With the future defeat of Nazi Germany clearly on the horizon, in 1944 Kurt Liebknecht met with Wilhelm Pieck in Moscow in 1944. Pieck was the respected leader of the exiled German Communist Party and a senior representative of the Communist dominated National Committee for a Free Germany. Liebknecht was keen do discuss how he might contribute to the reconstruction of postwar Germany. It can have done no damage to his future prospects that Liebknecht, while they were both still in Moscow, had written to and sought out the man who later became the president of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany): nevertheless, for two or three years following the war (which in Europe ended, formally, in May 1945) Liebknecht remained in Moscow, receiving a doctorate in June 1945 with a dissertation on hospital construction in Soviet Central Asia.