“…From 1949, the policy of ‘roll-back’/‘liberation’ also became the official position of the newly formed Federal Republic, and of its Bundesministerium für gesamtdeutsche Fragen (Federal Ministry for All-German Affairs, or BMG). This ministry took over funding of the UfJ from the United States in 1950, and also funded (and in some cases instigated) numerous further anti-communist initiatives designed to maintain Germans’ sense of national unity and undermine the SED regime in the East (Friedel, 2001: 49; Kreuz, 1980: 21). Anti-communism was a common denominator of political culture in the early Federal Republic (Major, 1997: 258), and the three major West German political parties ran Ostbüros (Eastern Offices), which similarly sought to support those who rejected the domination of the SED in the GDR, encouraging a spirit of resistance to a regime which, at the beginning of the 1950s, none of them expected to last long (Buschfort, 2000: 62).…”