I would highly recommend Norman Naimark's The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 1997. It outlines the first four-five years of the Soviet occupied zone of postwar Germany, right up to the formal founding of the German Democratic Republic. The author explains in detail how the provisional East German authorities functioned within what amounted to Soviet military rule that included rampant confiscation of resources in the name of reparations (dismantling of entire factories was a favorite Soviet means of achieving this kind of payback). The book has a whole chapter devoted to the question of rape of German women by Soviet soldiers, a crime that was repeatedly perpetuated during the military occupation. If you're into nuclear politics, the book also covers Soviet takeover of uranium mining facilities in the Erzebirge mountains to fuel their own nuclear program. This included the use of what amounted to slave labor in appalling conditions.

The transition was forceful and quite violent.

What is critical is to understand the context that before the Nazis took power, the German communist party was the other radical, violent extremist movement in politics. In the 1920s, they received direct advice and support from the Soviet Union. They engaged in frequent street fights with the Brownshirts. They were among the first targeted by the Nazis in the early 1930s, their party banned, their leaders imprisoned and exiled and murdered.

After the fall of the Nazi regime, with the Soviets occupying a large portion of German territory (as well as Berlin), the Soviets went about using the prewar communist structures to establish a satellite state. This included the installation of Germans who spent large portions of the war in Russia being "trained" in communist politics and management. (There was, apparently, quite the split between those German communists who went off to Russia or elsewhere for the 1930s and early 1940s and those who survived at home.)

In short, public support for the German communist party in postwar Germany was, if anything, weaker than its relatively low popularity in the last free elections of the 1920s. As this did not fit the Soviet narrative of Communism as inevitable, voluntary, future for any country, the Soviets did their usual thing—rigged early and provisional elections, intimidated voters, blocked roads, and so on. The Communists reached out to the center-left Social Democrats, who had been the plurality party prior to the war, about merging. All too aware of the dangers of extremism in German politics—Social Democrats were also murdered and persecuted by the Nazis—and not blind to the intentions of the Soviets, the SDP rejected the offer from the Communists. So in Berlin, for example, there were really two elections for mayor. In one, an absurd number of people voted for the Communist candidate. In the other, free one administered by the West, social democrat Ernst Reuter won.

As mentioned in the other post, the Soviet havoc against the German people was as staggering as anything that went on during the war, save the concentration and extermination camps.

• Estimates are all over the map, but most agree that at minimum several hundred thousand German women were raped by advancing Soviet soldiers. Some feel the number is as high as two million. As you can imagine, this did not do anything to help the German attitude towards the Russians, even if those Germans had been vehemently anti-Nazi in their beliefs.

• The Soviets also dismantled much of the machinery they encountered, trucking and training entire factories in pieces back to the Soviet Union. They called it reparations sometimes. This dually served the purpose of punishing the Germans and enhancing the Soviet industrial capacity (not just through having new machines, but new designs to replicate.) Much of what they didn't confiscate was merely destroyed.

• Naturally, there was the usual looting and pillaging of valuables, works of art, food, anything they could get their hands on.

It should also be stressed that the Soviets and East German communists undertook dramatic and thorough denazification. They purged, violently and often sloppily, anyone thought to have had a meaningful role in the Nazi regime and military. There were, of course, exceptions (see: German rocket scientists, who largely populated the American and Soviet space programs for decades), but East German is generally regarded as far more denazified than the West was in the decades following the war.

Once the DDR was more formally established and most borders to the west were functionally closed, the Soviet-managed administration was a mixed bag. On one hand, East Germans were a bit better supplied with food than those in the West. Officially everyone was employed, they all got (somewhat useless) wages. Quality of life in East Germany improved from "utterly destroyed postwar landscape" to livable relatively quickly. The playwright Bertolt Brecht, a Marxist who fled to the U.S. during the war, was courted by both the Communists and Western authorities to return when anti-communist Americans were running him out of the country in 1947. He chose to go to the east, not only because of his politics, but because the denazification and quality of life made it an appealing place to live. (No doubt his guaranteed status as an elite made the potential life there more palatable, too.)

But many, if not most, of the East Germans were really never happy with the immediate postwar Soviet and Soviet-by-proxy Communist control. By 1952-53, they launched a massive uprising in Berlin, one of many incidents of satellite-state backlash against the Soviets in the 1950s. As usual, the Soviets and their puppet regime went nuts, and brought in the Soviet military to restore (dictatorial) order. By this time, Stalin had croaked, and the dynamic between SSRs and the Politburo changed significantly. Even most communist East Germans preferred their own brand of communism, and with the greater autonomy that came in the 1950s and 1960s distanced themselves from the USSR. Their 'slogan' of "Actually Existing Socialism" always struck me as interesting, in that it looks to me like the passive-aggressive implication that other Communist countries are not actually existing socialism.

I enjoy a number of books on the subject, and to DieMensch-Maschine's suggestion, I'd add the following:

• Frederick Taylor's "The Berlin Wall," 2004

• Mary Fulbrook's "Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR, 1959-1989", 1998

• "Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall" by Anna Funder, 2003

• "The Blockade Breakers: The Berlin Airlift" by Helena Schrader, 2008

I apologize for a somewhat prattling post, blaming the usual reasons (lack of caffeination, work to rush off to do, sloth). Also, I'm happy to provide a citation on any individual comment made above.

tl;dr: It was really crappy