[1] Among circles of the workers' parties KPD and SPD there were different interpretations of the reasons for the rise of the Nazis and their electoral success.

[8] In opposition to the unification process, on 7 April 1946 the SPD anti-merger tendency in western sector of Berlin held a party conference in a school in Zehlendorf (Berlin) at which they elected a three-man leadership team comprising Karl Germer Jr., Franz Neumann [de] and Curt Swolinzky [de].

The 103 social democratic delegates from the western occupation zones participated in the unification congress in breach of the SPD party discipline.

[3][5][14] The SEB Party Board held its first meeting on 23 April 1946 and elected a 14-member Central Secretariat consisting of Otto Grohewohl, Max Fechner, Erich Gniffke, Helmut Lehmann, Otto Meier, August Karsten and Katharina Kern (from SPD), Wilhelm Pieck, Walter Ulbricht, Franz Dalhem, Paul Merker, Anton Ackermann, Hermann Matern and Elli Schmidt (from KPD).

Following this special congress individual members of the KPD and SPD would be able to transfer their membership to the new SED with a simple signature.

Although parity of power and position between members of the two former parties continued to be applied extensively for a couple of years, by 1949 SPD people were virtually excluded.

Between 1948 and 1951 "equal representation" was abandoned, as former SPD members were forced out of their jobs, denounced as "Agents of Schumacher",[15] subjected to defamation, regular purges and at times imprisonment, so that they were frightened into silence.

The referendum was suppressed in the Soviet sector on 31 March 1946, but it went ahead in those parts of the city controlled by the other three occupying powers, and resulted in rejection of the merger proposal from 82% of the votes cast by participating SPD members.

[18] Following the City council elections for Greater Berlin which took place on 20 October 1946,[19] in which the SED and SPD both competed, the total turnout was high at 92.3%.

[20][21] The SPD did indeed continue to exist in the eastern sector, but the basis for its existence changed fundamentally, since it was banned from public activity and its participation in elections was blocked by the National Front of the Democratic Republic of Germany, a political alliance created to enable minor political parties to be controlled by the SED.

Most notably, Kurt Neubauer [de], the regional SPD chairman in Berlin-Friedrichshain was elected to the West German Bundestag where he sat from 1 February 1952 till 16 April 1963, for much of the time as the only member of the chamber with a home address inside the Soviet occupation zone.

In contrast to Berlin, for which voting results show SPD majorities rejecting the merger of the left-wing parties, the historian Steffen Kachel [de] has identified quite a different set of results in Thurinigia, a region dominated by farms and forests, where for most of the time left-wing parties had hitherto enjoyed a lower level of overall support among the population as a whole than, typically, applied in western Europe's big industrial cities.

After 1933 the collaborative relationship between the SPD and the KPD in rural Thuringia had been sustained during the twelve Nazi years (when both parties had been banned by the government) and surfaced again in 1945 until broken by the Stalinist approach presented by the creation of the SED.

[13] Among comrades from the SPD side, rejection of the merger was at its strongest in Greater Berlin, and it was here that the largest proportion of party members did not become members of the new merged party:[13] During the two years following the party merger, overall membership of the SED increased significantly, from 1,297,600 to approximately 2,000,000 across East Germany by the summer of 1948, possibly swollen by prisoners of war returning from the Soviet Union or former SPD members who had initially rejected the merger having had a change of heart.

In Mecklenburg and Thuringia their vote fell only slightly short of the required 50%, but in Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg, the "Bourgeois" CDU and LDP gained sufficient electoral support to form governing coalitions.

Voters were presented with a single list from the National Front of Democratic Germany, which in turn was controlled by the SED.

[27] By ensuring that its candidates dominated the list, the SED effectively predetermined the composition of the National legislature (Volkskammer).

The upside of East Germany's new voting system, in 1950, was apparent from the reported 99.6% level of support for the SED based on a turnout of 98.5%.