Ludwig Geißel (25 August 1916 - 20 November 2000) was a German charity administrator who became vice-president of Diakonisches Werk, a charitable organization of the Protestant / Evangelical churches in Germany).
[3] This is a reference to the leading role he played as a negotiator during Germany's division between 1949 and 1989 into two separate and at times mutually antagonistic states.
[2] Ludwig Geißel was born the eldest of his parents' five recorded children at the height of the First World War in Alzey, known then as now as a centre of the local wine growing industry.
[4] Geißel was a founder of the "East-west sponsorship" ("Patenschaftswerk West-Ost") initiative, intended to preserve the cultural traditions of the millions of Germans from the east of the country displaced by the 1945 frontier changes.
[3] 1949 was the year in which three post war occupation zones were relaunched as a new state, the German Federal Republic (West Germany).
At Lauenburg, a short distance upriver from Hamburg, Ludwig Geißel campaigned on behalf of the moderate-right CDU (party), of which he had become a member.
[4] He was involved in organising mass evacuation airlifts from Nigeria to Gabon of child starvation victims during the Biafran War.
[3] He therefore appointed an assistant, a young lawyer who worked for the church called Reymar von Wedel, to undertake the task.
[14] His negotiating partners from the East German side included the Head of the Secretariat of the Conference of Governing Bodies of the Evangelical Churches ("Geschäftsstelle der Evangelischen Kirchenleitungen"), Manfred Stolpe, who after 1989 became a leading politician in post-reunification Germany.
[15] Sources differ regarding the scale of the Häftlingsfreikauf programme: government sources acknowledged its existence only reluctantly and most details remain officially undisclosed, but one widely quoted figure indicates that slightly under 34,000 East German political prisoners had their freedom purchased by the West German government between 1963 and 1989.