It is not clear precisely when or in how much detail the Soviet government and western allies agreed how post-war Austria should be divided between the military administrations of their respective armies, but by May 1945 it was evidently apparent to Bruno Sattler that Linz would mark the frontier between the Soviet occupation zone surrounding Vienna and the US occupation zone surrounding Salzburg, with the Soviets on the north shore of the river and the Americans on the south side. On or shortly after 9 May 1945 Bruno Sattler crossed the river, armed with six different sets of identity papers and a plan. Mindful, at least in outline, of the inevitability of approaching Cold War, and through the mediation of his wife, he intended to make contact with the Americans and offer his services as a man with useful knowledge of how to track down and locate communists. But in the immediate term his overriding objective was to avoid capture: for a year and a half he lived hidden by a cousin, in .Early in 1947 he turned up in the by this time diminished mountain of rubble that had been Berlin where he lay low in a boarding house in the Dettmannstrasse (today renamed as the Stauffenbergstrasse). His wife and three daughters were already living in Berlin: his youngest daughter recalls that Elfriede knew her husband was back in town and met up with him several times. In August he stopped turning up for their appointments, however: his wife, increasingly desperate, was left walking up and down the streets in the area for day after day with her three daughters in tow, until the family were finally informed by a helpful police officer that Bruno Sattler had been "arrested by Soviet soldiers".