WOLFGANG VOGEL:WOLFGANG VOGEL, the shadowy lawyer who for years embodied the only channel of communication between the two states set up on German soil after the second World War, has died aged 82, some months after a heart attack ruined his health.
The supreme go-between also brokered deals between the Soviet and western blocs in the depths of the cold war, taking money from both sides as he arranged "spy swaps", and bought freedom for thousands of political prisoners and ordinary East Germans.
Vogel's pathway to equivocal fame and fortune opened in 1959, when he was approached by the wife of Rudolf Abel, a Soviet spy caught and imprisoned in New York two years earlier. In 1960, an American U2 spy aircraft piloted by Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union. US president Dwight D Eisenhower claimed it was on a weather patrol, but Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev produced recovered parts of the aircraft, including film and instruments - and the pilot. A Paris summit between the two leaders was cancelled by Khrushchev, and Powers was jailed after a show trial.
Vogel took the leading part in constructing a deal whereby Abel was released to the Russians in exchange for Powers. The swap took place on the famous Glienicke bridge, which straddled the border between East and West Berlin.
Perhaps his most famous coup was the release from the Soviet Union in 1986 of Jewish dissident Anatoly Scharansky. Vogel's main client on that occasion was the US government.
Vogel was born in Lower Silesia, which was German until 1945 and then handed over to Poland, whereupon the Vogel family moved to the Soviet zone of Germany. Vogel studied law at Karl Marx University, where he married Eva Anlauf; their son, Manfred, was born in 1947. They also had a daughter, Lilo, but were divorced in 1967 - after Vogel negotiated their emigration from East to West Germany.
He qualified as a lawyer in 1949 and joined the East German ministry of justice three years later. His mentor, a judge, fled to West Germany after the abortive anti-communist uprising in 1953, and sent Vogel an invitation to join him. This was intercepted by the Stasi, which promptly forced him into service, initially as an informer, and soon as an active legal agent for the regime abroad.
Relations between the two new German states were not bad - they simply did not exist officially.
It was only when chancellor Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik of reconciliation between Germany and its former enemies made headway in the early 1970s that the two states exchanged "representations".
Brandt resigned in 1974 when an East German spy, Günter Guillaume, was discovered in his inner circle, put on trial and imprisoned. After much work by Vogel, he was released in 1981.
Meanwhile, the regime was desperate for hard currency and developed a cynical method of acquiring it: the sale of individual freedom. It was an amoral exercise in realpolitik which made Vogel a rich man as fees poured in for negotiating the transfer westward of political prisoners and ordinary East Germans.
But in 1989 the Berlin wall came down, and Vogel's services were no longer required. He moved west himself, to a lakeside resort in the Bavarian Alps, with Helga, his second wife.
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Wolfgang Vogel: born October 30th, 1925; died August 21st, 2008