During the period when the ANC operative Nelson Mandela was incarcerated, there were not only verbal calls from other countries for the release of the world’s best-known political prisoner; at the very latest since Mikhail Gorbatchev proposed an end to the Cold War in the Soviet Union, there was at least one definite and direct attempt to release him. One of the conceptionally most advanced plans was that of the East German lawyer Wolfgang Vogel. Having been appointed by the GDR’s head of state, Erich Honecker, as Personal Representative for Humanitarian Affairs, he had already arbitrated the exchange of roughly 150 captured spies from 23 countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain; he had also organised the release of tens of thousands of prisoners. The plan was to exchange Nelson Mandela for the Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, or to include him in a large-scale international exchange of political prisoners and agents. It was for this reason that Wolfgang Vogel visited South Africa in March 1986, one of only a few GDR citizens to do so, to effect the release of Mandela – and failed.Peer Reviewe
