The camp, by this stage, was desperately overcrowded: Typhus was rife. Helene Overlach was still not physically robust, and her health now deteriorated alarmingly. The slaughter of war had left Germany particularly short of able-bodied workers, with the result that more and more of the daily administrative work in the concentration camps was undertaken by selected inmates. Early in 1945, with Overlach appearing unlikely to survive, comrade inmates arranged for Helene Overlach and one other German communist to be included in a batch of Polish prisoners being sent to Sweden (which was neutral in the war) for release, under an arrangement that appears to have been connected with the "White Buses" scheme recently negotiated by the Red Cross. Her comrades also found a way to arrange a false name and the identity papers necessary for Overlach to remain undetected among the Polish women. Although there was no longer any doubt that the end of the war was imminent, as the buses transporting the women left Ravensbrück on 25 April 1945, fighting around Berlin was still intense. They nevertheless arrived in Malmö on 1 May 1945. The batch of inmates for release that included Overlach and her comrade had been transported not by bus but by train: when the Polish women noticed that there were two Germans concealed among them, they wanted to throw "the fascists" off, but they were somehow dissuaded.