EPILOGUE

HAVING BEEN BORN FOUR YEARS and ten days after Germany’s unconditional surrender in World War II, my life’s trajectory has its roots firmly planted in that war and its results. As such, I have always had a great interest in the history of Germany in the twentieth century. How was it possible that one of the most civilized countries on the planet could succumb to the wiles of such clownish ghouls as Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring, and Joseph Goebbels? Why on earth did the German people go along for the ride that would end in mass murder and the biggest war in history? Why would they turn a blind eye to the storm troopers who pulled Jewish neighbors out of their homes in the middle of the night? Why?

Of course, I wasn’t alive when all that happened, so I felt justified in not sharing the burden of the guilt and moral dilemma that plagued the German people. More so, the country I grew up in—East Germany—was led by men with bona fide credentials as fighters against the Nazi evil. The state and its leaders used the word antifascist as the single most important descriptor of their mission. This epithet was extremely successful in rallying an entire country behind its leadership. As a young person, I was absolutely convinced that I was aligned with the most righteous movement in the history of mankind. But was I really?

As I prepared to write this book, I did much research—for the first time—on the history of the Soviet Union as well as the KGB and its predecessors. I had read about those subjects in my younger years, but in those days all the available material had been carefully scrubbed and whitewashed to depict the glorious struggle of Communist revolutionaries in pursuit of a socialist paradise. In that context, it was quite plausible that the security apparatus had to occasionally resort to harsh measures to fight the enemies of the revolution.

When the denunciation of Stalin finally happened, it was focused primarily on condemning the cult of personality, and it certainly did not extend to an indictment of his inner circle—some of whom went on to inherit power after the dictator died. During my years in the Soviet Union, there was nothing I could have found that would have contradicted the notion that I was in a good place and serving a noble cause.

My “silent defection” in 1988 was purely a personal and emotional decision, devoid of ideological underpinnings. And for the next twenty-five years, I deliberately withdrew from the stage of world events as I pursued my American dream. When the Berlin Wall came crashing down, I watched from an emotional and physical distance. All I wanted was my shell of privacy, where I could live out my life in peace with my new family in the United States.

My discovery by the media changed all that, and my hiding between the folds of the curtain of history came to an end. I had to come to terms with my background and my place in the events of the Cold War. The results of my research were disappointing at best, and often heartbreaking. Given my personal experience, Vasili Mitrokhin’s revelation that the first directorate of the KGB was fundamentally ineffective during the second half of the Cold War was not a surprise. However, a deeper dive into the history of the Soviet Union became an eye-opener of unanticipated proportions. In particular, the book Stalin and His Hangmen by Donald Rayfield, a 600-page treatise describing the murderous ways of Stalin’s regime, shook me to the bone.

During the Red Terror, which was conducted shortly after the Russian Revolution by the Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB, people were killed because they were considered enemies of the revolution. Later, people were killed for all imaginable and unimaginable reasons: They belonged to an ethnic minority; they were suspected to be foreign spies; they spoke a foreign language; they had visited a foreign country; they wrote prose or poetry that was suspect; they owned too much property; or they were family members, or even just friends, of those who were killed.

In the end, the monster ate itself from the inside out. Five out of nine heads of the Soviet security organization—all of whom had murdered hundreds of thousands of people—were themselves executed, together with many of their close associates. And the killing continued . . .

Having read the word shot for the umpteenth time, I broke down in tears as I finally realized that I had made a pact with the devil. The KGB I had joined was the successor to the band of murderers responsible for the deaths of at least 10 million citizens of the Soviet Union—though the actual number killed by Stalin and his henchmen is still in dispute. The people I worked with were all highly educated, clean-cut professionals, and I’m sure their hands were clean—because the dirty work (there was still dirty work being done, albeit on a much reduced scale) was left to others.

In those days, I didn’t know, and perhaps did not want to know, what was happening around me. But ignorance does not absolve me from guilt. I have always tried to be a good person and please others, starting with my parents. When I signed up for the KGB, I justified my often immoral actions with the excuse that I was serving a greater good. But as the mantle of ideological righteousness began to fall away in tatters during my early years in the United States, I was finally able to do the right thing. I could have walked away from Chelsea as I had done with Günther and Matthias. But I had no excuse that could stand up to the power of unconditional love.

So how is it that somebody who wants to be good—and do good—could wind up dedicating a large part of his life to a fundamentally evil cause? The answer is simple: We are not, and cannot be, good as autonomous selves. Try as we might, without guidance from God we have no moral focal point and no consistent frame of reference to determine what is good and what is not. If I’d had a relationship with God in my younger years, I might have been more circumspect. I might have asked some basic questions, the answers to which may have made me uncomfortable, but likely would have influenced my decision. But I didn’t ask those questions because I was so convinced of the power of my own goodness that it became a source of pride, essentially an idol. And therein, I believe, lies the answer to the question of why the Germans went along with Hitler. (And I must confess that I probably would have done the same thing.) Without God, man cannot achieve goodness; without God, man is lost.

Fellow Christians have asked me how I have become a different person after committing my life to Jesus. The answer to this question may be a bit unusual, but it is my answer. By the time I reached my fifties, I had in me all the right behavioral and attitudinal ingredients to pursue the Christian walk. All that was needed was for me to get to know and understand Jesus. As Shawna remarked after observing me in action for a few weeks as my administrative assistant, “You are already a Christian; you just don’t know it.”

When I began to learn about Christianity, I found it fit me like a glove. To draw an analogy: When your hand is ice cold, it has no feeling. It neither desires a glove nor even knows about the existence of the glove. When the hand begins to thaw, it starts to feel pain. That is when the soothing glove is most welcome.

Christ has taken away much of my pain, and I can live out my life on earth knowing that my sins, committed knowingly or unknowingly, have been forgiven by the enormity of His sacrifice. That is where I have landed. I am finally home.

Because I am allowed to leave behind a documented legacy of my unusual life, I’m praying that this legacy will be described by a single word: LOVE. I am so grateful to Jesus Christ for the most loving action any person could take on behalf of another. I thank my wife for helping me grasp that truth. And I want to encourage my children to live lives filled with love for God and their neighbors. There is no other way.