Peter Oehme was born in Leipzig. During the war years Leipzig was subject to heavy air-raids and he was evacuated, with his mother, to a village in Saxony. US troops invaded and then withdrew from the area in the summer of 1945, reflecting an agreement already concluded between the leaders of the victorious powers, which left the entire region administered as the Soviet occupation zone (relaunched in October 1949 as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic). After the war ended the family were reunited in Leipzig, but while he was still at school they relocated to what came to be known as East Berlin. His memoires recall that his parents were enthusiastic supporters of the new political structure in East Germany, although Oehme himself displayed outbursts of low-level rebelliousness, notably in the aftermath of the Hungarian uprising, when he was one of a group of medical student representatives demanding the abolition of compulsory lessons in the Russian language and Marxist-Leninist basic studies.