[1] Subsequently, between 1951 and 1958, Tillich led the Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit (KgU "Combat Group against Inhumanity"),[2][3] a US funded[2] militant campaigning anti-communist organisation,[4] based in West Berlin, which supported resistance to the one-party dictatorship that had established itself as the German Democratic Republic in October 1949.
Instead of returning to Berlin, Ernst Tillich settled in Bavaria, in the US occupation zone, becoming a Youth Officer in Fürstenfeldbruck near Munich, and later becoming chairman of the district council.
A year later he returned to Berlin, becoming active in the field of social policy and joining the editorial board of "Das sozialistische Jahrhundert" ("The Socialist Century"), a newly launched fortnightly political magazine controlled by Otto Suhr between 1946 and 1950.
In March 1950 Ernst Tillich joined the leadership team of the West Berlin based Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit (KgU "Combat Group against Inhumanity").
Other KgU leaders included Rainer Hildebrandt, Ernst Benda, Günther Birkenfeld, Herbert Geissler, Peter Lorenz and Albrecht Tietze.
[2] Early on the group had gained a reputation, which East German propaganda encouraged, for hatching blood curling plots to blow up bridges and prisons, which somehow never came to fruition, but which nevertheless generated a succession of idealistic, often very young, conspirators who could be pilloried in high-profile show trials and then locked up or executed.
[2] Truth is hard to disinter from politically motivated exaggeration, but it seems that as KgU leader Tillich initially tried to lead the group away from an agenda of amateurish thwarted bomb plots towards a Gandiesque passive resistance strategy.