Hans Mahle dating history

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Hans Mahle (born Heinrich Mahlmann: 22 September 1911 – 18 May 1999) was a German party official, working successively for the Communist Party (KPD), the Socialist Unity Party (SED) and, after being co-opted into its leadership team in 1961, for the Socialist Unity Party of West Berlin. During the Second World War he became a founding member of the Soviet-sponsored National Committee for a Free Germany. As the war ended, on 30 April 1945, he was one of 30 men quietly delivered in a Soviet army truck to Bruchmühle, just outside Berlin, as a member of the so-called “Ulbricht Group”. He was part of the first of the three ten man cohorts, who had been flown across from the east, via Minsk, as far as the Oder, but the final part of the journey was undertaken with greater discretion. The men had arrived from Moscow with a meticulously detailed nation building plan, which would unfold in the Soviet occupation zone over the next few years. In a departure from the original plan, however, on 12 May 1945 Mahle was redeployed to an even more important project for which he was particularly well suited, on account of his wartime experience of radio technology and his talents, recognised and much prized by the Soviet party leadership, for “political education”. The Soviet military mayor-administrator in Berlin, Nikolai Berzarin ordered him to take charge of what became the East German Broadcasting Service. He remained a figure of major political importance in the Soviet occupation zone throughout the rest of the decade. However, by 1950 senior comrades were beginning to distance themselves from him, a clear sign that he was losing the leader's backing. In 1951 he was dismissed from his post on suspicion of espionage. His fall from grace was not as brutal nor as total as he might have feared at the time, and by 1956 he was the beneficiary of a gradual rehabilitation process. He never recovered his former status and influence within the party, however.