By April, 1951, Gustav Hozzel found himself in a house on the outskirts of Schwerte, a town itself on the outskirts of Dortmund, at the edge of the Ruhr with Max Bachman. The emergency militiamen had fortified the bottom floor of the house with rubble and had had knocked down the back wall toward the next house as a line of retreat. The two, along with Rolf Mehlen, survived a shelling and a Soviet assault on their position and then driving the attackers off. They and the Americans were eventually forced out of Schwerte to Dortmund.