the West German government. Meanwhile, the migrating refugees leaving East Germany, mostly intending to settle in West Germany, continued to proliferate at the available crossing routes, which by now included the West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw. 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. "The mood was explosive", Priesnitz later recalled, "...the people did not trust anyone, and were embittered, because they believed that not enough was being done to help them". As they pressed through the crowd the two men were spat at. Vogel was particularly shocked that his diminutive and ever-present wife, Helga (who was not merely his wife but also, by all accounts, his most hard-working and long-standing administrative assistant) was also "brutally" jostled. Priesnitz attempted to be reassuring: "It has nothing to do with you [two] personally ... it is against the [East German] state that they want to show their contempt". Vogel and Priesnitz were clearly deeply affected both by the crowd outside the Prague embassy and by various encounters with individual members of it who related desperate personal tragedies of families that had been split by the hitherto repressive policies directed against would-be escapees and their families. It is not clear that the encounter of the two government lawyers with the German asylum seekers in Prague did anything to alter or postpone the course of history, however. For most Germans the end was in sight for the one-party East German dictatorship. 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. The final deal negotiated between Priesnitz and Vogel was reported in December 1989. This time payment was to be made not in cash, but as 15 million Marks worth of tropical fruits – reportedly mostly bananas – which