At the end of August of that year Germer was temporarily freed from detention at Esterwegen, his case being that be had been a Major in World War I on the German side and was also of pure German blood, therefore the charges were too vague to get any real case against him. Germer moved to Belgium where he took an apartment and started working as an exporter of heavy farm machinery in Brussels, making frequent trips to England and Ireland. This was with great difficulty as the war and Hitler's movements were making travel difficult. In Brussels, Germer had the means to store his personal belongings, his diaries and other things at a friend's house. Between 1939 and 1940 he wrote 223 pages of his autobiographical book "Protective Prisoner No 303" about his experiences in the concentration camp, which he wanted to publish. On 10 May 1940, when the Germans marched into Belgium Germer was again incarcerated. As the Germans advanced, Germer was transferred to the French authorities who held him in a French concentration camp of Lévitan. He was later sent to Saint-Cyprien camp in the Pyrénées-Orientales where 90,000 Spanish refugees were interned in March 1939. It was officially closed on 19 December 1940 for "sanitary reasons". Its occupants, including Germer, were transferred to the Camp of Gurs where in October 1940 thousands of Jewish women, children, and the elderly, who had not gone to the Nazi concentration camps in Germany, were deported from the Baden region of Germany as per official Nazi policy which was overseen by Adolf Eichmann.