to the post of minister. As the plenipotentiary general for the Recovered Territories (previously German lands assumed by Poland), on 25 June 1945 Ochab issued a directive banning and threatening penalties for persecution of Germans still present there or applying repressions like the ones used by the Nazi Germany against Poles. He left the government at the end of June, when it became the Provisional Government of National Unity. Afterwards Ochab was a member of the Secretariat and held the position of propaganda chief of the PPR (1945–46) and of first secretary of the regional PPR branch in Katowice (1946–48). He returned to his cooperative and worker activities, as chief of worker cooperative associations in 1947–48, and chief of the Central Council of Trade Unions in 1948–49. In December 1948, the PPR and the Polish Socialist Party became the single Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR), which was to rule Poland until 1989. In the new party Ochab became a deputy member of the Politburo (1948–54). In one more turn of Ochab's military career, on 1 April 1949 President Bolesław Bierut named him a general and first deputy minister of defense. Minister Michał Rola-Żymierski was replaced in November 1949 by Konstantin Rokossovsky, a Soviet marshal of Polish origin. From January 1950, at the time of increasing Sovietization of the Polish military, Ochab led the political division of the armed forces. In June Rokossovsky discharged him from active military service and from his assignments at the Ministry of Defense. In 1950–52 Ochab chaired the Polish–Soviet Friendship Society. He was secretary of the Central Committee from 1950, responsible for the area of ideology. From 1952 he also led the Central Committee's supervision of the military's political division. At that time and later in his career Ochab had a tendency to express his views in radical and uncompromising terms. When Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński was arrested on 25 September 1953, Ochab published an article fiercely critical of the primate in Trybuna Ludu, the party's official newspaper. In regard to the persecution and imprisonment of Władysław Gomułka, Ochab later blamed Stalin and Beria, rather than Bierut or Jakub Berman. At the PZPR's Second Congress in March 1954, Ochab finally became a full Politburo member. By many in the party he was considered an "heir apparent" and was ready to take over when First Secretary Bierut died in Moscow in March 1956. First secretary of the Polish