as a new state, the German Federal Republic (West Germany). A few months later, in October, the Soviet occupation zone was relaunched as a separate Soviet sponsored state, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). In West Germany the first general election took place in August 1949. At Lauenburg, a short distance upriver from Hamburg, Ludwig Geißel campaigned on behalf of the moderate-right CDU (party), of which he had become a member. As a result of his involvement in politics he came to know Herbert Wehner, a former Communist from Dresden and now a somewhat idiosyncratic SPD (moderate-left) politician representing a Hamburg electoral district, who in 1966 would serve as Minister of Intra-German Relations, politically an unusually sensitive post. In 1950 Geißel became head of the Hamburg branch of the Evangelical Charity Organisation, instigating a Crisis Response section ("Katastrophenhilfe"), informally as a response to the catastrophic floods in the Netherlands in 1953, and founded formally in 1954. In 1955 he moved to the Evangelical Charity organisation's national head office in Stuttgart, taking charge of the Crisis Response section nationally. Following the merger of the Evangelical Charity Organisation with the church sponsored evangelical Inner mission, in 1957 he was appointed director of the combined organisation, still based in Stuttgart. His responsibilities encompassed finance, crisis response and administration. In 1972 he was appointed vice-president of what had by now evolved into Diakonischen Werkes der EKD e.V. He retired in 1982, but continued to contribute in an advisory capacity. As a representative of the national church administration, Ludwig Geißel participated in various charity projects, often in ecumenical collaboration with bodies outside the Evangelical Church structure. The more memorable of these included looking after refugees from Hungary in the wake of the 1956 uprising. He was a co-initiator, and subsequently the leader, of the Bread for the World initiative, focused in the first instance on the famines in India. He was involved in organising mass evacuation airlifts from Nigeria to Gabon of child starvation victims during the Biafran War. He was also involved in earthquake relief work in Turkey, Greece, Iran and Italy. On 9 June 1958 Ludwig Geißel started to operate as the "authorized representative of the West German national churches to the government of East Germany", with responsibility for the transfer of money from the protestant churches in West Germany to the Protestant Churches in East Germany. Because of the way the frontiers