Ludwig A. Rehlinger

Ludwig A. Rehlinger (23 September 1927 – 28 March 2023) was a German jurist who became a senior West German government official ("secretary of state"). He came to wider prominence in connection with the trading of East German political prisoners.

Biography Rehlinger was born and attended school in Berlin. As a child he used to visit his grandparents who lived at Erkner, outside the city on its eastern side, where he learned to love the forests by the Dämeritzsee (lake).

Between 1957 and 1969 Rehlinger worked as a ministerial official in the West German Ministry of "All-Germany Questions" (renamed after 1969 as the "Bundesministerium für innerdeutsche Beziehungen"), serving successively under Jakob Kaiser, Ernst Lemmer and, during an important period from December 1962 till October 1963, Rainer Barzel. The ministry was especially sensitive because it was central in the relationship between West and East Germany, including so-called "political questions" and "security responsibilities". It was while he was at the ministry that the practice began whereby the West German government paid the East German government for the release of political prisoners, under a scheme which came to be known as "Häftlingsfreikauf". Although something similar had previously taken place involving the churches, direct government involvement in the practice first occurred in December 1962 when twenty East German prisoners and the same number of children were released in return for a delivery from the west of three rail wagons loaded with potash fertilisers. A pattern quickly emerged, driven from the western side by humanitarian motives and from the east by a desperate shortage of basic supplies and convertible currency.

The initial transaction came two weeks after the appointment on 14 December 1962 of the lawyer-politician Rainer Barzel as the Minister of Intra-German Relations. Its subsequent implementation was headed up by ministerial officials with legal training, although senior politicians continued to take a keen interest in the west and, it is assumed, the east. At a more detailed level, the pattern that emerged involved regular and intense negotiations between Ludwig Rehlinger from the west and the negotiator-lawyer Wolfgang Vogel on behalf of the east.

Ludwig Rehlinger was not alone in his dismay at the Ostpolitik strategy of the Brandt government. Several Bundestag members switched their support away from the SPD and FDP parties, in favour of the centre right CDU/CSU opposition. There was a move to have Rehlinger's old boss, Rainer Barzel, elected as Chancellor in succession to Willy Brandt. Rehlinger was given leave of absence from his work with the Gesamtdeutsche Institut in order to serve as Barzel's campaign manager. In the event, Barzel's candidacy was scuppered because the necessary vote of no confidence was unexpectedly lost by two votes: Chancellor Brandt survived in office and his treaty with East Germany was ratified. The result achieved added poignancy 25 years later when, in 1997, longstanding rumours were confirmed that two Bundestag members, and Leo Wagner had each accepted 50,000 Mark bribes from the East German Ministry for State Security to vote against their own parties and in favour of Brandt's SPD. After the failure of Barzel's campaign for the chancellorship Rehlinger's leave of absence from the Gesamtdeutsche Institut became permanent, and its work was taken forward, in a transformed political context, under the presidency of Detlef Kühn. which was in fact his old ministry but with a new title (and a greatly modified mandate).

Rehlinger died on 28 March 2023, at the age of 95.