to return to Oslo. After a period recovering from an operation in connection with his Tuberculosis, he started working in the secretariat of the International Labour Front Against War which had been jointly created in September 1938 by the (Dutch) Revolutionary Socialist Party, the (British) Independent Labour Party, the (Spanish) POUM and the (exiled German) "Neuer Weg" group. The new organisation's purpose was to gather and disseminate information about the Spanish Civil War. In the April 1940 Norway was over-run by German troops. Blackstein fled to Sweden where he was initially interned for several months, before being given permission to live in Uppsala. In his Swedish exile he found time to refresh his college studies, revisiting topics in Economics, History and Literature. He also found work as a journalist. Along with that he was able to stage several plays by Danish authors. Working with an Uppsala University student theatre group he was deeply involved in the translation and production of several plays by Bertolt Brecht. On top of that, in 1943 he was employed by the Racial Biology Institute at Uppsala University as a lecturer and archivist. On the political front he was also an active member of the Swedish-based group of German trades unionists (" Landesgruppe Schweden der Auslandsvertretung der deutschen Gewerkschaften (LDG)"). Within the LDG he opposed the mainstream view, manifesting a certain mistrust of the motives of the allied powers. He was also uncompromising in his opposition to any whisper of a united front between communist elements and social democratic elements in the LDG. War ended, formally, in May 1945. Blachstein remained in Sweden until the early summer of 1947, working in Stockholm as secretary to the International Rescue and Relief Committee (IRRC). A central part of his work involved organising the sending of food parcels to Germany. (He continued to work for the IRRC even after his return to Germany.) New beginnings In February 1945, a large part of Dresden had been destroyed, and after May 1945 his home city was part of a large chunk of what had been central Germany that found itself administered as the Soviet occupation zone. When he returned to occupied Germany on 6 or 27 May 1947 he settled not in Dresden but in Hamburg, at that time administered as part of the British occupation zone. This meant that after 1949, when the occupation zones were relaunched as the US