[1] At school he joined the Nazi Schoolchildren's League (NSS / Nationalsozialistischer Schülerbund): at this time Adolf Hitler was still known only as a highly effective opposition politician.
[4] In 1939 he began working as a personal bodyguard for prominent party members, which also involved his receiving training as an official in the Criminal Investigation Department.
Towards the end of the war he was promoted to the rank of SS-Obersturmführer (roughly equivalent to a First lieutenant) and, in December 1944, transferred to the Netherlands[1] with a mandate to organise subversive groups behind what was now becoming the allied front line.
[7] According to a credible 1969 press report much of his energy while in the Netherlands implied a personal rivalry with his father, a Dresden-based Criminal Investigation Officer of evidently overbearing character, who was by origin a member of Germany's Sorbian ethnic minority.
[3] However, Felfe is believed to have become a "full blown" Soviet agent only in September 1951, following a meeting in late 1949 or early 1950[3] with Hans Clemens,[6] a former colleague from their days in German Intelligence.
[3] 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.
[3] Agent "Paul" continued to work under the case officer Vitaly Korotkov for the Soviet Main Intelligence Directorate until his arrest in November 1961.
Felfe was employed as an interrogator,[3] tasked with screening, among others, former members of East Germany's quasi-military police service (Volkspolizei) and any identified associates arriving in the refugee camps.
Subsequently declassified CIA analysis outlines four elaborate operations undertaken in the early 1950s by Soviet Intelligence, under the codes names "Balthasar", "Lena", "Lilli Marlen" and "Busch", designed to support Felfe's usefulness and credibility in the eyes of his West German bosses.
[2] His status within the service and the confidence of his senior colleagues enabled Felfe's free access to many of the secret files held by the federal government and, notably, its foreign ministry.
[12] Felfe also stated that he had provided the west with a detailed plan of the KGB headquarters in Karlshorst on the south side of Berlin, something which Gehlen loved to show high-ranking intelligence chiefs from his country's western allies.
[3][13] After his arrest in 1961, the court found that during ten years as an active double agent Felfe had photographed more than 15,000 secret documents and transmitted countless messages by radio, or using one of his personal contacts.
[3] According to two exceptionally well-briefed pundits, Oleg Gordievsky and Christopher Andrew, he managed to keep the Soviets regularly apprised in their major areas of interest concerning the CIA and other intelligence services.
His senior position in counter-espionage left him plenty of opportunities to cover his own tracks on such matters as any links he may have had with the English spy Kim Philby.
In the end it was a Soviet defector, a KGB major called Anatoliy Golitsyn, who in October 1961 provided the decisive information that led to Felfe.
[1] Still aged only 51, Felfe was nevertheless released on 14 February 1969 in exchange for 21[citation needed] (mostly political) prisoners including three West German students from Heidelberg – Walter Naumann, Peter Sonntag and Volker Schaffhauser[8][21] – who had been convicted in the Soviet Union for spying because they had allegedly been caught writing down the license plate numbers of Soviet military vehicles on behalf of the CIA.
It came about only following massive pressure from the German Democratic Republic which threatened to break off the secret political prisoner ransom scheme that the two Germanys had been quietly operating since 1964.
[17][25][26] The manuscript had been reviewed by Felfe's former employers in the KGB, and during a press interview he gave the estimate that perhaps 10-15% of what he had written had been removed at their request, while their acceptance of certain other passages had surprised him.
[27] Public disclosure of Felfe's activities damaged the reputation of the West German Intelligence Service,[4] which just three months earlier had been taken by surprise by the erection of the Berlin Wall.
According to Heribert Hellenbroich (head of BND) on public TV, Felfe displayed a healthy measure of chutzpah while being an instructor to nascent spies of BND: During his explanation of secret communication via shortwave radio from KGB / Moscow to their European spies, he used actual radio traffic (encrypted number sequences in spoken German language voice) that in fact contained orders that Felfe himself was to carry out on behalf of the Soviets.