Rudolf Hamburger died at Dresden on 1 December 1980. His body was buried in a place of honour in the city's , close to the graves of Hans and Lea Grundig. Ten years later, as the Soviet Union approached the final flight path to implosion, Hamburger was posthumously rehabilitated by Moscow in 1990. Till now there had been powerful institutional barriers preventing Rudolf Hamburger's footprint from appearing in the historical record except as a footnote in his wife's remarkable story. After 1990 many of those institutional barriers had fallen away.