An obituary published by the "17 June 1953 Association"[a] described Priesnitz as "a pioneer of humanity above and below the barbed wire that so bitterly and inhumanly divided our country during [four] decades.
[8] Instead of following his father into a banking career, Priesnitz now spent the next four years obtaining a university-level education, studying Jurisprudence and Volkswirtschaft (applied economics) at Berlin (Free University), Münster and Cologne.
Erich Honecker, the East German leader, was by now in his mid-70s and in declining health: senior Central Committee colleagues were finding him increasingly autocratic, inconsistent and unpredictable.
After 1988, Walter Priesnitz was the overall administrative head of the West German ministry most directly affected by the snowballing economic, political and social unravelling of East Germany.
[15] In 1984 hundreds of thousands of dissatisfied East Germans had for years had their names on the waiting list for exit visas which might at some stage be issued in the context of the "Häftlingsfreikauf" programme.
In January that years six student dissidents made their way into the American embassy in East Berlin and announced that they would start a hunger strike which would last until they were released to the west.
With a diplomatic visit from the French foreign minister imminent, the leader simply wanted the matter to be concluded as quickly and quietly as possible.
The implications of this ad hoc liberalisation for hundreds of thousands East Germans wishing to move west had apparently not been foreseen by Honecker.
Nor had the potentially adverse impact on the cash payments from the west delivered by the "Häftlingsfreikauf" programme on which the cash-strapped East German government was becoming dependent.
Frequently, when these incidents occurred, it was Wolfgang Vogel who was summoned to attend the East Berlin embassy or diplomatic mission in question and resolve the matter quietly and deftly, but with intensifying misgivings about what the new informal approach might mean for the continuing "Häftlingsfreikauf" programme and more broadly for the future of the "German Democratic Republic".
The leader was absent from his office, recovering from a gall-bladder operation, and party comrades deputising for him were not mandated to take decisions concerning the crowds attempting to emigrate by gaining access to the West German mission.
Late in September 1989, sensing the continuing lack of direction from the government in East Berlin, Priesnitz finally sent a message to Vogel, suggesting that the two of them should together travel to Prague in order to speak in person with some of the asylum seekers gathered outside the West German embassy.
Reunification was a separate matter, which had yet to acquire a popular aura of inevitability, although over in Bonn Chancellor Kohl (who enjoyed a far warmer personal relationship with General Secretary Gorbachev than his ailing counterpart in East Berlin), probably already saw a clear route towards ending the forty-year division of Germany.
Whatever the future might hold, by the end of 1989 the trading of East German political prisoners had become both an open secret and a humanitarian irrelevance.
This time payment was to be made not in cash, but as 15 million Marks worth of tropical fruits – reportedly mostly bananas – which would have been a welcome Christmas treat for East German city-dwellers.
On 19 December 1989 Wolfgang Vogel, having driven with his wife in their gold coloured Mercedes-Benz across into West Berlin in order to sign off the paper work, one by one, on each of the final tranche of 100 political former prisoners, was able to send a telex to the Ministry in Bonn: "From 24 December 1989 there are no longer any political detainees in the prisons of the German Democratic Republic".
[17] The events of November/December 1989 led the West German government to conclude that a Ministry for Intra-German Relations was no longer necessary, and it was dissolved, formally on 20 December 1989.
The minister remained in office until 17 January 1990, which was the final day before the opening of the new parliament, and it is likely that Walter Priesnitz continued to serve as the Ministry Secretary of state until that date.
Here he played a key role in negotiating and drawing up the reunification treaty and agreements under the ministerial direction of Wolfgang Schäuble, another law graduate.
[8][14][18] Priesnitz then served, between 1996 and 1999, as chairman of the executive board of BVVG Bodenverwertungs- und -verwaltungs GmbH,[19] a state-owned company based in Berlin, created by the government in 1992 in order to administer, lease out and as possible progressively sell state-owned agricultural and forest land in the so-called "New states" "... neuen Bundesländer" which after 1990 was the term commonly used in what had been West Germany to identify what had been East Germany between 1949 and 1990.
Thanks to the sweeping scope "land reforms" of 1945/46, there were more than a million Hectares to be managed and, subject to various socially and politically driven criteria, disposed of.
[21]) He then stayed on at BVVG, elected to chair the supervisory board in 1999, and remaining in that post for eleven years until 2010, at which point his age was given as the reason for his not seeking re-election.
In paying tribute to Priesnitz directly after he died, the foundation recalled his commitment to the maintenance and further development of its educational institutions in Königswinter and Weimar.