His own education was interrupted when he was exiled from the French occupation zone in connection with a civil passive disobedience campaign: he was obliged to defer his school final exams till 1928.
[1] 1933 was a year of regime change as the German Nazi Party took power and lost little time in establishing one-party government in Germany.
He was re-arrested in 1935 and spent most of the next four years incarcerated in a succession of establishments including the concentration camps at Esterwegen (in the extreme north-west of Germany) and at Sachsenhausen (near Berlin).
[2] By early 1940 he had made his way back to the Koblenz area and joined up with Jakob Newinger, André Hoevel and the latter's wife Annelise.
The war ended in May 1945 and Rudolf Steinwald was quickly back in Germany, settling not in his Rhineland home region but in the Soviet occupation zone further towards the east of what remained of the country.
He threw himself into reconstruction in the Soviet zone and in the German Democratic Republic which the entire region became, formally in October 1949.
Before that, in April 1946, the authorities prepared the way for a rapid return to one-party government with the contentious merger of the Communist Party and the more moderately left-wing SPD.
In December 1948 he was elected a member of the regional legislative assembly being set up by the German Economic Commission, a position he retained till 1949.