This impacted his family greatly – Weber's father was a Communist who found himself harassed and at one stage thrown into prison for a year and a half by the Gestapo.
In June of that year he was a delegate to the FDJ's first parliament, where he met its president, Erich Honecker, future head of state of the German Democratic Republic (GDR/East Germany).
To his initial irritation, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany ruling over the Soviet occupation zone insisted that Weber study under a pseudonym, settling on "Hermann Wunderlich".
Guest lecturers had included Wilhelm Pieck, Walter Ulbricht, Otto Grotewohl, Anton Ackermann, Fred Oelßner and Kurt Hager – men who had taken a lead role in creating the German Democratic Republic, which was now Weber's own field of study.
[2] His youngest professor at the party academy and, he believed, among the best of them, had been Wolfgang Leonhard who himself had subsequently defected to the west and become, like Weber, a notable academic expert on East Germany.
[1] Hermann Weber served as Professor for Political Sciences and Contemporary History at the University of Mannheim from 1975 till his formal retirement in 1993.
[9] Weber identified a high point of his research career as the discovery, in 1968, of the text of the original minutes of the Founding Congress of the German Communist Party.