Helmut Kind originally had a commercial training. In 1945, he was among the initiators of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in Halle and in September that year was appointed the regional LDP manager for Saxony. His resistance to the communist "coordination" policy led to several interrogations and his arrest by the Soviet secret police in November 1945. In May 1946 he was imprisoned in the then Hohenschönhausen detention camp. Later, he described the catastrophic conditions in the unheated rooms of the former factory. He reported how many of the internees died of oedema – water retention caused by the prisoners drinking vast quantities of water to try and overcome their constant hunger. The winter of 1946/47 was also extremely fierce and, since they had no warm clothes, quite a number of internees died from the cold. In February 1947, Helmut Kind was taken to the Sachsenhausen camp where he was detained for three years before he was released. Kind spent a total of five years in prison without ever being brought before a court or being formally sentenced.
