clemens in the course of their work for the Federal Intelligence Service as well as reels of recording tape and information conveyed by radio message.
[2] Living in the west after 1945, Tiebel received reports from his mother, who remained in the Dresden area till 1958, that his wife and her father were having trouble coping, and that they had "taken to drink".
Late in 1951 he proposed a family meeting, subsequently travelling to West Berlin (as the non-Soviet sectors of the city were now collectively known) where he met up with his wife, her father and their children, as well as his own (widowed since 1948) mother.