Karl Wilhelm Fricke was permanently affected by his father's fate. The son was unusual among his contemporaries in refusing to join the &lt;a href="Free%20German%20Youth"&gt;Free German Youth (FDJ / "Freie Deutsche Jugend")&lt;/a&gt;, which was in effect the youth wing of the region's &lt;a href="Socialist%20Unity%20Party%20of%20Germany"&gt;Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED / "Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands")&lt;/a&gt;. The SED, formed only in April 1946, had already positioned itself as the ruling party, while the entire Soviet occupation zone had by October 1949 reverted to one- party government and redefined itself as the German Democratic Republic. Fricke's refusal to join the ruling party's youth wing left him with no opportunity formally to complete his secondary education. For a time he nevertheless worked as a language teaching assistant at the school where earlier his father had worked: there was a desperate shortage of Russian language teachers and Russian was the foreign language which Fricke had by now sufficiently mastered. Life as a teaching assistant came to an end on 27 February 1949 when he was arrested at the school by two policemen, after a colleague had denounced him for criticising the Russians. The charge he faced was the standard one of conspiracy to commit high treason. The police station in which he was held was a former villa that had not yet been converted and fortified, and he knew one of the arresting policemen from their childhoods. While awaiting the commissar responsible for processing his case he managed to escape. That night he crossed the (at that stage still relatively porous) frontier which by now separated East and West Germany.