He became a party chairman and served between 1948 and 1958 as "deputy lord mayor" ("stellvertretender Oberbürgermeister") of Berlin, a period during which the increasingly divided city's constitutional status and future were contentious and ambiguous on a number of different levels.
[1][2] Between 1920 and 1933 Gohr was a member of the Gewerkschaftsbund der Angestellten (GWB), a clerical workers' trades union that was at the liberal end of the political spectrum.
[1][2][a] For some years, till 1945, he worked as a "prokurist" (loosely, "administrator / representative") and head of department for the Berlin-based National Nitrogen Syndicate ("Deutsches Stickstoff-Syndikat" / DSS), an internationally powerful (at least during its early decades) cartel association dominated by IG Farben and other (for the most part German) multi-national businesses operating in the chemicals and pharmaceuticals sectors.
[1][5] Gohr worked for the "Deutsche Düngerzentrale" (which until its dissolution in 1949 was a national body involved with fertiliser) and became a member of the FDGB ("Freier Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund" / "Free German Trade Union Federation") which was emerging in the Soviet occupation zone (but not in the other three occupation zones to the south and west) as the national monopoly trades union organisation.
He then took over from Helmut Brandt as regional CDU party leader for the eastern half of the city, serving in this post till August 1952.
[1][8] During 1948/49 Arnold Gohr was a member of the so-called People's Council ("Deutscher Volksrat"), a consultative assembly in the Soviet occupation zone which from an Anglo-American perspective could be presented as the precursor to a western-style parliament.
Its principal function was to draw up and endorse a new constitution, based on a draft presented back in 1946 by the newly created Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED).
[2][9] With the 1948 currency reforms, which expressly excluded the Soviet zone and the ensuing drama of the eleven-month Berlin Blockade, it became clear that perpetuating occupied Germany's postwar status quo was no longer an option.
These arrangements had been imposed in the face of opposition from several prominent CDU founding leaders in the east such as Jakob Kaiser Ernst Lemmer, Walther Schreiber and Andreas Hermes.
[1] He also joined, in 1953, the Vereinigung der gegenseitigen Bauernhilfe ("Farmers' Mutual Aid Association" / VdgB), a government approved mass organization for those involved in agriculture.