[3] 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.

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.

[3] The unenviable responsibility for determining which political prisoners should have their freedom purchased fell to Rehlinger, using lists of known detainees, together with personal files of available information, supplied by three lawyers.

Rehlinger was a ministerial official and not a politician, but he had nevertheless worked in a high-level job in a politically sensitive ministry under a government that, formally, had not even acknowledged the existence of a separate East German state.

[9] The result achieved added poignancy 25 years later when, in 1997, longstanding rumours[10] were confirmed that two Bundestag members, Julius Steiner [de][11] 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.

[1] Between May 1988 and March 1989 Rehlinger served briefly as a Berlin senator, with responsibility for the administration of justice, stepping into the shoes of Rupert Scholz who in May 1988 had found himself unexpectedly parachuted into national politics with an appointment as Minister of Defence.