Handke was incarcerated initially at Schwalmstadt . He was moved to Rockenberg in 1936 , Butzbach in 1939 , to Kassel-Wehlheiden in 1940 and finally to Zwickau in 1944 . Unlike many Communist comrades imprisoned under the Nazis , in May 1945 when the war ended Handke was still alive . He was released from the jail in Zwickau by the US 3rd Army which arrived in town on 17 April 1945 , and in May Handke was installed by the military administrators as mayor of Zwickau . Zones of occupation in what would remain of Germany had already been agreed between the wartime allies , and the arrival of the Americans in this part of the country ahead of the Soviet army was not something the politicians ' plans had anticipated : Handke 's home region of Saxony was scheduled to end up in the Soviet occupation zone . At the end of June the Americans withdrew their fighting forces from West Saxony into Bavaria , and on 1 July 1945 Zwickau was occupied by the Red army . Many of the quasi-political appointments made by the Americans in the area were quickly reversed by the Soviet Military Administration , but the Soviets were content to leave the new mayor of Zwickau in his post and in due course to expand his administrative responsibilities in the region , where he became head of the administration in Zwickau-Plauen For the entire Soviet occupation he was also appointed vice-president , and then president , of the German Trade and Supplies Administration between July 1945 and 1948 . In Saxony , he also sat as a member of the regional legislature in 1949/50 . At the same time the entire region was being developed into a separate stand-alone Soviet sponsored German state , the German Democratic Republic , formally founded in October 1949 . Already in April 1946 , the merging of the old Communist Party and more moderately left wing Social Democratic Party into the new Socialist Unity Party had created the basis for a return to one-party government . Handke , a long-standing member of the Communist Party , now no longer illegal in Germany , like thousands of others , had lost little time in signing over his membership to the new Socialist Unity Party
been agreed
Yalta Conference
Georg Ulrich Handke