The so-called bloc parties were not wholly disenfranchised, however since along with certain mass movements they received a fixed quota of seats in the national legislature Volkskammer.
[3] On 8 August 1950 Stempel was arrested for rejecting the "single list" voting system and on 6 September he was stripped of the party leadership.
[5] He warmly thanked his colleagues in Saxony regarding their work together and commended his successor as regional Democratic Secretary, a man called Döring.
[3][8] The early 1950s were a period of heightened political nervousness in the German Democratic Republic with a series of high-profile show trials and, in 1953, the uncompromising suppression of an insurrection.
Within the Liberal Democratic party Täschner was the most prominent member of a four-man leadership collective, of which the other three were Johannes Dieckmann, Willi-Peter Konzok [de] and Hans Loch.
[7] The SED would have preferred for Herbert Täschner to have remained in his post as Liberal Democratic Party General Secretary, but he was nevertheless relieved of the position in May 1954.
[3][7] As one unsympathetic commentator pointed out at the time, the periodic sacrifice from among least loved of the party apparatchiks made the remaining comrades more docile.
[10] Täschner was fortunate in that his fall from grace came only after the death of Stalin, following which politics in Central Europe became a little less brutal.
[3] Whereas his predecessor had been sent to a Siberian labour camp, Täschner was found a job in publishing, initially, between 1954 and 1956, as director with the Thüringische Landeszeitung, at that time a state sanctioned newspaper of the Liberal Democratic Party, based in Weimar.