Karl Linke (born Görsdorf 10 January 1900: died Zittau 16 May 1961) was an officer in the East German army. Between 1952 and 1957 he was head of the country's Military Intelligence (Verwaltung für Allgemeine Fragen) service.
Following the discovery of security breaches, on 31 August 1957 he was reduced in rank to reserve colonel.
Life
Early years
Karl Linke was born in Görsdorf, then on the north-western frontier of Bohemia which was a quarter in the industrial town of Grottau, and part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At the time the town was bi-lingual, but following the creation in 1918 of Czechoslovakia the official language would become Czech in 1920. Linke came from a working-class family. He left school and undertook an apprenticeship in weaving in 1914, working as a weaver in a factory till 1918. Meanwhile, he joined the SAJ, which was effectively a youth branch of the Social Democratic party. In 1918, in the closing months of the war, he reached the age of 18 and joined the army. A brief period as an Italian prisoner of war ensued.
To Germany and then to Czechoslovakia
When the Italians released him his home town was in Czechoslovakia and Linke took a cleaning job in Senftenberg, across the frontier in Germany. It was here that in 1920 he joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD / Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands). In 1923 he recrossed the frontier into Czechoslovakia. Here, between 1923 and 1929, he worked as a weaver. He was, till 1930, a member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, also working as a smuggler for the German Communist Party. While living in Czechoslovakia he played a leading role in a strike in 1927/28, and was later arrested for taking photographs without permission at the steel works in Witkowitz, possibly in connection with his work for the Berlin-based Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (Workers Pictorial Newspaper).
To the Soviet Union
Linke was able to emigrate to the Soviet Union in 1930, accompanied by his second wife, whom he had married the previous year after the death of his first wife a few years earlier. He joined the Soviet Communist Party (КПСС), remaining a member till 1951. He worked in Moscow as a Master Weaver till 1934. After that, from 1935 till 1939, he worked in a clerical position in the Ministry for Light Industry. In 1939 he took a clerical job with the Chamber of Commerce in Moscow.
War
From the Soviet perspective the Great Patriotic War began in June 1941. In defiance of the existing non-aggression pact the German army invaded the Soviet Union. In July 1941 Karl Linke and his son Heinz both volunteered to join the Red Army, where one of Linke's roles was as a commissar in a partisan division, a role that for two years he combined with that of a (Communist) "Party Secretary" in the partisan group. In this capacity he took part in parachute operations behind German lines in the Gomel region. During 1944 as the leader of a reconnaissance group he took part in armed Slovakian partisan operations and then in the Slovak National Uprising against the Axis government which erupted between August and October 1944. The war ended in the early summer of 1945 and Karl Linke returned to Moscow, suffering from wounds endured in the war and on account of the death of his son Heinz who had been killed while fighting with the Slovak partisans.
To Czechoslovakia and then to (East) Germany
In 1946 Karl Linke returned to Czechoslovakia, between 1946 and 1949 taking a middle management job in a tape weaving factory in Hrádek nad Nisou ("Grottau" in some older German sources). Fifteen years in the Soviet Union had left him with fluent Russian, and Linke then moved on, at the end of 1949, to Berlin where between 1950 and 1951 he worked as a simultaneous translator for the Soviet representative in the Allied Control Council. The German Democratic Republic (East Germany) had been formally founded (from what had previously been designated the Soviet occupation zone) in October 1949, and in 1951 Karl Linke and his wife both took East German citizenship.