Was West Germany better than east Germany in the cold war?

Answer 1

Just before the Berlin Wall was built on Aug. 13, 1961, this network of spies informed the West Germans that something big was being planned "The BND knew something was up that July and August," Wagner told SPIEGEL ONLINE. The agency likewise knew that a wall was a realistic scenario and told the politicians in Bonn. "But they didn't want to accept the idea." The BND couldn't pinpoint exactly when West Berlin would be sealed off. "Until a week before the wall went up only around 60 people knew it was going to happen," Wagner said. Military espionage in East Germany was vital to the West at the height of the Cold War. According to Wagner, the 400,000 Soviet troops based in East Germany were the strongest Red Army divisions in the entire Eastern Bloc. The West feared an attack could be launched from the GDR on West Germany and NATO. "They needed reconnaissance," he says. That was where the spies came in. The West German agency recruited thousands of ordinary East Germans to keep them informed of any military build up. The spies used radio transmitters or passed information via visiting relatives from West Germany. The BND would then pass on the intelligence to the government and military. These East German spies' motivation varied enormously. For many the decision to spy was provoked by a deep-seated attitude of anti-communism. But others did so out of adventurism, or due to family ties, or simply as a favor to old army buddies from the war. There was also some financial compensation, though the study's authors believe this was less important as a motivation, particularly as it was impossible to spend West German money in the East. "Bank accounts were sometimes opened in their names so that if they ever left the GDR they would have some start-up capital," Wagner says. East Germany Was Better at the Spying Game Before 1961 it was relatively easy to recruit spies and to access the information they gathered. According to Uhl, the BND had already recruited 5,000 East Germans by 1955, most of them from the ranks of the defeated German army. Although things got more difficult after the wall went up, a network had already been established and new spies were recruited, for example, by conservative professors at the universities or journalists. The BND also increased its reliance on information passed on by West German tourists to the GDR.