In December 1949, Dr August Töpperwien was released from his prisoner-of-war camp in Poland and returned to Solingen. His house had been bombed, but Margarete and their two children had survived the war. Töpperwien rejoined the staff at his old grammar school in the position, as a senior high-school teacher, a Studienrat, which he had occupied for the fourteen years before he was called up to the Wehrmacht.20
