Hermann Pöschel (28 September 1919 – 30 December 2007) was a politician and an important official in the German Democratic Republic's ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED / Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands).

From a German perspective, war returned in 1939 which opened up employment opportunities in defence related sectors of the economy, and in 1940, the year of his twenty-first birthday, Hermann Pöschel took a job in Dessau as a research engineer with the Junkers Aircraft Company.

The next year, however, in April 1946 the authorities prepared the way for a return to one-party government with the contentious merger, in the Soviet occupation zone, of the SPD with what till then was the Communist Party.

The country's constitutional arrangements, based on those created by Lenin for the Soviet Union, placed stress on the "leading role" of the ruling party.

It was a function he would retain till 1989,[3] his 28-year tenure was the second longest achieved by any of the thirteen departmental heads reporting in to the Central Committee.

[1] During the 1970s The Party became increasingly troubled by the abundance of black-market articles (silk scarves, women's sweaters, denim clothing, gas lighters, LPs, chewing gum and lollipops) from Poland appearing in East Germany.

A fellow Central Committee member, Hermann Axen was mandated to research counter-measures to be undertaken against black-marketeering, while Pöschel was given the task of identifying how the goods in question could be produced and sourced from the country's own factories.