During the years of one-party dictatorship in East Germany between 1949 and 1990 Pietzuch was officially celebrated as a war hero, and it was believed by scholars that he had been parachuted back into Germany near Munich, and then captured and murdered by Nazi "SS" paramilitaries during 1944, towards the end of the war. It was only with the opening up of previously concealed government records that followed the political collapse of the East German and Soviet dictatorships in 1989/90 that Margarete Forszpaniak, a former resistance comrade, disclosed the truth about Pietzuch's death to the historian , having herself learned it two decades earlier from , the responsible East German Central Committee official.