Wolfgang Vogel (Lawyer)

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Wolfgang Heinrich Vogel (born October 30, 1925 in Wilhelmsthal , Habelschwerdt district , Lower Silesia ; † August 21, 2008 in Schliersee ) was a lawyer in the GDR , organizer of the first agent exchange (1962) in the Cold War and later GDR negotiator in the so-called release of prisoners .

Life

Wolfgang Vogel grew up in a Catholic family ; his father was a teacher. From 1932 to 1944 he attended school and then did his Reich Labor Service in Zobten . Then he began training as a navigation instructor and was with the Air Force from March 1, 1944 to January 30, 1945 . After the end of the Second World War and the expulsion from their Silesian homeland, the family moved to Jena . He began studying law at Jena University and moved to Leipzig University in 1946 , where he passed the first state examination in 1949 .

Vogel then completed a legal clerkship at the Waldheim District Court , where he met his boss Rudolf Reinartz , who moved to the GDR Ministry of Justice and took Vogel there with him as a speaker. On September 18, 1952, Vogel passed the second state examination in front of a state examination commission (judicial examination office) in East Berlin . As a result, Vogel worked as a senior consultant in the Ministry's legislation department. Justice Minister Max Fechner was overthrown and imprisoned after the uprising of June 17, 1953. Reinartz fled to West Berlin; he passed Vogel a letter in which he invited him to a meeting in West Berlin. Vogel handed the letter to the MfS and was subsequently recruited as "GI Eva". Nevertheless, he was not spared from the "purge" of the Ministry of Justice under Hilde Benjamin and had to leave it in 1954. With the support of the later attorney general Josef Streit , he was accepted as a lawyer in the Greater Berlin Bar in 1954 and practiced in East Berlin. Three years later he was also admitted to the West Berlin courts. In 1961 Vogel managed to organize the first agent trade of the Cold War . During this exchange of agents on the morning of February 10, 1962 on the Glienicke Bridge in Potsdam, the US spy pilot Francis Gary Powers, shot down over the Soviet Union, was exchanged for the exposed KGB Colonel Rudolf Abel .

Then an unprecedented career began for Wolfgang Vogel. Until the fall of the Berlin Wall , he was involved in the release of 150 agents from 23 countries. Günter Guillaume , a spy with Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt , was among those released . In addition, Vogel also played a central role in the so-called prisoner ransom, in which the Federal Republic ransomed 33,755 political prisoners over the years. Vogel, from the 1970s officially commissioner of the GDR State Council Chairman Erich Honecker for humanitarian issues, worked closely with the federal governments under Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl , as well as with the two large Christian churches in the Federal Republic and above all with the Herbert Wehner , chairman of the SPD parliamentary group at the time ; He played a key role in the departure of 215,019 GDR citizens through family reunification.

In the summer and autumn of 1989, Vogel played an important role in the events at the Prague embassy . a. in the permanent representation and the German embassy in Budapest. He was supported by Gregor Gysi . The offers that he was able to make to the embassy refugees were partly enthusiastically accepted, partly rejected angrily.

After the fall of the wall and the indictment against Erich Honecker , he became its defense counsel, but resigned this mandate in October 1990. After reunification he waived his license to practice law. In the period that followed, allegations that Wolfgang Vogel was a Stasi informant increased. In 1992 it became known that Vogel had been listed as a secret informator (GI) under the code name "Eva" and later as a secret employee "Georg" by the Ministry for State Security (MfS) in the 1950s ; however, the file was closed in 1957 and archived as a locked file . His MfS command officer , Heinz Volpert, remained his confidante and contact man at the MfS until the end of his life. Vogel worked closely with him even after the Stasi case was closed. He was therefore arrested on March 13, 1992.

In August 1992 Vogel admitted that he had worked for the MfS unofficially at times. In 1998 the Federal Court of Justice acquitted Vogel of the charge of blackmailing GDR citizens who wanted to leave the country . During the process, Vogel received support from Helmut Schmidt and Hans-Dietrich Genscher . He himself made the following comment on the allegations: “My paths were neither white nor black. They had to be gray. "

In this context, it was also known that Vogel had earned very well in both the West and the East. Bonn recently paid him an annual lump sum of around DM 320,000 for humanitarian activities . In addition, there was income from legal support for GDR prisoners - up to one million DM annually. He didn't have to pay tax on these sums.

family

In April 1946 Wolfgang Vogel married Eva Anlauf, with whom he had children Manfred and Lilo. The marriage ended in divorce in 1966. Since 1974 Vogel was married to Helga Fritsch for the second time. She came from Essen, originally wanted to buy out a friend from the GDR, but after she met Vogel in 1968, she moved to the GDR in 1969. She worked as a secretary in Vogel's well-known law firm at Reiler Strasse 4 in Berlin-Marzahn . After the fall of the Wall, the Vogel couple lived in Schliersee ( Bavaria ) until Wolfgang Vogel's death .

