By 1948 it was becoming apparent that the government control structure being unrolled in the Soviet occupation zone was based on careful planning . The key planners were a group of German Communist party members who had spent the Nazi period , including the war years , exiled in Moscow , and survived . On 30 April 1945 the 30 man Ulbricht Group had been flown in from Moscow to " prepare the ground " for the period of Soviet occupation . From the outset there was a certain mutual mistrust between the senior party comrades returning from Moscow , led by Walter Ulbricht and also including Wilhelm Pieck , and others who had survived the war years exiled in western Europe . Suspicion of the western survivors was especially intense where their wartime experiences had involved contact with Americans . Government nervousness increased during the later 1948s in the wider context of growing cold war tensions . In September 1948 the East German leader Walter Ulbricht announced the creation of an SED Party Control Commission , mandated to " lead the fight against hostile agents in the service of foreign powers " . This turned out to be the prelude to a period of purges in East Germany that recalled events in Moscow during the later 1930s . The targets in East Germany were ( again ) identified as " Trotskyists " and " anglo-american agents " . Marie Weiterer 's work for the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee in the south of France and later in Paris had always been undertaken with the full agreement of the leadership of the exiled German Communist party , but in the new spirit of the age it was nevertheless now characterised by the East German authorities as amounting to espionage activity undertaken in the service of Noel Field . On 1 September 1950 the party Central Committee published the text of a resolution dated 24 August 1950 ( identified as the " Field resolution " ) which excluded various senior party officers from party membership . Those accused were then sent into what amounted to " internal exile " . The most senior of these was Paul Merker . Maria Weiterer was another of those excluded from the party and stripped of all party related functions
events in Moscow
Great Purge
Maria Weiterer