Berlin - Jews trickling back to Soviet-controlled East Germany after World War II in the hope of helping to establish a "Workers' and Peasants' State" were soon disappointed, a new exhibition in Berlin shows.

Curated by historian Andreas Weigelt in conjunction with the Centrum Judaicum, the exhibition focuses on the lives of 10 Jewish men and women who made their homes in the communist east in the early post-war years.

Documents and photos displayed at the exhibition and relating to the period 1945-56 paint a grim picture of everyday life in what became the German Democratic Republic in 1949.

Repressive measures adopted during this period made life tricky for Jews who had opted to live in its capital, East Berlin, Leipzig, Erfurt or Dresden.

Communists of the calibre of Erich Nehlhans, Leo Zuckermann, Ernest Wilkan, Julius Meyer and Fritz Katten would all fall foul of the communist authorities.

Nelhans' fate was especially tragic. Having survived the war underground in Berlin, he helped found a Jewish community in East Berlin in late 1945, only to be arrested in 1948 by the NKVD, the Soviet secret service - allegedly for helping Jewish Red Army soldiers escape to Palestine.

Jailed for 25 years by a military court, he died in a Soviet labour camp in 1950, aged 51. Some 47 years later the Russian military authorities conceded Nelhans had been falsely convicted and ordered his posthumous rehabilitation.

The East-West propaganda battle began immediately after the war. The Communist Party loudly trumpeted its view that East Germany was innocent of the evil Nazi past.

In Bonn, the West German government spotlighted the East's treatment of political dissidents and questioned the communist state's viability at a time when thousands were fleeing to the West.

Stalinist party purges in Eastern Europe, accompanied by antisemitic show trials in Prague and Budapest sparked fear among Jews in East Berlin.

In early 1953, more than 600 Jews escaped to the West within a six-week period, according to the exhibition catalogue.

Jews who were communist party members often found themselves accused of being "Zionist agents" or "Jewish nationalists" at a time when the communist Eastern bloc was supporting Arab states in their conflict with Israel.

Julius Meyer, who survived the concentration camps Auschwitz and Ravensbrueck, was active in the VNN, a post-war organization representing people persecuted by the Nazi regime. As such, he had a seat in the East German parliament.

But his status was questioned and when a major campaign against Jewish doctors began in Moscow - shortly before Stalin's death in 1953 - Meyer left for the West.

Another Jewish Marxist to suffer in those years was Leo Zuckermann who returned from wartime exile in Mexico to become East German president Wilhelm Pieck's head of chancellery.

As the Berlin exhibition reveals, Zuckermann was considered a suspect by the Soviet and East German (Stasi) secret services, owing to his years of exile in France and Mexico, his western contacts, links to Israel, and his marriage to a French woman.

As pressure mounted on him, Zuckermann resigned his post and, in December 1952, headed to West Berlin with his family before returning to Mexico.

Ironically on an official visit to Mexico in 1981, East German President Erich Honecker invited Zuckermann to an embassy reception, greeting him like a long-lost friend, and chatting to him on firstname terms for several minutes.

Among the German-Jewish Marxists who lived in East Germany during the Cold War was the writer Arnold Zweig who, after wartime exile in Palestine, returned to become president of the Writers' Union in East Berlin in the 1960s.

Another was Ruth Werner, a legendary wartime Soviet agent in Britain codenamed "Sonya."

Werner - born Ursula Ruth Kuczynski in Berlin - first became a communist agent in China in the late 1920s. Later, she continued her spy activity in Britain where she was a courier for atom spy Klaus Fuchs, before making a dramatic flight to East Berlin after his arrest and imprisonment.

Ceasing her spy role, she turned to writing, authoring 14 books, including her best-selling autobiography, Sonya's Report, in
1977.

In 1991 Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa interviewed Werner at her Berlin home, when she confessed the demise of communism had had a traumatic effect on her.

"It was a devastating blow. Everything I'd worked for came to a sudden end. It was a very great shock. I had placed my trust in a human form of socialism," she said. Ruth Werner died in Berlin in July 2000, aged 93.

The "Between Staying and Going" exhibition at the Centrum Judaicum runs to June 30. (dpa)