Dieter Popp (24 November 1938 – 27 November 2020) was a West German insurance agent who worked as a spy between 1969 and 1990. He was based in Bonn, at that time the so-called provisional capital of the German Federal Republic (West Germany). His espionage work was undertaken on behalf of the Military Intelligence Service of the East German National People's Army.
In 1990, during the run-up to reunification, Dieter Popp was arrested. In 1991 he was sentenced to a six-year prison term and heavily fined for what one source terms "aggravated espionage". Taking into account the time he spent held in pre-trial investigatory detention, he ended up serving four years of his six-year term. Released in 1994, he continued to believe passionately that East German intelligence operatives such as himself had been "missionaries of peace" ("Kundschafter des Friedens"). By keeping Soviet negotiators well briefed on the secret goals, methods, and red lines of their western counterparts in respect of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks he had contributed to the containment of east–west tensions and prevented the cold war from exploding into a hot war as a result of western hubris and misplaced over-confidence. Over time it was the lessening of that east–west tension that opened the way to understandings between Mikhail Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl that put an end to the separate German Democratic Republic. In 1995 Dieter Popp co-founded and became the chair of an organisation of those whose beliefs in this respect were similar to his own, known as "Kundschafter des Friedens fordern Recht e.V." ("Missionaries of Peace demand Justice"). His powerful advocacy of his views continued to place him outside the German political mainstream.
Life
Provenance and early years
Dieter Popp was born in Berlin. His father was a Communist (which had been illegal since 1933) and involved in resistance activity. His mother was a "non-Aryan". In 1939 his mother's grandfather, a member of a Jewish family and a leading surgeon in Chemnitz, was arrested in the operating theatre where he was working and deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp where he was subsequently murdered. The family were bombed out of their Berlin home in 1944 and evacuated roughly to the north, to Fürstenberg/Havel, formerly his father's hometown. Here they ended up living very close to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. He later recalled seeing the emaciated women inmates - mostly left-wing political prisoners - being marched through the town in rows of five. He would never forget the reactions of the gawping townsfolk: they saw these women, not without a certain warped sense of pride, as "their own prisoners".
Growing up in postwar Germany
War ended in May 1945 and his father was released from detention as an American prisoner of war in 1946. The family moved to Neustrelitz, a small town in the northern part of what was by now being administered as the Soviet occupation zone. The elder Popp helped set up the Neustrelitz branch of the Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED), established under contentious circumstances in the Soviet zone in April 1946. During this period the family secretly gave sanctuary to an SPD activist who had been released from a concentration camp and now faced detention by the Soviet occupation authorities in the context of Stalin's purges against non-Communist activists. The matter did not end well. Both the SPD activist and Popp's father were arrested by the Soviet authorities. After his father had been released from jail, in 1950 the family moved again, this time back to what was becoming known as West Berlin, as the military division of the city was increasingly reflected by administrative, political and, later, physical divisions. By 1956 Dieter Popp's father had died. In West Germany and West Berlin the old Communist Party had not been subsumed into the SED, but it had become increasingly marginalised, seen both by the West German political establishment and the population more generally as nothing more than a proxy for the foreign policy of the Soviet Union. In August 1956 the Communist Party was banned by the West German Constitutional Court. Popp, by now aged 18, could not understand why "in the west the Communist Party was banned and Communists were again being persecuted".