[2] Between July and September 1950 he then undertook a training course at the Regional Party Academy in Schmerwitz, before being an appointed, in 1951, Schools Advisor (Stadtschulrat) in the important Potsdam District.
That same year he started a higher level study course at the Party Central Committee's Social Sciences Institute (Akademie für Gesellschaftswissenschaften beim ZK der SED / IfG).
The subject matter for his doctoral dissertation was the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels for the newspaper Der Sozialdemokrat during the period of the Anti-Socialist Laws (1878 - 1890).
[5] From 1966 Bartel also served as associate professor with a teaching post and a professorial chair covering the History of the German Labour Movement at the important Party Central Committee's Social Sciences Institute / Academy (IfG/AfG).
A further academic followed in 1969 when he received his habilitation for a work entitled "A Study of Contributions to the History of the Implementation of Marxism in the German Labour Movement during the final third of the Nineteenth Century" ("Studie Beiträge zur Geschichte der Durchsetzung des Marxismus in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung im letzten Drittel des 19.
[7] It was also in 1969 (again in the teeth of opposition from Kuczynski and others) that he was appointed to succeed Ernst Engelberg as director of the Historical Institute at the German Academy of Sciences, a position he retained until his death in 1984.
[2] Horst Bartel was one of an initially small minority of committed communists in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany (from 1949 the German Democratic Republic) at the end of the war who not only worked together on constructing historical seminars and institutes, but together transformed the context of historical study so that it might comply with the precepts of the East German ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED / Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands).
Lothar Merthens [de], a prolific historian who was also noted as an uncompromising critic of the German Democratic Republic and its one party dictatorship, contended that Bartel, along with like-minded colleagues such as Walter Bartel, Karl Bittel, Rudolf Lindau and Albert Schreiner, lacked necessary academic competence, and that even within party corridors were widely viewed as simple propagandists.