she returned to Paris, where Franz Dahlem was still based. In 1937 she moved to Valencia where she worked for the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany in an office provided to them by the Communist Party of Spain. During the Spanish Civil War she was able to provide both administrative backup and political support to party comrades. In 1938/39 she was back in Paris. Between 1940 and 1944 she based herself in Toulouse where she acted as treasurer for a local group of underground communists. She was also able to establish contact with the nearby Camp Vernet internment camp, originally constructed to accommodate fighters returning from the Spanish Civil War and now used to house large numbers of German political exiles previously settled in Paris - mostly communists - who following the outbreak of war in September 1939 had been identified as enemy aliens and arrested. After the German invasion in May/June 1940 the southern part of France came under the control of a puppet government and inmates at Camp Vernet enjoyed considerable freedom, but as the war dragged on security at the camp was progressively tightened, and in the end Jewish and other politically significant German inmates were handed over to the Gestapo and shipped to Germany. Franz Dahlem was transferred to Berlin in 1942. Käthe Dahlem remained in Toulouse, living illegally under the name "Cathérine Dallerey". After - possibly even before - the Liberation of Paris in August 1944 she was listed as organisation secretary for the western version of the Soviet sponsored National Committee for a Free Germany (in French "CALPO"). Franz Dahlem was freed by the Red army from his concentration camp in Germany and taken to Moscow in May 1945. He was returned to Germany on 1 July 1945. Käthe Dahlem returned from Paris in October 1945. Following the contentious party merger which created the Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED) the Dahlems were among the thousands of Communists who lost no time in signing their party membership across to what had emerged, by October 1949, as the ruling party in a new kind of one-party dictatorship. Between January 1946 and July 1947 Dahlem was head of the main women's committee with the Greater Berlin city council ("Magistrat von Berlin"), till 1949 also organisation leader for the Berlin women's committee. In March 1947 she was a founder member of the