executive committee ("Parteivorstand") as head of the party education department. In 1947 he himself became a member of the national executive which quickly became (and was renamed as) the Party Central Committee. Within the Central Committee, between October 1947 and February 1949 he took on responsibility for a newly expanded department covering not just party education but also culture and schooling. Former Social Democrats in the party leadership were quickly squeezed out and the SED came to resemble a Soviet-style communist party in all but name. By the time the Soviet occupation zone was relaunched, in October 1949, as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany), the SED was firmly in place as the ruling party in a new kind of German one-party dictatorship. Fred Oelßner was nominated to membership of the People's Council ("Volksrat") in May 1949 and was "elected" a member of its successor body, the People's Parliament ("Volkskammer") later that year. The German Democratic Republic operated according to a highly centralised power structure: power resided not with any legislative assembly, nor even with government ministers, but with the Central Committee of the ruling party. However, the party's dominating role was concealed to the extent that Central Committee members were frequently also members of the Volkskammer and/or appointed as government ministers. In 1950 Oelßner joined the inner caucus of the Central Committee, known under the Leninist power structure of the new country as the politburo. German Democratic Republic Oelßner was in office between 1950 and 1955 as Central Committee Secretary for Propaganda. He worked till 1956 as editor-in-chief of Einheit (loosely "Unity"), a prestigious academic monthly journal published by the party, devoted to "the theory and practice of economic socialism". Till 1958 he was effectively the party's chief ideologue. In December 1951 he was appointed to headship of the teaching chair for Political Economics at the Central Committee Academy for Social Sciences. Under other circumstances this might have been seen as a full-time position and the basis for a long-term academic career, but in Oelßner's case sources stress that at this time most of the daily jobs associated with the post would have been delegated to others. In 1953 he became a member of the German Academy of Sciences ("Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin"). Thanks to his outstanding fluency in Russian, combined with his high political offices in the East German political hierarchy, during the first