The Genshagen camp was used to provide labour for a Daimler-Benz plant in the town. In 1999, more than fifty years later, at the age of 97, having become through marriage Fridel Apelt, she was still involved in a meeting held at the nearby Wentowsee Hotel, at which concentration camp survivors met Daimler-Benz executives in order to discuss wages and fair recompense ("Lohn und Würde") in respect of their time as forced labourers at the Genshagen plant. As Russian troops invaded from the east, concentration camps in that half of the country were hastily evacuated. On 4 May 1945, while undertaking one of the so-called death marches of camp inmates towards the west, Friedel Franz managed to escape captivity in the Prignitz region. With three others from the group she made her way to Wittenberge which was the nearest town. She reported to the town hall in order to arrange ration coupons for food. The official whom she met explained that it was not possible for her to return home to Breslau and therefore sent her to a municipal soup kitchen ("Ernährungsamt" / literally: feeding office). Having always worked for a living, she initially rejected the idea of feeding people as a social service, but as the realities of the situation became clear she complied, and very quickly she was working at the Ernährungsamt, which soon, between May and October 1945, she found herself running. Two months later, still in Wittenberge, she set about creating a local Communist Party group. Friedel Malter Following the ethnic cleansing of 1944/45 and the accompanying frontier changes, her Silesian home region remained out of reach after the war ended, formally in May 1945. Wittenberge, and the large central portion of Germany in which she now found herself was administered, till October 1949, as the Soviet occupation zone. Franz remained in Wittenberge till the Autumn of 1945, when she relocated to Berlin, the eastern part of which was also included in the Soviet zone. In 1946 she married Andreas Malter, a survivor of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The marriage would end after approximately three years. She was already, by the end of 1945, a department head for Women's Questions with the Communist Party Central Committee. In April 1946, following the contentious creation of the Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED), Friedel Malter was one of thousands of communists who lost no time in