Following his conscription Laurenz had the good fortune not to be sent to the front line for several years , instead being assigned to work on the training of new recruits . Towards the end of the war , however , in February 1945 he was posted as a soldier to the western front : in April 1945 he deserted , ending up at Profen ( south of Leipzig ) , where he was captured and was held for a few weeks as a US prisoner of war . Immediately after that he took a job in the coal industry , initially in Profen , and ending up , by the end of 1947 , at the national head office of the Coal Department ( '' " Zentralverwaltung Kohle " '' ) in Berlin . Since the war had ended , formally in May 1945 , the entire central portion of what had been Germany had been administered as the Soviet occupation zone . In the early summer the US army , in the south of the country , had advanced into a region of Thuringia that had already been designated , by the allied commanders , as part of the Soviet occupation zone , but they had withdrawn in June 1945 , leaving Laurenz in the region controlled by the Soviet military . In October 1949 the entire Soviet zone underwent a relaunched as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic ( '' East Germany '' ) . In economic and political terms the new country was closely modeled on the institutions of the Soviet Union itself . Internationally it was a member of the Soviet military bloc . Early in 1948 Karl Laurenz became a member of the recently constructed Socialist Unity Party ( '' " Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands " '' / SED ) , by now well on its way to becoming the ruling party in a new kind of German one-party dictatorship . In the course of his work in the National Coal Administration Department ( '' " Zentralverwaltung Kohle " '' ) Laurenz became friendly with several female colleagues , including Elli Barczatis who after 1949 was employed as a secretary to the head of the " Coal Department " , a political appointee called Gustav Sobottka . Towards the end of 1949 Laurenz and Barczatis became lovers
designated , by the allied commanders
Yalta Conference
Karl Laurenz