Adolf Hitler's bodyguard
When Hitler returned to Munich from military service in 1918, he became a member of the Nazi Party, an extremist far-right political party in Bavaria. In 1921, he was elected leader of the party. As his speeches promoted violence and racism, Hitler needed permanent security.
Helmut Brandt (CDU politician in East Germany)
In 1945 there was a widespread assumption that the destruction of Nazi Germany should open the way for a return to multi-party democracy. Helmut Brandt was a founder member of the Christian Democratic Union ("Christlich-Demokratische Union " / CDU), intended as a slightly more broadly based version of the DVP that had existed before the abolition, in 1933, of parliamentary democracy. He quickly became the party's expert on legal issues. The next year, however, April 1946 saw the creation of a new political party within the Soviet occupation zone, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED), formed through a contentious merger of the old German Communist Party and (many of the elements of) the more moderately left-wing Social Democratic Party. During the next few years the authorities sought to move towards a new one-party dictatorship, not by banning the other political parties but by controlling them. This was achieved by placing them all into an umbrella organisation known as the National Front and itself controlled by the SED (party). In the end it was only in the Soviet occupation zone (reinvented, formally in October 1949, as the German Democratic Republic / East Germany) that a return to single-party dictatorship was achieved, and even here implementation of the strategy was far from smooth, and stretched out over several years. With the CDU in his part of Germany increasingly under state pressure from without and infiltrated within, in 1948 Helmut Brandt joined the pro-Soviet District Federation (""Landesverband"") in the eastern sector of Berlin. In West Berlin this led to accusations that he was leading a split of the CDU which still saw itself as a single political party across all the allied occupation zones in what was left of Germany after 1945. It was also in 1948 that Helmut Brandt was appointed as one of the 45 CDU members of the first and co-opted as a member of the assembly committee charged with drawing up a new constitution. By this time. however, the CDU leadership in the Soviet occupation zone was undergoing internal fragmentation, dividing those who, for various reasons, were prepared to collaborate, whether willingly or not, with the constitutional developments being implemented by the ruling SED (party) from those, such as Georg Dertinger and Helmut Brandt, who were less so. On account of his "bourgeois-conservative" propensities Brandt now found himself forced out of positions of influence within the CDU, notably by of the East German party's collaborationist wing. It was Gohr who replaced him as chairman of the District Federation (""Landesverband"") in what was becoming known as the Soviet sector of Berlin.