He built his career; initially, in regional politics, but between 1966 and 1986 he was important nationally as a member of the Central Committee of the country's ruling SED (party).

[3] Then, early in 1948, he was accused of "political mistakes" and relieved of his party functions, following which he obtained a job as an assistant mechanic in the lignite (brown coal) mines at Hirschfelde on the eastern side of Saxony.

[1] Despite his difficultse earlier in the year, 1948/49 found Naumann working as an instructor for the FDJ National Council, based in Berlin.

In 1959 he attended the Seventh World Festival of Youth and Students in Vienna, leading a party of 550 East German young people.

The extent and nature of the relationship between Naumann and Oelschlegel while the latter was still married to her second husband, the writer Hermann Kant, was the subject of rumour and, at least in the west, press speculation.

[1] At the 11th congress of the Central Committee, on 22 November 1985, superficially on account of a speech he had given the previous month to the National Academy for Social Sciences, Konrad Naumann was stripped, reportedly at his own request, of his key Central Committee secretarial function and his Politburo membership on health grounds.

Nevertheless, directly after his fall it was also reported that he spent several weeks in a Government Hospital, undergoing treatment for acute liver damage.

[11] More thoughtful commentators placed the Naumann resignation in the context of growing tensions in the country's most important political and economic partnership.

[12] At the same time the leadership in East Berlin were caught unprepared for the new questioning of old Stalinist certainties concerning the relationship between the state and its citizens which were being consciously unleashed by the new General Secretary of the Party Central Committee in Moscow.

[2] According to this analysis, Erich Honecker sacked his roguish former FDJ comrade[4] because pressures from Moscow left him needing a strong united front from a well controlled and disciplined politburo at the heart of political power in East Berlin.

Like Karl Schirdewan in 1958, in 1986 Konrad Naumann was given a post, in the first instance as a Research Assistant, with the National Archives Administration in Potsdam,[11] where he remained till 1989.