After the war he became a national politician in the Soviet occupation zone, relaunched in 1949 as the German Democratic Republic / East Germany.

At the time of his death the arrest warrant had been rescinded and the case against him remained unproven, the necessary investigations having been delayed or suspended in response to his declining health.

[7] According to a personal "curriculum vitae" compiled by Axen in 1949 and later found in his "party file", his parents were killed by the Nazis after 1939/40 in "the ghetto" or concentration camp near Lviv/Lemberg.

By June 1934 he was also responsible for agitation and propaganda ("Agitprop") for the local leadership for Leipzig-West of the underground Young Communists, identified among comrades by the code names "Max" and, subsequently, "Friedrich".

[2] The group had by this point been effectively destroyed through arrests, and Axen now teamed up with a fellow young communist called Heinz Mißlitz to try and rebuild it.

[2] By this time, however, it was no secret that the German leader, backed on this point by widespread popular support in Germany and, more importantly, Austria, saw the independent Austrian state as an anomaly: with "Anschluss" looming ever larger on the horizon, in January 1938 Hermann Axen fled to Paris which since 1933, had served informally as one of two headquarter locations for the German Communist Party in exile.

[3] For the next couple of years, till 1940, he took casual work, employed in a support capacity in a range of businesses, while at the same time undertaking courier jobs for members of the illegal German Communist Party leadership.

Possibly in connection with his legal stateless status, Axen avoided this fate and managed to escape to the southern half of France where a puppet government had been established under the leadership of the World War I hero Philippe Pétain.

[10][11] Over the next couple of years the Vichy government was increasingly marginalised, and by 1942 Gestapo officers were a regular sight on the streets of the cities in southern France.

[2] He was held for more than two days at the main Auschwitz-Birkenau camp before being allocated to a sub-camp at Jawischowitz (as it was known to the Germans) where for more than two years he was set to work underground in the coal mines.

[2] At least one source warns that as Hermann Axen rose in the East German political and media hierarchies, his role during his time in the Nazi concentration camp system was often exaggerated retrospectively.

For the fifteenth edition of his "autobiography" a ghost writer presented a scene that involved Axen, armed with a machine pistol, storming an SS watch-tower: this is believed to be fiction.

[3] Auschwitz concentration camp was emptied of its internees, as the Red army advanced from the east, in January 1945 and Axen was among the survivors transferred to Buchenwald near Weimar.

The Americans pulled their troops back to the agreed lines on their maps in July 1945,[15] and by August 1945 Hermann Axen had been installed as Head of the Youth Committee with the appointed city council of Soviet-administered Leipzig and as a member of the regional leadership team ("Kreisleitung") of the local Communist Party.

[2] In 1948 he became a member of the People's Council (" Deutscher Volksrat"), a precursor parliament set up in the Soviet occupation zone and mandated to develop/endorse a constitution for the new Germany, based on a draft document issued by the ruling SED (party) three years earlier.

[2] One important task undertaken by the Central Committee's Agitprop chief involved radio transmissions originating in the Soviet occupation zone which he quickly and effectively reconfigured (or, in the words of at least one source, "purged"[3]) in 1949, introducing a consistency of editorial focus to ensure that broadcasts followed the ruling party line.

Sources also refer to the presence by 1950, of Central Committee "spies" among broadcasting staff[16] The June 1953 uprising alarmed the East German leadership more than was apparent at the time.

[2] Since Berlin had been the focus of street protests the previous month, it may well have been thought that Axen's "Agitprop" experience would have been of value, but sources nevertheless present this appointment as a significant demotion.

[2] During 1970 politburo members enjoyed a ringside seat in an increasingly frantic power struggle between the country's leader, Walter Ulbricht, and a would-be successor, second party secretary Erich Honecker.

To commentators more familiar with western European government structures than with the party-focused model applied in countries under strong Soviet influence, it is noteworthy that in the German Democratic Republic under Honecker, Axen had far more power over East German foreign policy than Otto Winzer or Oskar Fischer, who served as Ministers for Foreign Affairs respectively from 1965 till 1975 and from 1975 till 1990, but neither of whom ever made it to the Politburo.

[2] Throughout his political career, Hermann Axen spoke at the National Memorial of the GDR at celebrations commemorating the liberation of Buchenwald concentration camp.

From his days in "Agitprop" and his ten-year editorship of Neues Deutschland he was respected as the "undisputed number one" when it came to thoughtful and effective mass communication.

Western intelligence also believed that he enjoyed the complete confidence of Erich Honecker, both on questions of foreign policy and in matters of [socialist] ideology and theory.

Intelligence analysts speculated that the close relationahip between the two men went back to their shared experiences: they had both served time in prison under the Nazis.

However, western analysts also received reports from their informants that Axen suffered from an inferiority complex, that he was short and by this time fat, with terrible eye-sight.

[24] He served between 1981 and 1989 as a member of the politburo's "Commission for coordinating economic, cultural and technical-scientific relations with the countries of Asia, Africa and the Arabic region.

This meant that during the seven months between March 1990 and reunification the East German parliament ("Volkskammer") was no longer the creature of the ruling SED (party).

In July 1990 a parliamentary "ad hoc select committee", mandated to provide the necessary oversight, asked Hermann Axen to prove that the money he was seeking to convert had been acquired lawfully.

In September 1990 the select committee, still not persuaded that Axen's savings had been lawfully acquired, ordered the confiscation of the monies in his relevant bank accounts.

[27] The year of her birth is given as 1925 and she worked, during the East German period, as a contributing editor with Bummi, a monthly publication intended for small children, launched in 1957 and named after its leading character, a teddy bear.