With the Soviet army advancing from the east, in 1944 the German leader declared that Breslau was a strategic "Festung", to be defended at any cost. Hildegard Maria and her parents fled when the civilian population was evacuated on a cold January day a couple of weeks before the Soviet forces arrived. The Rauchfuß family settled initially in . By 1947 those identified as ethnic Germans had been transported on to Leipzig, where the Rauchfuß family made their home. Despite having been liberated from Nazi control by US forces in April 1945, it had been agreed before the end of the war that the city was to be administered as part of the Soviet occupation zone in post war Germany, and the Soviets had been in control of it since July 1945. Accordingly it was in the Soviet zone, relaunched in October 1949 as the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), the Hildegard Maria Rauchfuß lived and built her career during the decades that followed. Her first job after arriving in Leipzig was as a book-keeper. It was Ernst Richard, a legendary senior editor at the , who spotted her talent as a writer. In 1948 she moved on to work in the literature department at . Four years later, in 1952, she was dismissed without notice after two of her short stories had been broadcast on the RIAS, a Berlin-based radio station which operated under the "supervision" of the United States Information Agency.