Tragic tale reveals cold-war spies' theft of children's identities
Identity theft in Eastern Bloc laid bare in story of Pole who convinced West German family he was a long-lost son, with tragic repercussions
An extraordinary untold chapter of cold-war espionage has emerged with the revelation that secret services in the Eastern Bloc systematically stole the identities of orphaned and abandoned children and used them to create aliases for their foreign agents.
The details have come to light in a German documentary that tells the tragic story of a Polish man whose identity was assumed by a spy for the Polish secret service who infiltrated West Germany's civil service and remained active there for years.
Jerzy Kaczmarek was recruited as an agent in 1977 when he was in his early 20s, and given the identity of Janusz Arnoldt.
Arnoldt had been born in 1946 to an ethnic-German mother who abandoned the one-year-old in an orphanage after fleeing her home in Pomerania - which later became Polish - along with hundreds of thousands of other ethnic Germans.
I was desperate to get to the heart of a story that has haunted me and my family for over three decades
To perfect his cover and enable him to operate in Germany, the spy Kaczmarek made an application through the Red Cross to track down "his" (Arnoldt's) birth mother, who lived in West Germany. The family welcomed the long-lost "son" with open arms, but were stricken with grief when Arnoldt's "mother", Hildegard, dropped down dead at her front door hours after seeing her supposed son in West Germany for the first time.
Helped by his new family, who took him to their hearts, Jerzy Kaczmarek went on to make a successful career for himself posing as a German bureaucrat in the northern city of Bremen's office of emigration and immigration, where he was a popular colleague, admired for the speed with which he mastered bureaucratic German. He even became a respected member of the Social Democratic Party.