 Within the Hamburg legislature Langhans campaigned strongly for women's rights and for retributive measures against perpetrators of state sponsored crimes during the Nazi years.A particular target was the historian Kurt Detlev Möller, "outed" as a former Nazi party member and, she contended, "a great anti-Semite", who was attempting to reinvent himself as Director of the Hamburg City Archive.In May 1949 three of the four occupation zones into which Germany had been divided at the end of the war were merged and relaunched as the German Federal Republic (West Germany).