The Second World War proved disastrous: the family was scattered during the war years, and at the end of the war the new Hungarian government carried out a comprehensive land reform, "confiscating the land of gentry with estates of more than 50 hectares". Only the land in Austria remained in prince Paul's possession. Further, in the years after 1945 Hungary came under the rule of the Hungarian People's Republic, an authoritarian Communist regime sponsored by the Soviet Union. Prince Paul endured a show trial and was sentenced to solitary confinement for 15 years. Freed in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, he moved to Zurich with his wife, Melinda Ottrubay, whom he had married in Budapest in 1945, and lived in Zurich, from there managing his Austrian domains, until his death.