of important projects with Benedikt Ruhmöller who was later, in 1999, elected mayor of Ahlen. Paying tribute to his former boss in 2012, Ruhmöller recalled Priesnitz as a "person valued on all sides, and an exceptionally competent administrator". Intra-German relations Priesnitz was called back to Bonn in 1985, taking a position with the "Bundesministerium für innerdeutsche Beziehungen" ("Ministry for Intra-German Relations") as head of Department II, described in one source as the ministry department responsible for "Germany Policy" and "humanitarian tasks". In 1986 he took charge in another department of the ministry, Department Z, in which responsibilities covered "administration and humanitarian tasks" [again], along with "structural and funding measures". In 1988 he took over from Ludwig A. Rehlinger as departmental Secretary of state. Although he held the office for only a little more than two years, the period was an exceptional one. The German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was changing rapidly, in ways that few western commentators noticed at the time. The country was, by many criteria, financially bankrupt. The Soviet Union was modernising economically: East German trade negotiators visiting potential overseas customers for the (lucrative) heavy industrial plant and machinery in which the country traditionally specialised were increasingly coming across their Soviet counterparts not as comradely socialist partners, but as commercial competitors. Morally, too, the winds of Glasnost blowing across from – of all places – Moscow left the party leadership facing an ever more uncertain future. 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. The unwritten rules of "Republikflucht" – unlawful citizen escapes from East Germany – also seem to have been shifting. 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. Among his own most important responsibilities was the "Häftlingsfreikauf" programme ("trading of East German political prisoners"). His East German negotiating partner was Wolfgang Vogel. In October 1985, somewhat to the surprise of fellow guests, Walter Priesnitz accompanied his departmental head, Ludwig A. Rehlinger, as a guest at Wolfgang Vogel's lavish "diplomatic" sixtieth birthday party in East Berlin. Despite their political differences, Priesnitz and Vogel were both clever political lawyers, both originally from Silesia: an effective working relationship of mutual respect between the two of them, seeming at