With her uncompromising commitment to Catholicism and her equally forthright "anti-Prussianism", she fought for the retention of separate schools for Catholic and Protestant children. This was a particular issue in the immediate aftermath of the war on account of the twelve million or more refugees - many of them from originally Protestant families, forced to leave their homes by the ethnic cleansing that accompanied the new eastern frontier, which meant that what had been the eastern third of Germany had become part of Poland, Czechoslovakia or the Soviet Union. The territory covered by Rhineland-Palatinate had been overwhelmingly Roman Catholic before the war, but now contained almost as many Protestants as Catholics. Rothländer also opposed the denazification programme imposed by the French military administration directly after the war for reasons that may have been more practical than ideological. Denazification programmes were implemented in the American, British and Soviet occupation zones, as in the French zone, but after four years of Nazi occupation of France, the French authorities initially took a blanket approach, according to at least one source assuming that "all Germans were to blame" for Nazi atrocities. Mindful that the teaching profession had been strongly infiltrated by committed Nazis, local military administrators began by sacking three-quarters of the school teachers, which created immense practical difficulties for those trying to run the schools. After stepping down from the regional parliament in 1951 Helene Rothländer, now aged 60, accepted a directoral appointment ("als "Regierungsdirektorin"") with the , in which, until her retirement in 1955, she assumed overall responsibility for the public ("state") schools ("Volksschule").