Walter Priesnitz (1 April 1932 – 26 August 2012) was a German lawyer and government legal officer. He played a central role in negotiating the Trading of East German political prisoners for – in most cases – cash ("Häftlingsfreikauf") on behalf of the West German government, an informal and (at least initially) highly secret operation that was in place between 1962 and 1989. An obituary published by the "17 June 1953 Association" described Priesnitz as "a pioneer of humanity above and below the barbed wire that so bitterly and inhumanly divided our country during [four] decades."

Walter Priesnitz was born into a catholic family in Hindenburg (as Zabrze was known between 1915 and 1944), near Katowice in Upper Silesia. The region had been part of Prussia/Germany since 1740 but the narrow result of the March 1921 referendum had done nothing to still the ethnic tensions that had been intensifying ever since the middle part of the nineteenth century. Within this ever more polarising society, Priesnitz grew up as a member of the ethnic German community. His father worked in a bank. He attended school in nearby Gleiwitz until 1945 when he was removed from school and conscripted into the newly formed "Volksturn" (people's militia). Shortly after this he found himself taken as a prisoner of war to Prague. His period of detention lasted only a few weeks, however. By the end of the year he was back at school, now in Zwickau, where in 1950 he passed his "Abitur" (school final exams). It is likely that he was among the millions driven west by the ethnic cleansing of 1945 which had seen the German population of Silesia forcibly replaced by ethnic Poles, themselves driven out of the larger (but less densely populated) area which before 1939 had been internationally recognised as the eastern third of Poland. During 1950/51 Priesnitz undertook an apprenticeship with the Zwickauer Kreissparkasse (regional bank).

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. While still an undergraduate student, in 1954, Walter Priesnitz joined the centre-right CDU (political party). He also became a life-long member of the catholic student fraternity "K.St.V. Borussia-Königsberg zu Köln". He passed his level 1 and level 2 national law exams respectively in 1955 and 1959 while working as a pre-qualification lawyer. He received his doctorate in 1960/61 from the University of Cologne in return for a piece of work on "the motives for robbery of young law breakers". The dissertation was based on a study of Cologne district court records covering the period 1953–1956 in respect of convicted lawbreakers.

Walter Priesnitz had by now switched to government service, employed successively between 1959 and 1971 at two government ministries. He started out at the West German Federal Ministry of Displaced Persons, Refugees and War Victims (as it was then known), working until 1962 in an administrative capacity for Department IV, which was the department responsible for disability insurance. In 1961 he was promoted to the "departmental assistant" grade. After that there came a mandatory period of working "in the field" during which he undertook three relatively brief stints at the Berlin Social Security office, at the National Supervisory Office for the Banking System (also in Berlin), and thirdly for the Eiderstedt District Council, in the extreme north of the country, near the border with Denmark. By the end of 1963 he was back at the ministry, where he served as a section head until 1967. He then took charge, during 1968/69, of the ministry's important "Representation Office" in West Berlin. (West German government ministries were based in Bonn until 1990.) In 1969 there was a change of government and Priesnitz was switched to the Interior Ministry, where between 1969 and 1971 he served as departmental director of the department in charge of the endlessly complex relationship between West Germany and Germany's divided former capital which still, before 1972, had no internationally agreed status.

On 1 March 1971 Priesnitz moved on to a senior post as director of regional administration ("Kreisverwaltungsdirektor") for Nordfriesland, which involved a return to the region of West Germany bordering Denmark. He remained in post until 1975, evidently cementing his reputation for exceptional competence. Although the position was not a directly political one, it involved extensive work at the critical interface between politicians and the world of public administration. His next posting was to Ahlen, a prosperous mid-sized municipality slightly to the east of the Ruhr industrial region. Here he served between 1975 and 1985 as "Stadtdirektor" – effectively chief executive of city administration. During this time he worked closely on a succession 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".

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 times to border on friendship, was quickly established.

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. The ambassador was away in Washington and embassy staff had no idea what to do. Some days later they contacted the East German "Häftlingsfreikauf" negotiator who cut short his ski holiday and made his way to the embassy building in East Berlin, where the six defiant hunger strikers were confined, unable to shave or wash, in a room that was becoming notably fetid. He persuaded them to leave the building by promising that their case would be considered by the responsible government agencies during the next few weeks. He then left to telephone Heinz Volpert, the responsible Ministry for State Security (Stasi) officer, to discuss next steps. To his amazement, the Stasi had already received orders from on high that the six dissidents were to be delivered across the border into West Berlin that evening. 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. Wolfgang Vogel had known Erich Honecker for a long time, and was able to have his telephone call taken by the leader: "That could cause a chain reaction...", he began. But, as Vogel later recalled the conversation, he was cut short. "I don't think you've understood. I want them in West Berlin before midnight". Unsurprisingly, growing numbers of well-networked East German dissidents now began appearing at western embassies in East Berlin, and then also in neighbouring "socialist" states, demanding permission to "go west": a significant number had their demands accepted. 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".