 In 1950/51 he undertook a period of study at the Party's Karl Marx Academy in Berlin before being promoted, in 1951 as a Police Inspector (colonel level) and deputy head, as well as being leader of the Police airborne department and aero-club.Directly after the war there had been shared opposition to the idea of a German army among the allied occupying powers.Opinion shifted in the ensuing ten years, however, and when, in 1956, the German Democratic Republic was permitted to establish its own National People's Army, what emerged was partly based on quasi-military structures that had already been fashioned within the nation's police service.