The literature on authoritarian regimes has largely focused on how authoritarian regimes manage to remain in power. But this begs the question of how these regimes can establish stability to begin with. It is not self-evident how a ruling minority is able to convince larger parts of the population to commit to the new regime. I study this question in the hard case of the establishment of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The newly created communist regime was imposed onto a population that stood under large influence of national socialism where communism has been one of the main ideological targets. Using GDR census data, I analyze how three major regime strategies – indoctrination (teachers), economic benefits (housing) and repression (military bases) - were deployed to create obedience towards the new regime. To identify the effects more precisely, I leverage differences across local party elites and their links to the government, proxying the access to resources. Given the issues surrounding measuring obedience in authoritarian regimes, I use fine-grained data on criminal records in the GDR to scrutinize the relationship between authoritarian control strategies and different types of crimes. While control strategies are supposed to reduce the number of crimes, they might also create opposition towards the regime. First evidence suggests that economic benefits decrease the number of crimes, while there is no relationship with higher doses of indoctrination or repression. This paper offers new insights on the origins of authoritarian regimes and displays how they address early challenges.