War ended, formally, in May 1945. Düsseldorf and the surrounding region now formed part of the British occupation zone, which in May 1949 would be merged with US and French occupation zones to be relaunched as the &lt;a href="German%20Federal%20Republic"&gt;German Federal Republic ("Bundesreuplik Deutschland" / BRD / West Germany)&lt;/a&gt;. Maria Wachter was released. She took a secretarial job in Düsseldorf and renewed her membership of the Communist Party. However, with the intensification of Cold War tensions that followed the 1953 uprising in East Germany and accompanied Soviet military intervention in Hungary in 1956, in August 1956 the West German Constitutional Court banned the Communist Party. Wachter was briefly taken into "investigative custody" in Neuss, but was not charged or convicted. The German Communist Party was relaunched in 1968 as a "new" party with a (slightly) new name, and from some of her utterances it appears that Wachter lost no time in (re)joining it.