Between 1948 and 1950, Crüger served as the second secretary of the regional Communist Party for Württemberg. In December 1950 he was excluded from the party, however. Sources suggest that this may have been in connection with his adherence to Strasserism twenty years earlier. It is also possible that party bosses objected to Crüger's friendship with who had managed to escape from Moscow in 1938 despite being summarily identified by the Soviet party authorities as a Trotskyite and enemy of the people. The shifting of tectonic political plates, whereby the Soviet occupation zone had been relaunched as the German Democratic Republic in October 1949, five months after the French, British and American occupation zones had been pushed together and relaunched as the German Federal Republic may also have played their part in as much as they confirmed that the division of Germany into two states allied to two militarily competing power blocks. When Herbert Crüger fell from grace at the end of 1950 the party condemned him as a "Westemigrant": his decision not to settle in the Soviet occupation zone back in 1946 now counted against him.