[4][5] Paul Merker was dismissed from the Politburo and from the Central Committee of the German Communist Party in April 1930 on account of his "extremist left-wing deviations" ("linksopportunistischer Abweichungen").

This happened after criticism from the influential Central Committee member Hermann Remmele, published in "Die Internationale", of the "ultra-left excesses of Social fascism" which Merker represented.

After Walter Ulbricht left Paris, Paul Merker was briefly heading up the party secretariat alone, before July 1938 after which he did the work in partnership with Franz Dahlem.

Immediately after the Second World War began, the Paris-based party secretariat made an application for legitimization on behalf of the communist emigrants living illegally in France, in order that these might register with the French authorities.

[8] The decision to do this formed an important strand in the criminal investigation which was launched against Merker in 1952 and ensuing show trial of 1955, because for many of the affected emigrants it led to immediate internment which was frequently followed, once France had come under German occupation in 1940, by transfer to a concentration camp and, not infrequently, early death.

Returning to the camp on the evening of 1 July 1941, Merker was intercepted by a fellow Communist detainee, Fritz Fränken, who informed him of a threat to hand him over to the Gestapo.

In June 1942, with help from Noel Field, he managed to escape from Marseilles to Mexico[1] which was becoming home to a considerable number of exiled German communists at this time.

In March 1948 he became a member of the (at this stage still provisional) People's Chamber (national legislature) / Volkskammer of the German Democratic Republic, retaining his seat there till August 1950.

[1] Between 1946 and 1949, jointly with Helmut Lehmann, he headed up the (East) "German Labour and Social Welfare Administration" ("Deutsche Verwaltung für Arbeit und Sozialfürsorge", renamed in 1948 "Hauptverwaltung für Arbeit und Sozialfürsorge") During the early years of the SED Paul Merker appears to have been at the heart of East Germany's ruling party.

[14] In conversations held during the final year of his life with the historian Wolfgang Kießling Merker nevertheless insisted that he did not participate in the central policy decisions; from 1948 he had the sense that he had no future within the party leadership.

[21] Along with Willi Kreikemeyer, Leo Bauer, Bruno Goldhammer,[22] Lex Ende and Maria Weiterer, on 22 August 1950 Paul Merker was excluded from The Party.

Even though the interrogators of the ZPKK had identified Merker as the most heavily implicated of this group, he was not - unlike Kreikemeyer, Bauer and Goldhammer - arrested once he had been excluded from the party, because President Pieck (who himself still retained the trust of Stalin) had intervened on his behalf.

[1] The Party's central committee published a statement on 20 December 1952, stating that Merker was guilty of having participated, as its leader for East Germany, in the conspiracy recently uncovered in Prague.

During his Mexican exile in the early 1940s and in subsequent articles in Neues Deutschland he had demanded that compensation be paid for Jewish assets expropriated by the Nazis.

[26] The court determined that Merker had since 1941/42, or earlier, been an informer or an agent for French Intelligence, and that his subsequent actions had been directed against the continuance of the German Democratic Republic.

[30] The meeting took place in a small town called Kleinmachnow which happened to be where Walter Janka, a friend from their shared political exile in Mexico during the Nazi years, lived.

[33] On 29 December 1956 The Party accepted Paul Merker back into the politburo, and in 1957 a house was placed at his disposal in Eichwalde, a small town on the southern edge of Berlin.

That year he began work as an Editor for Foreign Literature with "Verlag Volk und Welt", a major publisher of German and international fiction.