At home the British government responded to these developments by identifying as enemy aliens large numbers of Jewish and political refugees who had arrived from Nazi Germany.
[3] Two years later the political mood had changed and he was returned to Britain where he played an active part in the struggle against Fascism in Europe,[1] and became a co-founder of an exiled London based version of the anti-Nazi Free German Youth (FDJ / Freie Deutsche Jugend) movement.
The division of Berlin seemed at this stage neither so politically absolute nor so physically rigid as it later became, but the basis for a return to one-party government had already been set in place in April 1946 with the contentious merger between the old Communist Party and the Moderate-left SPD.
[6] After three years, in 1950, Ralf Landsberg received his doctorate from the Humboldt for a dissertation supervised by Karl Friedrich Bonhoeffer and entitled "Potentials in the creation of precipitate membranes"[7][8] The next step in his career involved a move, in 1952, to the Ernst Moritz Arndt University (Greifswald), in the north-east of the country, where he lectured on physical chemistry.
Profft himself had been released from the post after less than a year after making known political and ideological differences with The Party over matters including, notably, the Berlin Wall erected suddenly in August 1961.
His predecessor's academic career (followed a few months later by his party membership) had been abruptly terminated following a series of lectures in 1963/64 which had been interpreted as a call to remove political dogma from science teaching.
[12] In this instance Landsberg's dissident predecessor was Robert Havemann who subsequently gained prominence in various sources on account of the persecution he suffered at the hands of the East German authorities.