Soon after the war, which ended in May 1945, Pehnert joined the &lt;a href="Free%20German%20Youth"&gt;Free German Youth ("Freie Deutsche Jugend" / FDJ)&lt;/a&gt;, which within the Soviet occupation zone was being built up as the youth wing of the zone's newly emerged ruling &lt;a href="Socialist%20Unity%20Party%20of%20Germany"&gt;Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED)&lt;/a&gt;. In October 1949 the Soviet occupation zone was relaunched as the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), a separated Soviet sponsored German state with political and socio-economic structures modeled on those of the Soviet Union itself. In 1950 he undertook a "young journalists' course", and between 1950 and 1954 he contributed as a journalist to "Junge Welt", at that time the official daily newspaper of the FDJ.