A MARRIED couple accused of spying for the Russian secret services for more than 20 years have gone on trial in Germany in one of the biggest espionage court cases since the Cold War.
The pair, identified only by codenames Andreas and Heidrun Anschlag, are accused of having been planted in West Germany from 1988 by the Soviet Union's KGB and later used by its SVR successor secret service.
The defendants, whose alias surname means "attack" in German, declined to confirm any details about their identity or the charges as the trial got underway in the higher regional court in the southwestern city of Stuttgart.
Defence lawyer Horst-Dieter Poetschke said they had Russian citizenship.
Prosecutors say one of them arrived in still divided Germany in 1988 - a year before the Berlin Wall fell - and the other in 1990, posing as Austrian citizens who had been born and grew up in South America.
According to the Federal Prosecutor's Office, light could only be shed on the last three years of their alleged activities as agents.
They had "the mission from SVR headquarters to obtain NATO and EU political and military secrets", federal public prosecutor Wolfgang Siegmund said, adding: "Particularly also geo-strategic findings on the relationship of NATO and the EU with the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia."
Prosecutors say the couple set up a "middle-class existence" to cover up their activity for the secret services.
Andreas Anschlag studied engineering and worked in the car industry while Heidrun was a housewife. According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung weekly, even their own daughter had no idea about their double lives.
The couple allegedly passed on documents they obtained from a Dutch official in the foreign ministry between 2008 and 2011.
The court heard that the official, Raymond Valentino Poeteray, obtained several hundred pages of classified, partly secret documents from different Dutch embassies and received more than 72,000 euros ($A92,000).
The accused left the documents in "dead-letter boxes", for example under certain trees, from where they were picked up by employees of the Russian consulate general in the western city of Bonn, according to the federal prosecutor.
Heidrun Anschlag was responsible for communicating with the SVR via short-wave radio, the court heard.
The pair, who allegedly were jointly paid around 100,000 euros a year, communicated with their Moscow masters using text messages via satellite phone or hidden messages in comments in YouTube videos under agreed names, it heard.
In mid-2011, Siegmund said the pair had received orders to withdraw from Germany because of the risk of being exposed and were preparing to do so when they were arrested in October of that year.
They face up to 10 years in prison if found guilty.
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