The situation Germany changed at the beginning of 1933 when the National Socialists took power and lost no time in transforming the country into a one-party dictatorship. Those with any sort of a political record – especially, after February 1933, if that record involved the Communist Party – came under surveillance and were over the next few months arrested. Others fled. Johann Geusendam, now based close to the German frontier in the Netherlands and a member of the Enschede branch of the Dutch Communist Party, worked with the International Red Aid (workers' welfare) association on "refugee work" – helping political refugees escaping from Germany. By 1935/36, if not earlier, the Gestapo were aware of his "political work" at the border. 1935 had been the year his son had escaped from an increasingly xenophonic Soviet Union to be arrested by the Gestapo on his return to Germany and sentenced by the special peoples' court in Berlin to a five year jail term.