War ended in May 1945. Political activity outside the Nazi party was no longer expressly illegal. The victorious powers had already agreed among themselves that the western two thirds of Germany should be divided into military occupation zones. The southwest of the country, including Linz am Rhein, was administered as the French occupation zone. Since her marriage the former Else Peerenboom had chosen to be identified simply by her married name as Else Missong, but she now also returned to active politics, using for her public life the doubled name "Else Peerenboom-Missong" or "Else Missong-Peerenboom". (Sources differ over the sequence.) She resumed contact with former colleagues from the old Centre Party. The goal was nothing less than the creation of a postwar Centre Party, but this time the party should be interdenominational. As a Roman Catholic party the old Centre party had effectively ruled itself out of contention in the Protestant north and east of Germany (and in northern Bavaria), thus reducing its political weight nationally. In addition, the industrial scale of the ethnic cleansing east of the Oder–Neisse line meant that even the traditionally catholic Rhineland was now home to large numbers of Protestants among the refugees. In June 1945 Peerenboom-Missong participated in the "(pre-)founding congress" of the Rhineland region Christian Democratic Union (CDU party), held at the in Cologne. She became a member of the new party's Inter-zonal Unification Committee ("Zwischen-Zonen-Verbindungsausschuss"). However, as far as the military authorities were concerned the founding of political parties - at least of national political parties - was not expressly permitted in the French zone till 21 December 1945. On 31 January 1946 Peerenboom-Missong was there for the founding of the Christian Democratic Party for Rhineland-Hessen-Nassau.