Although the region of central southern Germany that included both Buchenwald and Axen's home city of Leipzig was liberated by US forces, the victorious allies had already agreed a postwar territorial division of Germany whereby the entire central portion of the country would be administered as the Soviet occupation zone. The Americans pulled their troops back to the agreed lines on their maps in July 1945, and by August 1945 Hermann Axen had been installed as Head of the Youth Committee with the appointed city council of Soviet-administered Leipzig and as a member of the regional leadership team ("Kreisleitung") of the local Communist Party. Between October 1945 and February 1946 he was Head of the Youth Committee for the entire Saxony region. In April 1946 he was one of thousands of Communist Party members who lost no in signing their party membership over to the newly formed &lt;a href="Socialist%20Unity%20Party%20of%20Germany"&gt;Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED)&lt;/a&gt;. The SED was formed through a contentious merger of the Communist Party and the less Moscow oriented Social Democratic Party. Its promoters may have hoped that the merger would take effect across Germany, but in the event it was only possible obtain the support necessary for it to take effect in the Soviet occupation zone, where the SED quickly emerged as the permanent ruling party in a new kind of German one-party dictatorship. For Hermann Axen 1946 was also the year in which he co-founded the "Anti-Fascist youth committee" ("antifaschistische Jugendausschuß"). Of greater long-term importance was his role as co-founder, together with Paul Verner und Erich Honecker of the &lt;a href="Free%20German%20Youth"&gt;Free German Youth ("Freie Deutsche Jugend" / FDJ)&lt;/a&gt;, which very quickly became, in effect, the youth wing of the ruling SED. Between March 1946 and February 1949 he served as secretary to the FDJ National Council ("Zentralrat").