By the time of his release his home region had been subjected to a comprehensive ethnic cleansing programme and subsumed into Russia. Elsner settled further to the west, in what was now administered as the Soviet occupation zone, where he joined the People's Police. Towards the end of 1949 the occupation zone was relaunched as the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), a new separated German state with political and economic institutions consciously modelled on those of the Soviet Union. In 1950 Elsner joined the &lt;a href="Socialist%20Unity%20Party%20of%20Germany"&gt;Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED)&lt;/a&gt; which had been created four years earlier and was by now effectively consolidating its role as a new ruling party for a second German one-party dictatorship. During the next year, 1951, he joined the recently formed Ministry for State Security (Stasi), entering its prestigious "Adlershof Guards' Battalion" (later renamed as the "Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment"). In 1952 he was promoted to the rank of company commander. Five years later, relaunched in 1954 as the Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment, the former Adlershof Battalion had itself grown to the point where it comprised ten battalions along with various support companies: in 1957 Bernhard Elsner became Chief of Staff for the regiment's First Battalion.