In May 1949 were merged and relaunched as the US-sponsored German Federal Republic (West Germany). (The Soviet occupation zone remained separate, and was itself relaunched as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany) five months later.) It was in West Germany that in 1954 Helene Rothländer came to national prominence in connection with the "Geimer Affair". Her loyal commitment to the Catholic Church was again on display. Robert Geimer was a young teacher who had been conscripted into the German army in 1939, and five years later caught up in the Siege of Budapest. He survived but in 1945 he was captured by the Soviet army, and had spent the next eight years in a succession of Soviet camps. He had returned in November 1953 and taken a teaching job at a public school in Schifferstadt, a small town the region in which Rothländer was responsible for the schools. It subsequently emerged that in 1944 Robert Geimer had married his childhood sweetheart, Anneliese Weick. Anneliese was, reports implied, the only girl he had ever loved. But she was also a Protestant and, worst of all, the marriage had been solemnised in a Protestant church. This was a breach of Geimer's obligations to the Roman Catholic church: Robert and Anneliese Geimer were excommunicated by their local parish in accordance, it was reported, with a strict interpretation of church law.