War ended in May 1945 with Berlin reduced to rubble and the western two thirds of Germany divided into military occupation zones. Most of the Müller assets expropriated b the previous government had been physically located in what was now being administered as the Soviet occupation zone - relaunched in October 1949 as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic. For the heirs of a Jewish capitalist who had been pilloried in the writings of Lenin back in 1916 there could be little prospect of restitution from that quarter. The prospects were better in respect of the relatively small number of family assets that had been physically located in the western half of Berlin or in other parts of Germany now under British, US or French administration. In 1945 Hellmuth Jacob, whose wife Elisabeth was one of the sisters of Arthur Müller, was appointed in West Berlin as a "carer in absentio" ("Abwesenheitspfleger"), authorised to look after Thekla Müller's interest while she was living abroad. (It is not clear how Hellmuth Jacob, who was also Jewish, had managed quietly to live "illegally" in Berlin, and to survive throughout the twelve Nazi years.) After more than a decade of legal wrangling, in 1956 the government of West Germany provided some restitution in respect of "west" German family assets forcibly taken by the Hitler government. By that time Thekla Müller was dead. There was never any corresponding restitution in respect of the far larger quantity of assets taken by the government in what had become East Germany.