In the context of the chaos of the final part of the Second World War, records that may have been created concerning Wolfgang's paternity and first weeks of life do not survive, but it is known that once he had recovered from his Diphtheria he was moved directly from the hospital wing to the "Bergquell Children's Home" in Stettin, since "his mother did not want him".

Later Schnur would describe his shock at the revelation and also his anger that his foster parents had only told him the truth after the Children's Office of the local Welfare Department had intervened on several occasions, instructing them to do so.

On 23 August 1961 he was nevertheless able to leave the city, taking a flight from West Berlin to Giessen where he was accommodated at another Youth reception Camp, not far from his mother's home at Bad Homburg.

She did, in fact, almost at once arrange for him to transfer from the Youth reception Camp in Giessen to an Internationaler Bund establishment in Homburg which specialised in preparing young refugees from East Germany for life in the west.

However, Schur was nervous about the idea, fearing (with good cause) that after his extended stay in the west he might find himself convicted of Escaping from the Republic ("Republikflucht"), a crime which under Paragraph 213 of the East German criminal code would normally lead to a prison sentence.

The Oberursel facility in which he had been based was believed – probably correctly – to be heavily infiltrated by US-Intelligence, and further enquiries failed to extinguish intensified security service suspicions about Schnur.

Marlies Bähr arrived and a "holiday romance" ensued although, as his handling officer's surviving report approvingly attests, his genuine infatuation did nothing to compromise the excellent quality of Schnur's "espionage" work with respect to the young women.

Over several days, as they danced, walked, flirted and just sat and talked, he subjected her to a sustained and intensive interrogation which, it appears, she barely noticed, in order to evaluate her true feelings and motives in respect of political matters and her personal life.

His Stasi handlers became satisfied that she was not an American spy, and they shared Schnur's conviction that she must have picked up a large amount of knowledge about East German students who had emigrated – after 1961 "escaped" – to the west.

Marlies Bähr was of limited interest to the Stasi as a potential intelligence source, but as a possible route into the closed circle of FU students around Detlef Girrmann (and others) helping often desperate East German citizens escape to the west, she could be invaluable.

She introduced him to "Hendrik", a student at Technische Universität Berlin to whom "Torsten" confided that he still feared arrest, following the unpleasantnesses at the "Free German Youth Wilhelm Pieck Academy".

Somehow "Torsten" very soon broke off contact with both Marlies and Hendrik, but the exceptionally comprehensive and detailed nature of the reports of his various meetings that Schnur submitted to his handlers continued to impress.

On his home base at Rügen he was employed as an "omni-directional radar" to identify and investigate possibly negative or hostile elements among the young people on the holiday island.

By now he had abandoned the idea of obtaining a degree in journalism, favouring instead "Wirtschaftsrecht" (loosely, "Economic Law") he undertook his Abitur course locally, through the "Kreisvolkshochschule" (large secondary school) in Putbus.

He was also beginning to lose a little of the trust he had formerly enjoyed from his handlers, after it was discovered from routine postal intercepts that "Torsten" still (or again) had on-going contacts with Marlies Bähr in Hamburg, but had neglected to mention the fact in his reports.

He seems to have become depressed and disillusioned at this time, and in around 1968, which was the year of the crushing of the Prague Spring, he ended his habit of regularly completing and submitting application forms for party membership.

This suggests that he was at the time well regarded by his handlers, since permission for a lawyer to set up in what amounted to a form of private practice was a "rare privilege" in the German Democratic Republic.

[9][10] It was partly as a result of his engagement with the Protestant church community at Binzen since the 1960s that Schnur had established and sustained contacts with many former so-called "Bausoldaten", people conscripted for military service who served in non-combatant units for reasons of conscience.

[13][14] A regular interlocutor for Schnur and Kasner in the context of the church's on-going conversations with the party was the lawyer-churchman Clemens de Maizière (1906–1980), whose son Lothar later became East German prime minister.

Kohl was a supporter,[22] regularly endorsing the view that Schnur would make an excellent East German prime minister through the run-up to some "theoretical" coming together of the two Germanys.

On Monday, 5 March 1990 Schnur's political ambitions met with an insurmountable setback, however, after disclosures surfaced concerning the nature, duration and extent of his activities as a Stasi informer.

Even after his twenty-five years as an exceptionally well-placed and productive Stasi informer, for his handlers and senior officers' doubts persisted as to which team Wolfgang Schnur was really part of.

[23] Once, however, it had been established that the reports were true, Neumann and others in Kohl's team were keen to obtain Schnur's confession in writing as a matter of critical urgency, in order to minimise the risk that on-going doubts or some subsequent retraction might undermine the electoral prospects of the CDU's eastern ally, the Alliance for Germany.

Schulz told his 2,000 listeners that the allegations against party leader Schnur were a slander and a lie, meticulously prepared by Stasi experts over a long period for "disclosure" directly ahead of the election.

[31] The ban arose out of accusations (which Schnur always denied) that in his reports to his Stasi handlers he had breached his duty of professional confidentiality towards clients, especially dissidents planning their escape from East Germany and those objecting to military service on grounds of conscience.

[33] §241a was added to the West German law during the early years of the Cold War, in 1951 and was deemed to have applied across the reunified country even in respect of events predating reunification.

Examples given of political persecution include the suffering of admonition or of damage to life or limb by violent or arbitrary measures such as deprivation of liberty or of economic disadvantage in the workplace.

He was further convicted because the court determined that he had reported to the Stasi his suspicion that Freya Klier, who is an author, had hidden in the loft of the house where she was living a manuscript that was clearly critical of conditions in the German Democratic Republic.

[37] By the turn of the century Wolfgang Schnur was living in diminished circumstances with his latest wife and their two-year-old son in a poorly maintained "grey villa" in the Hessenwinkel district on the eastern edge of Berlin.

[22] At this stage he was describing himself as an investments and projects consultant, although according to one unsympathetic journalist his only client was a family in Niedergörsdorf who were committed to creating Europe's largest museum of agricultural machinery.