Poepel looked to an ally in Captain Zind of the Army engineers. With Poepel's personal guarantee the latter was able to persuade the divisional headquarters to have anti-tank obstacles built instead of blowing up the bridges. Within four days members of the Technical Emergency Service built numerous anti-tank obstacles on the key bridges in Aue, using wooden beams and stones ridges. On 4 May 1945 only a weak US armoured reconnaissance troop reached the town, but was able to take it without fighting by bypassing the tank traps. The events of those days were held in Max Poepel's personal records which were found in 1991 and titled "The Last Days of the Third Reich in Aue, as I experienced it as a Town Councillor and Deputy Mayor". The complete text is in Aue's district archives. An abridged version was printed in 1991 and 1992 as a serialization in the daily newspaper, Freie Presse. The Americans did not occupy Aue administratively, but took some war booty from the inhabitants, including watches, binoculars, cameras and jewelry. When the Red Army took over the town from the Americans in accordance with the division of Germany into occupation zones after the Yalta Conference in June 1945, Max Poepel was arrested by the Soviet occupation forces, despite his record and the support of some anti-fascists. Up to 1949 he was held in a number of NKVD special camps like Torgau, Mühlberg and Buchenwald. In 1950, Poepel returned to Aue and was able to take over his garage business again, which had been run during his absence by its master mechanic, Fritz Taut. The garage's most important work was to repair existing cars, since there were hardly any new cars. Poepel led this workshop until his death in 1966. Max Poepel was married to Greta, née Schulz, and they had a daughter, Anneliese. Anneliese Poepel studied under the strict tutelage of her father's car mechanic, passed the trade test and later received the master's certificate. She married Erich Schmutzler, who manufactured cutting and punching tools in several of the rooms in his father-in-law's workshop. After Poepel's death in Aue on 28 August 1966, Schmutzler at first allowed the garage to be run under by an employee and ran the cutter and punch business himself. When the number of employees working for independent artisans became regulated by the authorities, Erich Schmutzler finally gave up Max Poepel's garage