In late 1924 or 1925, Spielrein left Moscow. She and her daughter rejoined her husband Pavel in Rostov-on-Don. As well as probably being disillusioned by her experience in Moscow, Spielrein may have been impelled to return because her husband by now was in a relationship with a Ukrainian woman, Olga Snetkova (born Aksyuk), and they now had a daughter, Nina. Pavel returned to his wife, and their second daughter Eva was born in 1926. For at least the next decade, Spielrein continued to work actively as a pediatrician, carrying out further research, lecturing on psychoanalysis, and publishing in the west until 1931. In 1929 she presented a vigorous defense of Freud and psychoanalysis at a congress of psychiatry and neuropathology in Rostov, possibly the last person to mount such a defense at a time when psychoanalysis was on the point of being proscribed in Russia. The paper also made it clear that she was up-to-date with developments in the west, and included sympathetic comments on the approach of Sandor Ferenczi, who was advocating a more emotional engaged role on the part of the therapist. She also talked of the importance of clinical supervision for psychological work with children, and described an approach to short term therapy that could be used when resources did not allow for extensive treatment. Her niece Menikha described her from the 1930s as "a very well mannered, friendly and gentle person. At the same time, she was tough as far as her convictions were concerned." Her husband died in 1936. In 1937 her brothers Isaac, Jan and Emil Spielrein were arrested, and executed in 1937 and 1938 during the Great Purge. Spielrein came to an agreement with Pavel's former partner, Olga Snetkova, that if either of them died, the surviving woman would care for their three daughters. Death Spielrein and her daughters survived the first German invasion of Rostov-on-Don in November 1941, which was repelled by the Red Army. However, in July 1942, the German army reoccupied the city. Spielrein and her two daughters, aged 29 and 16, were murdered by an SS death squad, Einsatzgruppe D, in Zmievskaya Balka, or "Snake Ravine" near Rostov-on-Don, together with 27,000 mostly Jewish victims. Although most of the members of the Spielrein family were murdered in the Holocaust, the wives and children of her brothers all survived, and there are currently around 14 of their descendants living in Russia,