In May 1945 war ended and the Hitler dictatorship collapsed: after July 1945 Leipzig and the surrounding region were administered as part of the Soviet occupation zone. In May 1946, having joined the newly formed SED (party), Schubart-Fikentscher received from the University of Leipzig the habilitation (higher academic degree) that had not been available to her during the previous twelve years. A habilitation was normally only awarded in return for a new piece of academic research, but in this instance the university awarded her the degree on the basis of a monograph she had already written and published some years earlier during her further researches on the Brünner Schöffenbuch. German universities were by this time seriously run down, while the slaughter of war and mass emigration had left the entire region desperately short of working-age population. In 1948 Wilhelm Schubart was persuaded out of retirement to accept a professorship in Ancient History at the University of Leipzig. , whose professorial chair she (informally) occupied, had ended the war as an army officer, and had in 1946 accepted a professorship at the University of Göttingen (in the ), but still the Leipzig university authorities hesitated over how to manage his professorship and appoint in his place the woman who had been doing the job since 1943.