Helga Obuchoff was born in Praschnitz a mid-sized town in the Zichenau region of what had become East Prussia following the frontier changes agreed and implemented by the governments of Germany and the Soviet Union four years earlier, in 1939. Her father had volunteered for army service in 1939, and was promoted by the end of the war to the rank of a junior officer. After the &lt;a href="Flight%20and%20expulsion%20of%20Germans%20from%20Poland%20during%20and%20after%20World%20War%20II"&gt;ethnic cleansing of 1944/45&lt;/a&gt; the Obuchoffs and their three children ended up living with relatives in the Harz region, before moving on and settling in Genthin, a small industrial town near Magdeburg, where Helga Obuchoff grew up. The entire central portion of what had been Germany was administered as the Soviet occupation zone after 1945, and her father engaged in the politics of the time and place, becoming by 1956 the first secretary in the Genthin district of the &lt;a href="Socialist%20Unity%20Party%20of%20Germany"&gt;Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED)&lt;/a&gt;, created in 1946 and, after October 1949, the ruling party in a new kind of German one-party dictatorship. As a young mother in a war-ravaged country with a desperate shortage of working age males, Obuchoff's mother was able to benefit from education and other practical career support that would not have been available to German women of earlier generations, and later became the Operations Manager at Genthin's large sugar refinery.