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Former South African Navy Commodore Dieter Felix Gerhardt, who commanded the Simon’s Town naval dockyard before being unmasked as one of the Soviet Union’s highest-ranking spies in apartheid South Africa, died at his home in Noordhoek on Wednesday 8 July at 11.40am. He was 90.
Gerhardt was born in Sea Point, Cape Town, on 1 November 1935, to Austrian-German parents, and not, as is often claimed, in Berlin. His life resists a settled account.
“The Wikipedia page is full of mistakes,” his widow, Ruth Gerhardt, said from their home in Noordhoek. “So are many of the other so-called authoritative sources.” She laughed when asked whether he had spied for money. “What money? We both worked hard. I was interested in sport, not expensive clothes or luxury. We simply lived our lives.”
She insisted he never abandoned the ideals that had shaped his life.
“He believed in the Freedom Charter right to the end. His health had failed since a fall on 6 May, but his mind had not. He remained mentally sharp. It was just that his body stopped working.”
She rejected, too, the persistent claim that she had been recruited by East Germany before she ever met her husband.
“That’s simply not true,” she said.
Married for almost 60 years, the couple spent a stretch of that marriage in separate prison cells, both convicted of high treason for an act whose motive is still argued over today. Accounts of the exact term vary. Ruth put her husband’s sentence at seven-and-a-half years; the Israeli investigative journalist and Mail & Guardian contributor Ronen Bergman later wrote, drawing on Gerhardt himself, that the sentences amounted to nine-and-a-half years for him and eight for her.