The authorities were evidently content that Crüger's teaching in the aftermath of the 1953 uprising should remain "under the radar", but his response to First Secretary Khruschev's very long "secret speech", delivered to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the final week of February 1956, which gave details of "Stain's crimes" and was informally disseminated across East Germany during 1956 and 1957, eventually triggered a political nemesis. While the East German government initially sought to downplay the entire matter, Crüger was one of those who sought to engage in sometimes heated discussions about the issues raised in political meetings organized by and on behalf of the party at the university and cultural institutions with which he was involved. He urged that political discussions at the university should not be suppressed, with a particular focus on Heinrich Saar, the newly appointed director of the university institute at which he worked, who was known to have been an anti-Nazi activist and a victim of political persecution during the Hitler years. He urged an overcoming of the dogmatic resistance of the party against attempts to broaden democratic practices within it. Discussions never reached the stage of concrete irrevocable proposals, however. was also outspoken in his criticism of the re-arrest of his academic colleague Bernhard Steinberger in November 1956 and the official strategy of savage press defamation to which Steinberger was then subjected by the government. On 5 December 1956, Crüger even addressed a letter to the Party Central Committee in which he argued Steinberger's case and insisted on his innocence. The latter was marked for the personal attention of the national leader (and first-party secretary), Walter Ulbricht.