In April 1946 a contentious political merger took place in the part of Germany that had been administered, since May 1945, as the Soviet occupation zone. Those who pushed the merger through may have intended that it should subsequently extend across all four of the military occupation zones into which the western two thirds of Germany had been divided, but that never happened. The most immediate effect of the merger was that the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party came together to form the &lt;a href="Socialist%20Unity%20Party%20of%20Germany"&gt;Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED)&lt;/a&gt;. Following the "unification congress", thousands of Communist Party members (along with many Social Democrats) - primarily those who had ended up in the Soviet zone - hastened to sign their party membership across to the new party. Despite his being detained in the Soviet Union while all this was going on, Dietfried Müller-Hegemann was one of those who became a member of the SED during 1946. In what later became a country marked by an exceptionally politicised health system, Müller-Hegemann would be a conspicuously loyal party member for many of the next 25 years. It was only in 1948 that he was released by the Soviets, however, and was able to return to Berlin. Here he obtained official recognition as a , a badge of honour that would confer increasing kudos after the relaunch of the Soviet occupation zone in October 1949 as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic ("East Germany").