signing their party membership across to what would have emerged, by October 1949, as the ruling party in a new kind of German one-party dictatorship. Between 1946 and 1950 she worked as a senior head of department with the Trade Union Federation (" Freier Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund " / FDGB), serving between 1949 and 1954 within another senior position within the organisation's administrative apparatus. She was a member of the FDGB national executive between 1946 and 1989. She was a founder, in 1947, of the Democratic Women's League ("Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands" / DFD), serving on its national executive between 1948 and 1955. The DFD was one of several mass organisations which, under the Leninist constitutional structure being unrolled in the occupation zone, operated under the control of the ruling party to broaden the popular mandate of the political power structure in the Soviet zone, which was relaunched, in October 1949, as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany). The DFD displayed several of the features of a political party, and was allocated a (fixed) quota of seats in the national parliament ("Volkskammer") by the SED. Malter herself was a member both of the People's Council ("Volksrat") and of the national parliament ("Volkskammer") which emerged from it, between 1948 and 1954. During 1949/50 she served as a member of the parliamentary presidium. Although she was, naturally, a member of the ruling SED (party), she sat in the Volkskammer not as a representative of the SED but as a representative of the FDGB which, like the DFD, enjoyed the status of an officially mandated mass organisation, and was allocated its own quota of seats in the Volkskammer. She also served in the Ministry for Labour and Professional Training as a secretary of state and deputy minister between 1950 and 1956. Friedel Apelt By this time, in November 1952, she had married , another member of the East German ruling establishment and, in common with the country's leaders, a former communist functionary who had spent most of the twelve Nazi years in Moscow. Friedel Apelt retired from all her full-time posts in 1956 on health grounds, although she continued to hold a number of less onerous, honorary and part-time positions. Between 1959 and 1990 Friedel Apelt chaired the East German Human Rights Committee, an FDGB initiative that initially focused on West German citizens disadvantaged by the 1956 constitutional court ban on the Communist