The United States Army occupied Weimar in 1945, at the close of World War II, and later handed the city over to Soviet forces. Oehler attempted to defend the Nietzsche-Archiv from the charge of having supported the Nazi regime, claiming that it always had been politically neutral. He could maintain that soldiers did not use the Archiv rooms, but the Soviet administration nevertheless froze all the Archiv's accounts. On December 6, 1945, Oehler was picked up by someone claiming to be Soviet interpreter. He never returned. As the family later found out, he had been sentenced to penal labour in Siberia but had died, probably of hunger or freezing, in an improvised prison while still in Weimar.