[1] He was also employed as a policy leader ("Polleiter ") in the party's "sub-region north" ("Unterbezirk Nord"), in which capacity he worked closely with Walter Ulbricht.

He made contact with Albert Kayser, formerly a Communist member of the national parliament ("Reichstag"), and returned to party work - now illegal - in the Berlin sub-region.

[1] In January 1936 Sägebrecht faced the special people's court and was convicted on the relatively unusual charge of "intellectual activism" ("intellektuelle Willenstäterschaft").

He was sentenced to a five-year jail term,[3] but in the event he spent the rest of the Nazi period in a succession of prisons and concentration camps, released only in April 1945.

[4] During the early months of 1945 the Soviet army advanced relentlessly from the east, and in April the authorities in Germany desperately raced to empty the concentration camps.

Sources state simply that in the course of the death march from Sachsenhausen towards Schwerin Willy Sägebrecht was freed by Soviet troops near Below.

On 30 April 1945 Ulbricht had been flown over from Moscow, where with many comrades he had spent the war, bringing a group of 30 men and, as matter turned out, a detailed and well thought through nation-building agenda.

The merger, which as events turned out was only directly implemented in the Soviet occupation zone, was intended to unite the political left and thereby make it impossible for right wing populists to take power, as had happened in 1933.

However, the centralisation of power was to some extent blurred by the fact that the same individuals often held positions of influence both within the Central Committee and in the quasi-democratic institutions.

Willy Sägebrecht was a case in point, sitting as a member of the People's Council ("Volksrat") and then of its successor body, the East German national parliament ("Volkskammer") between 1948 and 1958.

In December 1948 Ebert, who was son to the first president of the German Republic, became mayor of East Berlin, vacating his position as co-chair of the regional party executive.

Sägebrecht remained in post, now sharing the top job in the Brandenburg regional party executive with Paul Bismark till July 1952.

Willy Sägebrecht was not the first, and he certainly would not be the last East German politician for whom involvement with the State Planning Commission broke the trajectory of a hitherto promising career in the political mainstream.

Within it, in September 1957 Willy Sägebrecht became head of military intelligence[1] in succession to Karl Linke[7] who had become suspected (correctly) of spying on behalf of "the west".