Between July 1963 and October 1990 he was in charge of the East German Statistical Authority ("Staatliche Zentralverwaltung für Statistik").
The creation of the SED was presented as a way to prevent a repeat victory of right-wing populism by ensuring that the political left was unified.
However, by the time the region was rebranded and relaunched, in October 1949, as the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) the SED was itself coming to be recognised as the ruling party in a new kind of one-party dictatorship.
During 1949 Arno Donda obtained a job in the main office of the national Trade Commission, promoted to the position of "kommissarisches Leiter" by 1950, which was when he enrolled as a student at Berlin's Economics Academy ("Hochschule für Ökonomie" / HfÖ).
Rauch was head of the East German Statistical Authority ("Staatliche Zentralverwaltung für Statistik") at the time.
[5] Despite the mutual suspicions arising from the Cold War tensions of the period, Arno Donda was widely respected in the international statistics community for his ability and integrity.
The East German economy was over-indebted and had for years "been consuming itself" ("zehrt seit Jahren von der Substanz").
Street protesters breached the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and it became clear that Soviet troops had no instructions to re-enact the brutal suppression of 1953 or 1968.
As further changes unfolded during 1989/90 it turned out that the economic solution for the country would arrive not in the form of massive additional loans from the west, but as part of German reunification, which was formally enacted in October 1990.