Awards

literature

  • Jens Schmidthammer: Lawyer Wolfgang Vogel. Middle between east and west . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1987, ISBN 3-455-08665-9 .
  • Wolfgang Brinkschulte, Hans Jörgen Gerlach , Thomas Heise: Independent buyers. The co-earners in the west . Ullstein, Frankfurt / M. Berlin 1993. ISBN 3-548-36611-2 .
  • Ludwig Geißel : negotiator of humanity. Memories . Quell Verlag, Stuttgart 1991. ISBN 3-7918-1984-4 .
  • Marlies crowd : Wolfgang Vogel. A happy unemployed man. The “exchange attorney” tries to leave the past behind . In: Marlies Quantity: Walks. Series of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit . Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2000, pp. 147–154. ISBN 3-89602-350-0 .
  • Norbert F. Pötzl: Bazaar of the spies. The secret missions of the GDR negotiator Wolfgang Vogel . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1997. ISBN 3-455-15019-5 .
  • Norbert F. Pötzl: An absurd Stasi note and a speculative thesis . Comments on Jan Philipp Wölbern: The emergence of the "release of prisoners" from the GDR, 1962–1964 . In: Germany Archive 41 (2008) 6; Pp. 1032-1035.
  • Norbert F. Pötzl: Mission freedom - Wolfgang Vogel, lawyer for German-German history . Heyne-Verlag, Munich 2014. ISBN 978-3-453-20021-0 .
  • Diether Posser : Lawyer in the Cold War. A piece of German history in political trials 1951–1968 . C. Bertelsmann, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-570-02347-8 .
  • Ludwig A. Rehlinger : Buying free. The GDR's dealings with politically persecuted people 1961–1989 . Ullstein, Berlin / Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-550-07503-0 .
  • Helmut Müller-Enbergs :  Vogel, Wolfgang . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 2. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
  • Craig R. Whitney: Diaboli advocate. Wolfgang Vogel: Lawyer between East and West . Siedler, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-88680-510-7 .
  • Jan Philipp Wölbern: The emergence of the “prisoners' release” from the GDR , 1962–1964, in: Germany Archive, 41 (2008) 5; Pp. 856-867.
  • Jan Philipp Wölbern: Problematic Argumentation. Answer to the comments on Jan Philipp Wölbern, The emergence of the “prisoner free sale ” from the GDR, 1962–1964 , DA 41 (2008), pp. 856–867, by Norbert F. Pötzl and Reymar von Wedel, DA 41 (2008) , Pp. 1032-1035 and 1035f.
  • Christian Booß: The shadow man. The early Wolfgang Vogel. In: Horch und Guck, magazine of the museum memorial in the "Round Corner" Leipzig, issue 1/2011, pp. 60–65.
  • Siegfried Mampel (1999): Lawyer Wolfgang Vogel - GM / IM "Georg" in: The underground struggle of the Ministry for State Security against the investigative committee of liberal lawyers in West Berlin , series of publications by the Berlin State Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former GDR, Berlin, 1999 , ISBN 3-934085-06-7 , pp. 107-109 (pdf)

Movie

Wolfgang Vogel - The GDR lawyer with the golden Mercedes. Director: Nina Koshofer . Length: 45 min. First broadcast in 2014. In Steven Spielberg's historical drama Bridge of Spies - The Negotiator , he is played by Sebastian Koch.

We are not a hotel after all - Refuge Embassy Director: Inge Albrecht Length 60 min German Film and Television Academy / WDR First broadcast in 1997 - including conversation with the refugees involved and the politicians Hans Otto Bräutigam and Ludwig A. Rehlinger as well as the GDR negotiator Wolfgang Vogel

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ filmed in 2015 by Steven Spielberg in Bridge of Spies - The Negotiator .
  2. ↑ Peter Blechschmidt: "Our Postman". The exciting vita of the GDR lawyer Wolfgang Vogel . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , December 2, 2014, p. 15.
  3. ↑ The individual fate of someone who was freed with Vogel's support, Christian W. Staudinger, was described in detail by him in his memoirs - in writing under the title What happened then - 1971 - in the Bulgarian dungeons and in the Stasi detention? - and as an audio book , read by Erich Räuker on YouTube under the title Escape from the GDR - Memories from Staudinger , accessed on December 9, 2015.
  4. ^ GDR refugees in the embassy in 1989 ( Memento from September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ). Website of the German Embassy in Prague ( memories of former ambassador Hermann Huber also as PDF; 78 kB ( memento of February 15, 2016 in the Internet Archive )).
  5. ↑ See Christian Booß: Der Schattenmann. The early Wolfgang Vogel . In: Horch und Guck , magazine of the Memorial Museum in the "Round Corner" , Leipzig, issue 1/2011, pp. 60–65.
  6. ↑ a b documents that endanger world peace. East-West negotiator Wolfgang Vogel under Stasi suspicion . In: Der Spiegel , No. 13/1992, March 23, 1992, accessed on February 16, 2016.
  7. ↑ See Müller-Enbergs: Vogel, Wolfgang .
  8. ^ "Welt Online" about the death of Wolfgang Vogel's Welt Online, viewed on August 22, 2008; 1:40 p.m. CEST
  9. ↑ http://www.whoswho.de/bio/wolfgang-vogel.html
personal data
SURNAME Vogel, Wolfgang
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vogel, Wolfgang Heinrich (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer and negotiator for the GDR
DATE OF BIRTH October 30, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Wilhelmsthal
DATE OF DEATH August 21, 2008
Place of death Schliersee