Tuschin and the funeral of Rudolf's and Adi's father on 4 April 1945 is among the disputed records in the American denazification panels. On the day after the funeral he was arrested and taken to the Bärenschanze prison run by the Gestapo in Nürnberg. He remained there until the Allied liberation in early May. When American troops reached Herzogenaurach, tanks paused before the Dassler factory pondering whether to blow it up. Käthe immediately approached the troops and argued that the plant was simply a sports shoes producer. The troops spared the plant, taking over the family house in the process. Two weeks after the liberation of Herzogenaurach, Rudolf returned. As the American denazification process proceeded, the threat of liability from their Nazi past drove an irreconcilable rift between brothers Rudolf and Adi, each seeking to save himself. The denazification proceedings and the family rupture, 1946 On 25 July 1945, about two months after the arrival of U.S. troops, Rudolf was arrested by the American occupation authorities, on suspicion that he worked for the Sicherheitsdienst (the secret service of the Reichsführer-SS commonly known as the SD) engaged in counterespionage and censorship, and was sent to an internment camp in Hammelburg. Rudolf began to prepare a defense that he did not voluntarily help the Reich and did not in any event engage in SS or SD activities. The American investigators soon discovered his early Nazi party membership and proof that he volunteered for the Wehrmacht in 1941. They even knew that in Tuschin his job was to keep track of "personal and smuggling cases." His key problem, however, was in explaining his activities after he had been summoned to Nuremberg in March by the Gestapo. Rudolf maintained that he had been summoned on 13 March for an investigation of his earlier unauthorized departure from Tuschin and did nothing but report daily to the Gestapo while they investigated him for over two weeks. He claimed that he had escaped on 20 March. Rudolf used written statements of his former superior in Tuschin (who was in the same camp and alleged to be the intelligence chief of the region) and a driver he had encountered after he was arrested by the Gestapo in April (who was also incarcerated with Rudolf). Rudolf made much use of the latter's testimony and averred that he had been sentenced by the Gestapo to the Dachau concentration camp. Rudolf