an illegitimate child: sources do not elaborate. Leipzig and the surrounding region were liberated from the National Socialist government by US forces on 18 April 1945, but by this time it had already been agreed the previous September between President Roosevelt (who died on 12 April, the week before the capture of the city), Marshal Stalin and (with varying levels of enthusiasm) other "allied leaders", that after the war Leipzig would be part of a large region in central Germany to be administered as the Soviet occupation zone. Early in July 1945 the Americans withdrew and the Red Army moved in. Membership of political parties - other than of the National Socialist party - had been illegal since 1933, but under allied occupation this was no longer the case. During 1945 Yvonne-Ruth Freyer joined the Communist Party. Reflecting a widespread determination that, at least in Germany, populist street politicians should never again be able to exploit divisions on the political left in order to take power, in April 1946 a contentious merger was implemented - in reality effective only in the Soviet zone - between the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party. Freyer was one of hundreds of thousands of Communist Party members who lost no time in using the pre-printed form, which the party authorities had helpfully prepared, to sign their party membership over to the new Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED). Meanwhile she made her way back to Glauchau where, between 1945 and 1947, she worked as a member of the office support staff at the local police station. During 1945 and 1946 she also found time to undertake voluntary (unpaid) work with the Dresden-based Sächsische Zeitung. Responsibility for each day's edition seems to have been rotated on a daily basis between those whose political backgrounds favoured the Social Democratic version of socialism and those, such as Freyer, who had come from the Communist Party. Tasks were allocated among the staff on a correspondingly variable basis. Freyer's own baptism of fire came when she was sent to report on a party meeting addressed by Walter Ulbricht, a local man who had spent the war years in Moscow. Ulbricht was already emerging, within the Soviet zone, as an important orthodox Stalinist member of the party leadership. By the time the zone was relaunched, in October 1949, as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany),