As a twenty-year-old, Harich was drafted into the Wehrmacht, but left and joined an anti-Nazi group in 1944. He was a Stalinist until the early 1950s; he wrote in a memoir of recalling "crying an ocean of tears over Stalin's death." Yet, after the removal of the Stalinists, he moved on to wanting a neutralized and united, democratic socialist Germany. His beliefs and principles were driven by self-transformation, and he was mostly interested in Marxist philosophy. Harich was looking for a "third way" between Stalinism and capitalism, he wanted a "humanistic socialism" in a reunified Germany. He established and engaged his friends, opponents, and social democrats in controversy in West Germany to argue that the GDR should make reforms to further the reunion of Germany. His sweeping reform proposals represented the only Party attempt at the internal restructuring of the GDR before it collapsed. He pushed for free elections, the admission of legal opposition groups, and the dissolution of the Stasi, the secret police of General Erich Mielke, leading others to often look at his ideas as Utopian, but was granted the title of "most brilliant head in the SED." Agreeing with Bloch and Lukács, Harich criticized Stalinism and believed in renewing Marxism from a humanist and naturalist point of view.