Vogeler's participation in World War I, in which Hans am Ende was killed, made Vogeler contemplate about life. As a result he became a pacifist after the war had ended and joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). It was at that time that he and his wife Martha divorced. From that point on, he wanted to work from an ideological perspective. He left his former way of painting romantic scenes and started to make proletarian content the center of his work. In 1931 he emigrated to the Soviet Union and was deported in 1941 by Soviet authorities to Kazakhstan, where he died in 1942.