now included in the large central portion of what had been Germany that was administered as the Soviet occupation zone (relaunched in October 1949 as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany)). It was not till June 1948, as his wife lay dying, that Arthur Liberasch was permitted to return to Lepizig. He lost no time in joining the Socialist Unity Party (SED), formed - if only in the Soviet zone - a couple of years earlier through a contentious merger of the old Communist Party and the Social Democrats. He now applied for recognition as a "Fighter against Fascism" ("Kämpfer gegen den Faschismus" / KgF). His application was turned down in January 1949 by the Mayor's Control Commission of the Municipal Section for Victims of Fascism". Walter Ulbricht, with whom he had clashed in the 1920s when they were both members of the Leipzig Communist Party, was by now the most powerful German in the Soviet occupation zone, as was a man with a famously long memory. However, Lieberasch lodged an objection with the appropriate appeal court and was recognised as a KgF in September 1949. The month he was given a job as a payroll clerk with VEB Vesta, a Leipzig-based iron and steel producer. During the early 1950s the East German leadership revisited the party ructions which had led the Communist Party to split in 1928/29: surviving former KPO activists from that time were subjected to a succession of investigations and reprisals. Invited to write a statement of self-criticism, as was the normal Stalinist custom under such circumstances in East Germany, Arthur Lieberasch confined himself to a single sentence, from which the expected expressions of deep remorse were conspicuously absent: "Creating the KPO was not a mistake, but simply an offence against [party] discipline" ("Die Bildung der KPO war kein Fehler, sondern nur ein Verstoß gegen die Disziplin"). He was excluded from SED party membership in 1952. Particularly strident condemnation of Lieberasch had come in 1951 from Ernst Lohagen, the leader of the dominating SED group in the Saxon regional parliament ("Landtag"): "This Lieberasch today has his agents in the party. Not only that: he is himself a member of our SED (party) in the Leipzig region. This long standing 'professional enemy of the party' recently wrote a statement to the party about Brandler as follows, in what amounted to a moral justification of Brandler, 'Brandler