Hundreds of thousands of Germans had ended up deep inside in the Soviet Union by the time the war ended in May 1945, mostly as political refugees or as prisoners of war, and for most of them it would take many months or several years before they were able to return. However, on 30 April 1945 a group of thirty men – the so-called Ulbricht Group – arrived from Moscow by plane in Berlin, keen to waste no time in implementing their project for the Soviet occupation zone, a large central chunk of what had previously been Germany, sandwiched between the three "western" occupation zones and the eastern third of what had been Germany, which was now incorporated into Poland, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. Schmidt's partner, Anton Ackermann, was a leading member of that group of thirty men. Elli Schmidt herself returned to Germany in June 1945 at the same time as Wilhelm Pieck. She was still a member of the (no longer banned) Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany. She and Ackermann were two of the sixteen co-signatories of the "Communist Party Appeal ... to the German people" of 11 June 1945 (still using her party pseudonym, "Irene Gärtner"). As party structures began to emerge, in July she became a member of the Secretariat of the Communist Party Central Committee, and she served during 1945/46 as head of the Communist Party Central Committee's Women's Committee.