Legendary German Lawyer Vogel Convicted of Extortion

Wolfgang Vogel, the legendary East German lawyer who negotiated a quarter of a century’s worth of releases of spies and political prisoners from East Germany and other Warsaw Pact countries, was convicted by a German court Tuesday of extortion against some of the very emigrants he helped to reach freedom.

But in a sign of the continued support Vogel enjoys from many of his former clients--as well as from the respected Western officials who used him during the Cold War as a conduit to untouchable figures in the East--the Berlin court gave Vogel a two-year suspended sentence for his offenses. That was significantly less than the 3 1/2-year sentence, and $215,000 fine, that prosecutors had sought.

The conviction means that Vogel, now 70, will be unable to practice law in Germany again. He was also fined the equivalent of about $65,000.

Over the course of his one-of-a-kind legal career, Vogel brokered the release of such illustrious prisoners as Francis Gary Powers, the American U-2 spy-plane pilot shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960, and Soviet refusenik and human rights activist Natan Sharansky, on whose case he worked for more than six years.

Throughout the Cold War, Vogel helped dozens of Western spies captured in the former East Germany make their way back to West Germany. He bartered the release of about 34,000 East German political prisoners. And he helped reunite about 215,000 German families that had been separated by the division of Germany and the sealing of the border between East and West.

With estimates of the number of people he helped running at about a quarter of a million, Vogel is believed to have extracted payments from Bonn, in cash and in kind, worth billions of dollars for the East Berlin regime.

But however lucrative Vogel’s negotiations may have been for East Berlin, his effectiveness and discretion as a go-between were no less valuable to the West, where diplomats could not afford to be seen dealing directly with such disreputable Communist officials as East German secret police chief Erich Mielke.

Despite Vogel’s record of success and good relations on both sides of the East-West border, he came to be seen, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, not as a liberating angel but as an unsavory apparatchik of the Evil Empire: a wealthy lawyer who had made his millions by taking advantage of East Germany’s worst acts of repression.

Specifically, Vogel was accused of cutting deals in which desperate would-be emigrants from East Germany felt pressured to sell their houses and land to top Communist officials at fire-sale prices.

Throughout his 14-month trial, Vogel argued that he had always acted in good faith, winning for his clients the best arrangements possible under extremely dicey conditions.

He was able to bolster his case with more than 1,000 thank-you notes from around the world, some of them written by such respected well-wishers as former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, former Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher and Bonn’s former permanent representative to East Berlin, Klaus Boelling.

And, noting that almost none of Vogel’s former clients complained of blackmail until German unification suddenly made their old properties desirable again, his defense lawyers suggested that his accusers were complaining only in hopes of getting back what they had earlier sold off.

In its decision Tuesday, the court in Berlin found that Vogel had blackmailed four of his clients, committed a single act of perjury in a 1993 legal proceeding and falsified documents in five cases.

The court said it considered the perjury offense the most serious. Although it ruled that Vogel had pressured certain clients to sell their property to secret police agents or to his friends, it said that these offenses were mitigated by his success in winning the clients’ freedom.

Vogel said after the verdict was read that he didn’t consider himself a blackmailer, “since I helped people, and a blackmailer can’t help.” His lawyers said they will consider an appeal.