[5] After reunification, and as the German Democratic Republic receded into history, there were times when he felt able to recall his experiences with greater candour and clarity than others who had known the ruling establishment from the inside.

1939 was the year in which war broke out, and after serving his six-month period of compulsory State Labour Service, Schürer joined the Luftwaffe.

[2] War ended in May 1945 and a large chunk of what had been central Germany, including both Saxony and the area surrounding Berlin, found itself administered as the Soviet occupation zone.

He took over leadership of the Planning Commission just three years later in 1965,[2] when, according to Schürer,[7] the incumbent, Erich Apel, shot himself after failing to win more than lukewarm support from Walter Ulbricht in the context of a trade and finance deal he was attempting to negotiate with the Soviets.

Nevertheless, it was membership of the Party Central Committee, between 1963 and 1989, which placed Gerhard Schürer at the heart of the East German power structure.

In 1999, pointing out that he had himself been head of the State Planning Commission since 1965, an interviewer asked Gerhard Schürer when he had started to doubt the [East German economic] system: There are suggestions that during the final years of the German Democratic Republic, Gerhard Schürer frequently found himself thwarted by the powerful economic secretary to the Party Central Committee, Günter Mittag.

Schürer's own recollection, ten years after the wall came down, was that he and Mittag had originally been in agreement on important financial and economic matters.

[3] In the shorter term, Schürer's eighteen-year wait on the candidate list for Politburo membership was, even by the standards of the time and place, a long one.

The East German economy was over-indebted and had for years "been consuming itself" ("zehrt seit Jahren von der Substanz").

[11] For the German Democratic Republic, the Schürer report was an important catalyst along what is sometimes presented as an unstoppable road toward reunification, which took place the next year, formally in October 1990.

[9][12] For Gerhard Schürer, on both sides of the Inner German border, it permanently raised the public profile of a man who, when appointed as head of the State Planning Commission back in 1965, might reasonably have hoped to end his career in circumstances of comfortable obscurity.

[2] He was never charged, but the two and a half weeks spent in cell number 108 of a Berlin "Investigation Prison" did not leave him entirely unmarked.

Nevertheless, he was not ready nor, he later claimed, financially able to retire, and he took a succession of casual jobs that included gardening for neighbours, washing cars and care work with the elderly.