Over the next few years, she involved herself in "Catholic women's work". During 1938/39 she served as director of a convalescence home on Bad Pyrmont. She also worked as an educator for the church. An attempt to kill Hitler in July 1944 failed in its objective but succeeded in seriously unnerving the government. A month later more than 4,000 people were simultaneously arrested overnight in an exercise called Aktion Gitter. In determining whom to arrest, the security services referred to their lists from before 1933 of people who had been active politically as non-Nazis before the imposition of one-party government. As a former member of the Prussian parliament, Helene Rothländer was listed: she was arrested on the night of 23/24 August and held in "protective custody" in the "Carmelite jail" in Koblenz. While she was there the prison was badly damaged by an air raid, but Rothländer was among the survivors. She had not been involved in the assassination plot, and had never been a Communist, a Socialist or registered as Jewish, so the authorities found no reason to detain her for longer. After approximately seven weeks, on 4 October 1944, she was released.