The SED was established on 21 April 1946 by a merger of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) which was situated in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany and the Soviet-possessed segment of Berlin. Official East German and Soviet narratives depicted this merger as an intentional pooling of endeavors by the communist parties.[5] However, there is much proof that the merger was more pained than regularly portrayed[citation needed]. Apparently, the Soviet occupation experts connected extraordinary weight on the SPD's eastern branch to converge with the KPD. The recently consolidated gathering, with the assistance of the Soviet experts, cleared to triumph in the 1946 decisions for nearby and local congregations held in the Soviet zone. In any case, these decisions were held under not as much as mystery conditions, in this way setting the tone for the following four decades. A more genuine photo of the SED's help accompanied the neighborhood races in Berlin, which were the primary legit races held there since the Nazi era[citation needed]. In that challenge, the SED got not as much as a large portion of the votes of the SPD. The majority of the Berlin SPD stayed standoffish from the merger, despite the fact that Berlin was somewhere inside the Soviet zone.

The Soviet Military Administration in Germany (Russian initials: a6 paper size) straightforwardly administered the eastern territories of Germany following World War II, and their insight tasks painstakingly observed every single political movement. An early knowledge report from SVAG Propaganda Administration chief Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Ivanovich Tiulpanov (see External Links beneath) demonstrates that the previous KPD and SPD individuals made distinctive groups inside the SED and remained rather commonly hostile for quite a while after the development of the new party. Likewise detailed was a lot of trouble in persuading the majority that the SED was a German political gathering, and not just an apparatus of the Soviet occupation constrain.

As per Tiulpanov, numerous previous individuals from the KPD communicated the slant that they had "relinquished [their] progressive positions, that [the KPD] alone would have succeeded much better had there been no SED, and that the Social Democrats are not to be trusted" (Tiulpanov, 1946). Likewise, Tiulpanov demonstrated that there was a stamped "political latency" among previous SPD individuals, who felt they were being dealt with unreasonably and as below average gathering individuals by the new SED organization. Therefore, the early SED party mechanical assembly as often as possible turned out to be successfully immobilized as previous KPD individuals started talking about any proposition, anyway little, at extraordinary length with previous SPD individuals, in order to accomplish agreement and abstain from culpable them. Soviet insight professed to have a rundown of names of a SPD bunch inside the SED that was secretly producing connections with the SPD in the West and even with the Western Allied occupation experts.

An issue for the Soviets that they related to the early SED was its capability to form into a patriot party. Everywhere party gatherings, individuals acclaimed speakers who discussed patriotism considerably more than when they talked about tackling social issues and sexual orientation fairness. Some even proposed setting up an autonomous German communist state free of both Soviet and Western impact, and of before long recovering the once in the past German land that the Yalta Conference, and eventually the Potsdam Conference, had (re)allocated to Poland, the USSR, and Czechoslovakia.

Soviet arbitrators announced that SED government officials as often as possible pushed past the limits of the political articulations which had been affirmed by the Soviet screens, and there was some underlying trouble making local SED authorities understand that they should think precisely before contradicting the political positions settled on by the Central Committee in Berlin.