In February 1949 Lohagen came under attack in the western media on account of his "attitude during the Nazi years". The attack appeared to be based on information extracted by British intelligence services from recovered Gestapo files. Even western media pointed out that the timing of the western press attacks, coming apparently as a response to the complaints from the Soviet commander in East Berlin that in the parts of Germany under western military occupation the "denazification" process was being pursued with insufficient vigour, appeared strangely convenient. The attack was quickly and robustly refuted in Neues Deutschland, the party's mass circulation daily newspaper for the region becoming known as East Germany. The rebuttal appeared in the edition of 24 February 1949 under the headline "Gegen eine politische Verleumdung" ("Against a political defamation"). At the same time the Party Executive ("Partei Vorstand") took the opportunity to praise Lohagen's illegal (at the time) political work and blameless conduct during the Nazi years. Later that year, in the frenetic aftermath of the failed siege of Berlin, the Soviet occupation zone was relaunched as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic, a new separated German state with its social, political and economic structures consciously modelled on those of the Soviet Union.