A solitary red rose was deposited by a sympathiser yesterday on the doorstep of his Berlin apartment block. But few tears were being shed for the 83-year-old Stasi general who dispatched some 30,000 agents to seduce Nato secretaries, buy up politicians, vacuum up secrets and train terrorists.

Normally voluble politicians contacted for comment yesterday refused to utter a word, as if Mr Wolf were a demonic presence. “Let him rot in hell,” spluttered one conservative deputy.

Germany, 17 years after the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, has still not quite got over the damage wrought to the national psyche by the spy chief. Even now the coalition government led by Angela Merkel, the Chancellor, is divided over the question of whether to continue vetting civil servants for their Stasi links. A draft law due to be introduced today has been withdrawn — because Germans still cannot agree on how far former Stasi collaborators and agents should be pursued, making victims out of spies.

Despite being dubbed the Man without a Face — for decades no photograph of him reached the West — Mr Wolf became the public standard bearer for veteran communist agents after the end of the Soviet empire. Urbane, well read and expensively dressed, he eloquently defended his activities in a Düsseldorf courtroom in 1993. “Why should I be in the dock and not Klaus Kinkel?” he asked, referring to the former head of the West German security service.

East German spies worked, he said, in the service of an internationally recognised state to protect its national interests — just as West German agents worked for Bonn and British spies for London.

To his great satisfaction, Mr Wolf (known as Mischa to secret service colleagues) ended up with a mild two-year suspended jail sentence. Helped by his young wife Andrea, he promptly reinvented himself: as an author of a cook book and a lion of the literary salons. With a rich cultural background — his father Friedrich was a German Jewish playwright and his brother Konrad was a film maker — Mr Wolf constantly hinted that he was a notch above the peasant politicians who ran communism. Even so, he remained a man of the Left, taking part in demonstrations and the annual procession to the Berlin grave of the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. Many elderly Germans could not forgive him for placing a spy, Günther Guillaume, at the side of the West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. It led to Brandt’s downfall and removed a key player in attempts to reconcile East and West Germany. Nothing better illustrated the destructiveness of Mr Wolf’s activities: his greatest spying triumph directly harmed the interests of the communist state he was supposedly trying to defend.

“There is suddenly a large public interest in the theme of secret police penetration of society,” said Joachim Gauck, who first opened Stasi police files after communism.

This could lead to a revival of interest in Mr Wolf. But for many minor officials who were blackmailed, bullied or seduced into betrayal by Mr Wolf’s case officers, his death on Wednesday night will come as a relief.